It was a dark and stormy night the third time I died. So cliché I couldn’t have scripted it better myself. It was May 22, 2004. The entire month had been fraught with thunderstorms and tornado warnings and flash floods, but this night was spectacular.

At the age of thirty-six, I was an unlikely candidate to die, but I defied the odds. Six months earlier, I had been extremely healthy, wrapped up in my aerobics and fat grams and getting enough fiber in my diet. But fate has a grim sense of irony, and I got to experience this first hand.

It was the day before Christmas 2003, and I wasn’t feeling well. My fever spiked at 105 degrees, and I went to the doctor. He told me to drink lots of fluids. Two weeks later, I was in the emergency room, unable to breathe. After many tests, it was determined that I had Congestive Heart Failure. Whatever virus had caused my fever had invaded my heart and damaged the muscle beyond repair. I was given little hope for survival without a transplant.

By late April, I was in end-stage heart failure. My organs had shut down. I was jaundiced from toxins my liver and kidneys could no longer remove. Finally, my local doctors sent me to the University of Michigan Hospital. The care was excellent, but my heart had become so weak I was barely clinging to life. It wasn’t long before my heart stopped beating the first time.

It was shortly after midnight, and I was sleeping like the dead. In fact, I was dead. The night nurse sounded the “Code Blue” alarm. Imagine my surprise to be awakened by someone shocking me with paddles. I tried to shout, but I had a hard tube down my throat. I felt myself slip away, then I was looking down on the whole scene from above.

It was a sobering sight. A burly male nurse was doing CPR compressions on my chest while a female nurse pumped the bag to make me breathe. A doctor in a long white coat oversaw them. Huddled at the foot of my bed was a group of people who seemed to be there to observe.

In the center, was my body, looking so empty and frail. I knew I had to return to my flesh or it would not survive. I swooped down on my lifeless flesh, but I could not re-enter myself. Then the paddles zapped and I was sucked in as if by a vacuum. Looking up at the nurses, I began to flail my arms wildly, then clasped them across my chest, trying to hold my spirit inside. But the flesh was weak and could not hold me. I popped back up like a beach ball under water.

After several repeats, the nurse shook his head and said, “I’m getting tired. I have to stop.” Somehow I willed my flesh to move, making eye contact and grabbing his arm. Another nurse said, “She’s here! She’s with us! She just doesn’t have a heartbeat!” Panicked, I cried out in my mind, in my soul, “Lord Jesus! Help me! Our Father who art in Heaven, save me!”

They kept working on me, and finally something clicked, and my heart started beating. The next day I awoke and came off the machine, and I told them all what I had witnessed. The nurses said I was correct, word for word. Even the one who had been a cardiac nurse for twenty years said she had never seen such a thing.

The second time I died was less dramatic. A week after my first code, I awoke feeling nauseated. Shortly after noon, I became disoriented and drowsy, then I began to sweat profusely. My blood pressure dropped and suddenly I could not breathe. It was a pulmonary embolism, and I was intubated immediately. My condition was guarded after that and I stayed in ICU. That was good since I died the third time only six days later.

It was May 22, 2004, and I had several visitors that day. It was a Saturday, and there was a sunny break after days of rain. As day turned to evening, the stormy weather returned. I forced a weak smile as my best friends appeared. I told them I was tired and that they should do the talking, but they looked concerned. I couldn’t see the monitor over my bed, where my heart rate and blood pressure were plummeting.

Looking at my friend, I said, “I don’t feel so good. I think I’m starting to sweat.” His eyes grew large and he ran to get the nurse. I turned my head to look at his wife who was holding my right hand and asked “What?” Her eyes were wide also, then I felt the trap door in my spine open as I fell away from my flesh. Whatever the doctors and nurses did to bring me back this time, I do not recall. I was not in the room. I was on my way to the place where souls gather to cross over.

When I became aware, I found myself back in my home town. It was neither night nor day, but a perpetual twilight, with no color or light source. There were no cars on the streets, or people, or lights in the houses. I realized that I needed to find something urgently, but I was disoriented and unsure of what I sought. Instinctively, I went to my home, to the bedroom, but it wasn’t there. Then I traveled to the home I had shared with my ex-husband, again to the bedroom, but it wasn’t there either. Finally, I went to the apartment that I had before I married, once more to the bedroom, but found it vacant. It was then that I knew that it was my body I sought, and I knew that it was in a bed somewhere.

Realizing for the first time that I was dead, I looked up and saw a light shining across the river. I moved toward it, and it grew brighter, beckoning me, drawing me like smoke on a gentle current of air. In that moment, I knew that I could end my struggling, end my pain and just let go and cross over. I could see from the shore all the lights crossing over, and I could join them. I could become one in the great light, the love of God, and know peace everlasting.

But I was not ready to go yet. Ironically, though my life had been filled with more than its fair share of pain, I had learned to fight. In one way or another, I had been fighting for my life since I came out of the womb. I was not about to give up the good fight yet. Realizing that I could not do anything under my own power, I cried out, “Dear God, help me! Jesus, save me! Take me back to my body, to those I love!”

In that instant, I became aware of a great presence. I went from a state of total panic to absolute peace. All of my pain and grief was lifted from me, and I knew infinite joy. A single question came into my mind. “Why do you wish to go back?” Of course, the question wasn’t in words anymore than the great presence had a face. It just was. And my answer, before I could weigh my words, was simply, “Because there are people I love.”

Many days later I woke up on the respirator. During the course of my last code, I had a stroke, and I could not speak or swallow or walk. All of these things had to be relearned, and my body had to regain strength. But I was alive.

The most amazing part was what happened to my body while I was away. My friends were sent to a waiting room, and they all were crushed when the doctor came to tell them that although my heart was beating again, my cells were breaking down, creating acid in my blood, and I would most likely be dead by the morning. At this news, they starting calling other friends, asking them to pray for me. An hour later, the doctor returned, completely baffled, and said I had no cell deterioration, and I was going to live.

I believe that when I was sent back to my body, it was healed so that I might live. My heart is still weak, but I have recovered well enough to no longer need a transplant. I know why I was sent back. To deliver a single message.

“Love one another. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Copyright © 2006 Dawn Levitt