Beyond the Valley of Death!

There’s a lot.

I could talk about the Ghost in Iraq.

I could talk about the close calls I’ve had..

But the biggest mystery to me is how I walked away from something that should have at the very least left me broken and busted. I’ve told the story before. Here it is again.

PERSONAL NOTE: I’m not sure how some of you are going to approach this one. Indeed, I’ve kind of danced around the matter. But since I opened this can of worms in the novel I’m working on, I guess I need to talk about it.

I will say the incident changed me forever and how I view this world and life.

The notion of Near-Death Experiences (NDE) is one fraught with many interpretations and causes. To be honest with you, I often have trouble understanding what happened. As a man of science, I have to acknowledge there are at least half a dozen explanations for what I’m reporting here. But as a human being, I have to say that I’ve never experienced anything more real. The best I can do is tell it and let you draw your own conclusions.

In October of ’99, we were living in Del Norte, Colorado. Our home was new in 1877, and we’d done a lot of work on it. The crowning achievement was when we added a master bedroom and bath to the second floor. Of course, we moved into it before the exterior was done, so on the weekends, I’d hang siding and do what I needed to do.

Well, on this particular Saturday, I drove my wife to work. The plan was that I’d get new tires on her car, do the work I needed on the house, and that evening, pick her up and then go for supper. I’d got the tires and was now working on the new addition.

Now, tell me if you see this one coming. I had a 14-foot metal ladder. When trying to work up high (where I was doing most of my work), I discovered I needed a few more feet. My solution was a stroke of genius. I got the picnic table, put the ladder on it, and worked that way. Now the trouble was I’d worked most of the day this way without mishap.

Finally, about two in the afternoon, I was working on the west side of the house. This was probably the most dangerous part of the job because directly under me were the power lines that fed the house. My son, who had been helping me, said he needed to get ready for work and that maybe I should come down. I told him to go ahead, that I had only a few nails left to finish.

I was about eye level with the top of the ladder, and my last memory was the top of the ladder sliding down against the wall.

Blackout.

 The funny part of it was that while this world blacked out, I was still aware of myself. It wasn’t like dreaming. It was as if I were floating in an endless void, and I knew it.

I couldn’t open my eyes, but some part of me had already put the scenario together. The table had tipped. The ladder had hit the power lines, and gravity had dropped me on the ground. Oddly, I felt no pain. I just couldn’t open my eyes.

And then I heard a man and a woman talking about doing CPR.

“CPR!” I thought. “Dude, you’re in bad shape here.”

I don’t know how long I drifted in that never-land, but I knew someone was with me. I felt no fear at this strange presence, only complete peace. It was almost as if an old friend had pulled up a chair and sat down next to me. Then I knew we were looking at pictures from my life.

 It was like going through a scrapbook. I’d look at a picture, and whatever the scene was would play out, and then we’d go on to the next one. Some of what we looked at was cool. Some of it wasn’t.

I don’t know how long this took. It could have been six seconds. It could have been six million years. Either way, time had lost its meaning for me.

We reached a point where I felt I had to explain what we’d been watching. Ray Boltz has a song that has a line in it that goes, “I plead the blood of Jesus, and his death upon the cross.” I heard myself say those words, and in that instant, it was as if the scrapbook was closed and tossed away.

Then, I was lying in the backyard, looking up at the clear night sky. I’d never seen so many stars. And I knew I was seeing right to the edge of infinity. All at once those stars exploded past me. In less time than it takes to say it, I’d crossed our Universe.

And I was walking through a place with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people. They were from every country. I heard languages spoken that I barely recognized; most I didn’t. And I could understand every word. I remember thinking that the curse of Babel had been broken, and these people were talking out of force of habit.

Not only was the language barrier gone, but the barriers of individuality had dropped. I could look at a person and know instantly everything there was to know about them. I remember looking at a woman with a child and just knew they’d died in a traffic accident in Syracuse, New York.

I walked on, overwhelmed by it all. The only thing I can compare it to is a major international airport minus the confusion one finds there. The place was so tranquil.

I asked myself one of those questions that you never really expect to get an answer to. I asked, “Where am I?”

I got an answer.

Something answered that I was in a place where people come who’ve died suddenly. They come here to come to grips with the idea of being dead. I also got the distinct impression that not everyone who dies a sudden death comes here.

And then, walking through the crowd, I saw Him. He was wearing jeans, a red shirt, and a brownish-gold blazer and boots. His hair was shoulder-length, a trimmed beard, and He had a grin on his face as he approached.

 I’ve never seen this man in this world, but in an instant, I knew who He was.

It was Jesus.

Something that surprised me was that I was taller than he was. Had I jumped in a time machine and gone back to Israel two thousand years ago, I’m sure I would have towered over him. To me, this is one of those throwaway observations that confirms there was some reality to the encounter.

And let’s talk about the best comparison I can make is going back to my analogy of the airport. It was as if I were coming from the gate at an international airport and running into a friend I didn’t expect to see so far from home.

He walked up to me, the grin still on his face, stuck out his hand and said, “Rich, what are you doing here?”

I took his hand. “I took a bad fall. I think I’m dead!”

And He actually laughed at me like it was some delightful joke. “Well, that’s what happens when you put a metal ladder on a picnic table over power lines.” Then he turned serious. “Truth is, you’re here early. We’re not ready for you. I’m sending you back. But when you get back, tell everyone I love them.”

Then there was no doubt in my mind that I wasn’t alive. There was nothing in me that didn’t hurt. And what happened proved to me that God has a tremendous sense of humor. Had this been a movie, the hero of our story would have awakened to find a wizened old doctor taking care of him, or a beautiful nurse taking his readings, or his wife sitting in a chair by his bed crying. I opened my eyes and looked into the face of the ugliest cop in Del Norte.

There was nothing wrong with my sense of humor, because I said, “Dear God, I’m dead and I’ve gone to Hell.”

And then I passed out again, only to wake up and find myself on the gurney being pulled across the yard by EMTs and local firemen. I asked how I’d got on the gurney, and they said they’d put me there. The answer made perfect sense.

Blackout, wake up, blackout, wake up.

I was aware I was at the hospital, in the ER, and somehow that was perfectly okay.

I couldn’t seem to make my brain work. Some parts of my body also seemed to be nonresponsive, but that was okay, too. And I couldn’t grasp hold of reality either. I remember asking a nurse if I was dreaming all this, and she told me, “No, this is all real.”

 What I said next probably made no sense to anyone, but it described perfectly how I felt. I remember touching my head with my hand and saying, “Now I know what a computer in the middle of a bad boot feels like.”

I remember the doctor asked me who had performed CPR on me. The only people home would have been my son and daughter, and so I reasoned they had.

Somewhere in all this, my wife, Julie came in. I seemed to recall there was no way she could have been there. I had her car. I later learned that her ex had gone screaming up to Creede to get her and bring her to the hospital. Later, I was to learn they’d made it down the mountain in less than fifteen minutes. I remember telling her about meeting Jesus and that I recalled hearing her pray for me.

More fade-ins and fade-outs.

I remember dreaming I was in X-ray and the tech was asking me to be still.

Then I was in a hospital bed.

Slowly, I was getting a handle on what kind of shape I was really in. My hands were bandaged, and the doctor told me they had severe burns. My shins were also bandaged from blowouts where the electricity had come out of my body. Someone told me I had soot coming out of my ears. My chest hurt terribly from the CPR, and I had a distinct bruise in the shape of a palm right over my heart.

I felt like I was coming more and more online.

My daughter Tanya and her husband Gary came in with my infant grandson, Austin. They laid Austin next to me, and he was having trouble holding his bottle. I tried to help, but I couldn’t make my hands work. It was like I knew where the controls were, they just didn’t want to respond properly.

The doctor came in and said they were thinking about getting Flight for Life and sending me up to Denver.

By now, I was online enough to add the cost up. Without insurance, the cost would be astronomical. I said I’m not going to Denver and I’m not staying in the hospital.

He then told my wife that I had severe brain damage because of the electricity that had gone through me and my heart having stopped. As I said, there was nothing wrong with my sense of humor (it seemed to be the only thing working at 100%), and I said you had to have a brain to be brain damaged and the stunt I pulled proved I didn’t have one.

Dr. Hougue, apparently wanting me to convince myself, said, “If you can follow that green line all the way to the end of the corridor and back without falling down and walk it straight, I’ll consider it.”

I’ve run ultra-marathons across deserts and plains, but that maybe 25-yard walk down and back took almost every ounce of energy and self-control I could muster. I got back to the starting point, feeling drained, but I forced myself to walk out to the van. I later learned that Dr. Hougue had told my wife that there was a distinct chance I’d be back and an actual chance I’d die during the night.

I don’t remember the ride home, nor do I remember how I got to and was sitting at my place at the counter. What I do remember was I was eating, of all things, a Mr. Goodbar. Apparently, I’d been talking about how much I wanted one.

My son-in-law had stopped at the store and purchased a ten-pack of them. I thought I was still on my first one. Turned out I was eating number six.

I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if the sugar rush did it, but all at once, everything just came on. I looked over at Crystal and Gerald and said, “You guys did a good job.”

“Good job of what?” they asked, confused.

“Doing CPR.”

“We never touched you.”

Gerald explained that he’d just entered the house when he heard the ladder fall. The lights all went out. Crystal had been taking a shower, getting ready to go with me to pick up my wife. Gerald ran out and found me lying on my side, the ladder on top of me, with foam and blood coming out of my mouth.

So, what does this future Green Beret do? He runs in screaming for Crystal and frantically tries to dial 911. But our phone system depended on the house current to work, and with no power, it was down.

He ran across to the neighbor’s house.

Crystal jumped out of the shower, threw some clothes on, and ran out. Her description differed from Gerald’s. She said I was lying on my back, the ladder at my feet, and even my tool belt was off and lying next to it. She said I was sucking in air like I’d just surfaced from the bottom of the ocean.

“But I heard a man and a woman talking about doing CPR. If you guys didn’t…”

“Dad, no one was there.”

Of course, when the EMTs and firemen were taking me to the ambulance on the gurney, the entire neighborhood seemed to have turned out to see what happened. Later, many described an older man and woman there whom no one knew, and the minute I was loaded into the ambulance, they were nowhere to be seen.

The story has an interesting after note. A few weeks later, we went to a school function with the kids. This guy comes up to me. He was crying his eyes out. He introduced himself as one of the EMTs that day. “Man,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

But I am, and I’m thankful. I’ve been blessed with an incredible life.

And remember.

God loves you.