CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children
Melvin Morse, M.D., with Paul Perry, foreword by Raymond A. Moody, M.D.
New York: Villard Books, 1990
206 pp., $17.95
On a stormy winter evening fifty years ago, three doctors in a hospital in northern Pennsylvania were in the final stages of delivering a baby. As was customary at that time, the mother was anesthetized and, presumably, unaware of the events around her. Suddenly the delivery room darkened. One of the doctors, the anesthesiologist, quickly produced a portable illuminator consisting of a sixty-watt bulb screwed into the end of a hand-held socket. When he turned on this crude emergency apparatus, the bulb failed to illuminate. 'It's dead,' the obstetrician commented with annoyance. Almost immediately another bulb was inserted; the delivery progressed uneventfully.
Later the mother recalled the events in the delivery room this way: "While I was lying on the delivery table, I was vaguely aware of what was going on around me. I was floating in a kind of warm glow in which everything was just as I hoped it would be. In a few moments, I knew that I would see my baby. Then suddenly I heard the words: 'It's dead' and thought you were all talking about my baby. And there was nothing I could do but lie there paralyzed with the fear that my baby had been born dead."
I thought of this experience told to me by my father - he was the obstetrician that stormy night - while reading Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near Death Experiences of Children by Melvin Morse, M.D., with Paul Perry.
Commenting on his observations over many years as a pediatrician, Morse confirms that patients may be awake and aware, despite appearances to the contrary. He writes: "It is important to talk positively and frequently to the comatose or dying patients since we now know that they may be much more aware of things around them than we realize."
This realization that seemingly unconscious patients can remain aware of events in their outer surroundings makes it easier to accept the possibility of an equal receptivity on the patient's part to inner experiences such as those Morse and others refer to as near-death experiences (NDEs).
Since Morse is a pediatrician, most of the patients he describes as having undergone an NDE are children or adolescents. His observations, however, are no less applicable to adults, who provide similar, albeit more sophisticated, reports. Although technically defined as "a mystical experience that happens to people who almost die," NDEs have certain features in common that were first described by Dr. Raymond Moody in his best-selling 1975 book Life after Life.
"Something mystical and unearthly happened to many people who had almost died," writes Morse. According to Moody a full-blown near-death experience happens something like this: A person, say, for example, has a heart attack in his living room. The chest pain is excruciating, and he passes out. What seems like moments later, he awakens to find himself floating above his body, where he watches the
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