Speaker 1: Tell me what you loft was like before you died. Well,
I'd sort of come to a standstill in my life.
I was divorced, I had a six year old daughter.
I had been a model for seventeen years, and I'd
kind of come to the end of that. I didn't
know what the next step was, and that was concerning.
So I was kind of hitting the wall emotionally. You know,
you get to certain stages in your life where there
are markers for you, where you think you know you
need to be in certain places. And I wasn't there,
and feeling badly that I'd not had a successful marriage
and whatnot. And like the good Catholic girl that I was,
I went to church and prayed that, you know, help,
I need some guidance. What am I doing? Where am
I going. I knew there were all kinds of feelings
inside of me, but I had no idea what I
was supposed to do with those. So I just needed guidance. Now,
both of my parents were dead at that point. I
was in my early thirties, and I just didn't have
anybody to go to to say, hey, this is maybe
the next logical step. So here I am praying, like crazy.
And three days later I'd had an accident in Mexico
with my ex husband and just located my knee, did
all kinds of damage, but could not have the big
patilla surgery because I was a working model. Having that
big scar was not okay. So I waited and it
was finally time to have that, and that morning, I'm
sitting on the gurney in the hallway waiting to go
into the surgical suite and I'm just freezing. I'm racking
with cold, and part of it, I'm sure was nerves
and whatnot. And this lovely nurse came by me and said,
you know, would you like a heated blanket? And I said, sure,
I would love that, that would be great. And she
gave me a heated blanket and that seemed to calm
things down. And I'm still a little, you know, unsettled
and whatnot. The next thing I know, I'm in the
surgical suite and they put another blanket on me and
I'm out. I haven't even had the anesthesia yet, and
I'm out, which was kind of a pre cursor in
a way of what was coming. At that time. As
a working model, I was really thin and they had
so much more damage to do to repair than they
knew because they didn't have MRIs and all that stuff
in nineteen eighty one. You know, we didn't even well.
Arthur'scopic surgery was fairly new at that point, but it
was still you know, they knew what they were doing.
So I'm on the table like almost two hours longer
than I'm supposed to be, and that meant that much
longer under anesthesia, and I guess because of my weight
distribution and all of that. With the anesthesia, it was
too much for my system. So I'm a sensitive I
always have been. So the next thing I know, I'm
waking up in recovery and I'm hearing all this commotion
and I don't want to pay attention to it because
I'm in my own experience right here. You know, I'm
trying to groggy and disoriented and whatnot. But I hear
all this commotion and I'm hearing them say Diane, wake up, Diane,
wake up, And I'm thinking to myself, how weird is
that that we had the same first name, And a
few minutes later, I'm hearing them say, Diane Sherman, wake up,
Diane Sherman, wake up, at which point I'm thinking, oh,
my god, did they get the wrong patient, did they
do the wrong surgery? What is happening? And I'm waving
to them, trying to get their attention, but not being intrusive,
because clearly whatever they're doing is serious and they're not
paying any attention to me. Alex. I'm thinking to myself,
maybe they can't hear me, and maybe they're just so
focused on saving this person's life that you know it's okay.
The next thing I know, I'm standing at the bottom
of her bed looking up at her while they're working
on her, and I'm looking down at myself. I see me,
I'm looking down at me, and I'm looking up at her,
and I realize it's me and I have no connection
to the knee in the bed that they're working on.
It was as if somebody had said, passed the soul,
you know, it was just neutral. There was nothing. And
the weird thing was it wasn't scary or off putting
or it was just I was notating what was happening,
you know, I was in that frame of reference where
you're just the observer. I was the observer. I don't
know that I'd ever been the observer that way in
my whole life, so it was next thing I know,
I am floating up. I'm in the corner of the
surgical room or the post off, and I'm now looking
over everything that's going on, and in watching it, there's
no real fascination except that something's happening, and I'm not
even questioning it, and I'm very analytical. I'm not going
to fear, I'm not going to anything. I'm just watching it.
And from there, I'm feeling extricated out of the corner
of the ceiling of that room. And now I'm being
pushed and every time I say that I can build
my body push against it, I'm being pushed into this
abject blackness. And as a kid, I was terrified at
the dark, and so being in that absolute blackness where
I couldn't see, could I had no reference to anything,
it was terrifying. And I'm being pushed forward more and
more into it, and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, if
I can just find one little glimmer of light, one
little tiny glimmer of light that I can hold onto,
I'm going to be okay. And so I'm just like
staring and stretching myself to find something, and all of
a sudden, as far out as my vision could go,
I'm seeing one little, tiny glimmer and I'm just like
glommed onto that to hold on to it for dear life.
And it starts getting bigger and closer, and I'm like
fascinated by this, And as it's getting closer, the fear,
of course, is starting to abate. And I'm just watching
this and just hopeful, and you know, all the feelings
of relief. You know, there's something happening where I feel
a little sense of control or a little sense and
there's something more than this blackness. And now it's surrounding me.
It's everywhere around me, and I'm fascinated by it because
it's nothing I've ever seen before. It's a color of
white I've never seen, and a substance. It's like being
in clouds, but not exactly that, the white as all
the colors of the rainbow in it. You know, it's iridescent,
and it's loving, and it's protective and it's supportive, and
it's here for me. We'll be right back after a
word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
And that's the first time I've said that, I just
got that it's here for me. That was such a
divine sense for me, because I think where I had
been before this experience was in a place where I
didn't feel people were there for me. So to have
this be here for me was wow. Coming home, really
coming home to that sense of belonging, that sense of
alrightness within yourself, That that sense of everything you've ever
hoped for in your life, whether it was the work
of the family or the marriage, or that this or
that this was the ultimate goal, was that sense of
coming home to self. And I've felt that in this moment.
And as this white is totally surrounding me, I'm now
floating in it. I have an odd sense of humor.
But at the moment I got the fact that I
was floating, I had the awareness that I was thinking,
I'm floating, and it was like it didn't feel unnormal.
That's what was so interesting. It felt so right and
normal to be floating. So as I'm coming through this white,
diaphanous cloudlike area, there are two rows of monks in
front of me, dressed in the brown monk's robes with
the hoods up, and I know, having listened to so
many near death experiences, I realized that people have experiences
that are analogous to them in some way. And the
monks were kind of like the safest part of my religion,
you know. Being in Catholic school for twelve years, I
went through lots of missions and whatnot, yes, and the
monks were always sweet to me, which the priests were
kind of scary. So these months felt okay for me.
You know, there was nothing scary going on in this
whole experience except being in the dark, and that was
my own childhood fear. It really, in retrospect, was a
very gentle experience. So now I'm coming to the end
of these two rows of monks, and the one on
the end steps forward and he speaks to me, and
I say, he because he had all those wonderful male qualities,
you know, sort of that masculine being in charge and
knowing what to do and caretaking and observing, and you know,
just he had the energy, had the powerful energy. And
he looked at me and I say, look, the hood
was up, but there was no face. It was a blackness,
and it was almost like little sparks of colored things
dancing in this hood, and it almost looked like a
picture of some kind of sci fi film where you
see things moving and when, but it seemed again normal, natural,
not scary. And he spoke to me, and when I
say spoke, he spoke inside of me. He didn't verbally
say anything out loud. And he spoke to me and
he said it's not your time. He must go back.
And I said, you can't send me back. I've just
found home, I've just found feeling cherished. You can't send
me back. And he said it's not your time. You
must go back. And I said, you can't bring me
this far and send me back. You can't. And he
said you have a child, and I said, yes, I do.
He said, well, you must go back. It's not your time.
You have a child. And I started thinking about my daughter,
my six year old daughter, who I loved and adored,
and I thought, I want to stay. I love my daughter,
but I want to stay. And so he kept repeating,
and I started thinking about who would take care of
her if I stayed. My parents were both gone, my
sister was not emotionally healthy enough to raise my daughter.
My ex husband was my ex husband for a reason,
I didn't have anybody that I couldn't trust her to
to be love, been cared for and watched over and
supported the way I wanted her to be, and in
that thought form back in my body. So to this day,
I don't know if they sent me or I sent
me back, and I won't know until I'm on the
other side. When you cross over, there's that kind of
help to bring you back to you know your essence,
who you are as a soul, and to remember the
brilliance of you. And so I tell them there's nothing
to be afraid of. There's absolutely nothing going to go
on that's scary, that's demeaning, that's hurtful, that there's nothing
but love and joy on the other side. And I
don't want people to be fearful of something that's so beautiful.
I think we should be celebrating death just like we
celebrate birth. It's the same, it's on the same part.
It's going to the next level of your being. How
can that be detrimental in any way? How can that
be scary? It's not. It's an adventure, the most divine
feeling you could ever imagine. It's connecttion, it's satisfaction, it's comfort,
it's preciousness to love and be loved. Yah h m
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