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March 6, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:31
Edition 617 - Rosemary Thornton - NDE
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hoping that everything is okay with you.
I know the world is topsy-turvy, upside down, and in many respects not a nice place at the moment.
And I just want to say here, by the time you hear this, anything could have happened and events may well have overtaken everything.
My thoughts very much go out to the people, the ordinary people of Ukraine, and the privations that they are suffering at the moment.
You know, here, significantly west of you, all of us are thinking about you right now.
But like I say, by the time you actually get to hear this, everything may have changed.
So that's all I'm going to say about that situation for now.
But it's really sad and disturbing, the state that the world has got itself into.
First we had a pandemic.
Now we've got this.
When will we ever get a chance to live our lives as we once did in peace and relative normality?
I don't know.
But that's as much as I want to say on this show.
Okay, the guest on this edition, remarkable story of Rose Thornton.
Rose Thornton went through some terrible events in her life that we will discuss involving a suicide, the suicide of her husband.
It's going to be one of the things that we talk about here.
So if it's a theme that you'd rather not hear about at the moment, perhaps you're not in the right state of mind to hear about this at the moment, please give this show a miss.
Maybe come back to it later.
But, you know, don't listen to this one because we will, as a starting point, be discussing suicide, which is a difficult topic, is something that is, you know, all around us.
We read the statistics.
And just to say that I think most of us know what it's like to feel down about life.
And, you know, you may be feeling that way right now.
And just to say, as I would say to you on the radio, if we were on air in London right now, remember that the Samaritans are a wonderful organization if you need to talk.
Their number is 116.123.
That's 116.123.
They're there 24-7-365.
They're a listening, non-judgmental, comforting ear for you at any time.
And I know that there are parallel organizations in the U.S. and other parts of the world, so please bear that in mind.
Rose Thornton, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, thank you very much for being in touch with me recently.
You know that your emails mean so much to me.
And thank you for them.
You know, these are not the easiest times.
There are all kinds of pressures on at the moment, work-wise and every-wise.
So, you know, we're all going through it one way or another.
But we have to bear in mind that there are people in this world, even if we think that we are currently not very well done to, who are going through much greater privations than any of us, perhaps, ever will.
Rose Thornton's story, then, is a truly remarkable one.
It is much more than, if there is such a thing as your average near-death experience, NDE, it's much, much more than that.
So we'll get into that in a moment.
Thank you to my webmaster, Adam, for continuing to maintain the website and getting the shows out to you.
And of course, as always, thank you to you for all of the communications and the guest suggestions and everything.
My website is theunexplained.tv.
That's theunexplained.tv.
And of course, the official Facebook page where you'll find news of the radio show and this podcast is the Unexplained with Howard Hughes Facebook page, the one with the official logo, the same one as is on the website.
You'll find that pretty readily.
And thank you if you have.
Please tell your friends about that.
All right, let's get to the U.S. now to Rose Thornton and her remarkable story.
I wonder what you're going to make of this.
Rose Thornton, thank you very much for coming on.
Oh, you're very welcome.
Now, Rose, you know the Brits are obsessed with weather and location.
Let's just to clarify things for my listener.
Whereabouts are you?
I'm in the Midwest.
I'm in Missouri, about six hours south of Chicago, Illinois.
Okay, does that mean that here we are at the beginning of March?
Does that mean you're in the grip of icicles or the spring has started to spring?
You know what I'm saying?
Spring has sprung, yes.
About two weeks ago, we had temperatures right at zero Fahrenheit, which is misery.
I am not a zero kind of girl in terms of temps, but now we're at 68 degrees today, which is kind of an anomaly.
Most likely in a month or so, we'll have another seven-inch snow.
68 degrees is 20 Celsius for our European listeners.
I used to do weather forecasts on the radio, okay, at the end of my news bulletins, so I can convert.
Even though I'm old school and I think Fahrenheit, you know, we use Celsius centigrade these days.
So that's 20.
68, 20.
That's very, very good.
We're going to be in that kind of territory, I think, in probably two months from now.
So I'm very envious of you.
Well, I do think it's an aberration.
I don't think it'll stick around, but we'll see.
Okay, well, that's the weather dealt with.
One of the things, when I read about you, there were references to old houses and something to do with TV programs that you've appeared on in the United Kingdom and the United States to do with old houses.
Let's clear that up.
What's that about?
Well, 20 years ago, I was a newspaper reporter.
And in fact, for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I wrote about everything, as reporters do.
And I wrote an awful lot of articles about old houses.
And one day my editor said, look, we got enough articles on old houses.
Find something new to write about.
So I went and found a different job where I could write about nothing but old houses.
And it was actually an up-and-coming website.
And they asked me to write about the Sears homes in Carlinville, Illinois, which is about an hour away from St. Louis, Missouri.
And in Carlinville, they had 152 Sears homes in a 12-block area.
And these are the old kid homes that could be ordered out of the Sears Robuck catalog.
And they were offered from 1908 to 1940.
So I went looking for a book on the topic.
And I couldn't find a book.
So I wrote the book I wanted to read.
And it became a surprisingly big hit, given That it was really a niche topic.
The timing was excellent.
It was really bungalows, is predominantly what Sears offered and sold.
And there was so much interest in bungalows in the, well, it was early 2000.
And the book just did really well.
I ended up, in fact, I ended up on BBC Radio and NPR and PBS history detectives.
It was a good run for me.
I was very surprised and delighted.
You're making me very, very guilty that I've only just discovered that now.
I should have known.
That should have been part of the pantheon of my general knowledge and sadly isn't.
So that's explaining the references to old houses that I keep finding.
Now, look, the story that we're about to tell, and I don't want to get into the detail of it now, but it is a difficult story to tell.
You've clearly been through more than a life's worth of heartache and heartbreak.
What is it that made you want to write about that?
That's a really good question.
As my story got more out into the world, and I was talking to a group in Virginia, and I had a good audience, I guess about 70 people.
I shared my story, and somebody stood up and said, I'm in the medical profession, and you really need to write this down.
They said this would help medical professionals, and it'd help a lot of people, probably.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no, not me.
I've written nine books, not going to write another.
I know what it's like to write.
And I had written about history.
Writing about something so personal, as you say, as I write in my book, I was dragged backwards through hell.
I mean, I really was.
And so writing about that, how much did I really want to plumb the depths of that experience again?
And when you write, talk about total immersion in your topic.
So I was very, very hesitant to write a book on this topic.
And so many people said, this is an amazing story.
You need to write this down.
And it was only with great hesitation that I decided to write a book.
And it took me three years to write.
And I wrote it, threw it out, wrote another manuscript, threw it out, on and on it went.
Many, many, many times I thought, I just can't do this.
I can't seem to get it in a way that I feel comfortable with.
So, yeah, it was a lot of effort.
And it was not something I was like, oh, boy, I can write a book.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I kind of got dragged kicking and screaming into that one.
Do you find it or have you found it cathartic?
I don't know about cathartic.
I know it's been a great blessing for me because while I have had to revisit some hard memories, I've also remembered the incredible kindness of people who, while my husband had been an attorney and I was a writer with some renown, and we had a good life.
We had a very sweet life, I thought.
And after this, all those fancy friends disappeared.
And I mean, kind of just evaporated.
And the people who entered the fray to save me were the workers of the world, the people who try hard every month to make the electric bill and the people who were so generous when, in fact, they might be considered the less fortunate economically.
And that was pretty interesting, too.
So you went through.
Yeah, those were the people who rushed in to save me.
You went through horrendous tragedy.
And of course, we're imminently going to get into that.
Interesting, isn't it?
And I hear this so much and have some experience of this myself, that sometimes when you go through bad times, sometimes because people don't understand generally.
I'm trying to search back through my own memory bank to see if I've ever been like this myself.
I don't think I have.
I've always engaged with people who've been through bad things.
But sometimes people don't know what to say and they treat you as if you've got some kind of disease that might infect them if they come too close.
And so sometimes the people who've been close to you when something bad happens are not the first people to connect with you and help you through.
They're probably the last.
They are.
In fact, I have observed, I mean, I'm a reporter.
I pay attention to detail.
I have observed that the people who literally rushed into the fray, and I just can't emphasize that enough, the people who actually helped, who knew what to do and how to do it and when to do it, those people had endured unspeakable tragedy in their own life, and they knew what to do.
They knew not to slather the hackneyed clichés on me.
They knew what stupid things not to say.
And they knew, in fact, the ultimate is just to be quiet.
As a friend said, show up and shut up.
That really is the best thing you can do for somebody in deep mourning.
I can't tell you how many times my own tragedy was compared to somebody having their dog pass.
And not to trivialize that, I know that that's a big deal, but it does not compare to my experience.
And ultimately, I found on social media a group of women who'd been through the same experience I had.
And boy, those women saved me.
They literally saved me.
The starting point for the book is that tragedy.
I just want to ask if there's anything relevant that we need to know about you in the years before you got married, the person that you were, you know, as a student, as a kid, were you interested in spiritual things, psychic things?
Did you believe in ghosties and fairies and things that go bump in the night?
Well, I guess I believed in ghosts because, you know, as a mom, having, I had three daughters, as a mom, you know that that much energy that comes into the world didn't start when that baby's born or nine months earlier.
That much energy and that much vibrancy in life has to be eternal.
I mean, I just knew that intrinsically.
And as I mean, I've spent my whole life reading things of spirit, things about spirituality.
I have been captivated by NDEs ever since Raymond Moody's book came out.
I think it was 76, a little trade paperback, Life After Life.
And then Daniel Brinkley, I think he wrote one of the early ones about his own experience after being struck by lightning and being resuscitated.
So I, boy, I read those books over and over again.
I read every book as soon as it came out.
I was always fascinated by that topic because I felt it gave us a glimpse into the fact that there's a bigger picture.
You know, like our eyes, even as a kid, I used to think about there's ultraviolet and ultra-red, and there are things in the world that we don't see because our eyes don't see that spectrum of light.
And so I knew there has to be more going on in this world than we can possibly see with our eyeballs.
So yeah, I've always been a hardcore believer in the things that Humanly, we don't grasp and understand.
I've interviewed Daniel Brinkley a number of times over the years.
When you were reading his book, when you were reading the other books when you were younger, and you'd yet to have your own near-death experience, were you kind of hoping that it would happen to you?
Oh, heck no.
Very much no.
And, you know, within my own experience, one of the things that happened was I said out loud, and in my experience, as I was floating away from my body, I talked out loud.
I mean, I've been widowed for six years.
I talk out loud to myself a lot.
You know, just funny little habit, I guess, writers, who knows.
But one of the things I said is I've been here before, like in this, in this conscious experience of life.
I have been here before.
And the angel said, remember that story your mom told you when you were a baby that you were given up for dead?
They said, you weren't close to death.
You passed on and we sent you back.
And that was so interesting because I was a three-week old infant.
So I don't know.
I didn't have any conscious memory of that until I passed myself.
But it sure did explain why I was captivated by NDE books my whole life.
Right.
And I've told my listeners many times that my own dear mother who left us in 90, I need to say 1996, in 2006, it's really hard to work out the number of years.
It just feels like a long time.
But the reason that she was here was that she went through a near-death experience at the age of 10, when a lot of kids got sick from things that we can cure easily these days, but not then.
And she had a crisis, and the doctor came, as doctors did in those days, to the home and told my grandmother, if she gets through tonight, she'll be okay.
But it's touch and go.
And my mother struggled and battled through the night she had pneumonia, and she very, very nearly died.
And she came back with a story that she told us as children, and all the way through our lives, it never changed.
She told us a story of how she went to a beautiful place, a place of unimaginable beauty, of gardens and fields and trees of a kind and scale that you can't imagine here.
And she was given the option to come back.
And she didn't want to come back.
She was told that she had things to do here, so she needed to come back.
And she was resisting it.
She was saying, no, please don't make me go back.
I love it here.
And they said, no, you've got to do that.
Of course, I wouldn't be here if she didn't come back.
But at the age of 10, my mother always believed that she went through a near-death experience.
And I had no reason whatsoever to doubt her.
And the detail remained the same.
But why I'm telling you this is that you must be familiar with the fact that these stories are much more common than perhaps most people assume.
Certainly with those medical people who addressed you, they will have experienced that with patients.
Yes, and that probably is another big reason I wrote this book.
Even after I started giving talks and podcasts, I had so many people tell me, you know, your experience helped me remember my own or rivaled my own.
I mean, in my experience, I ended up in a white room, just this bare but beautiful white room.
And the white was so intense, you couldn't see where the walls and the ceiling met.
And I've had so many people tell me I was taken to a white room too.
And yet prior to my own experience, I mean, all these NDE books, I had never heard about somebody ending up in a white room.
You know, the tunnel, the music, the field of wildflowers, all the traditional stuff.
So that was really fascinating to me that others have had this specific experience of being taken to a white room.
It is interesting because before I read about you today, I hadn't heard of that.
I'd heard my mother's story and other stories like it, but I'd never heard about the white room.
We'll get into that.
Our starting point, and I want to warn our listener, is a suicide.
Your husband's suicide.
And this is all, it must still be raw.
Of course it must be because this is not 20 or 30 years ago.
This is recently.
Relatively, it will be six years in April.
And it's, I really appreciate your saying that because, you know, the world is full of, oh, you should be over it by now, people.
I will never be the person I was before he did this.
I mean, I thought he was the love of my life.
I thought we had a good marriage.
I thought a lot of things.
And he ended his life April 2016.
And yet, you know, the thing about my NDE and going to heaven and all that, I consider myself healed of the trauma, but I still miss him.
You know, I still mourn his loss.
I wish he'd made better choices.
I wish a lot of things, but I had been completely disabled by grief.
I was just getting into a smaller and smaller circle.
And I knew ultimately either I would end my own life or I would end up just pretty much living in one room and never leaving the house, which is kind of the path I was on.
I was pretty messed up.
I mean, I lived out of my car for a brief time.
And I would have continued living out of my car until my demise.
But that's when a friend intervened and she said, you're not living in that car.
You're coming home with me.
And I said, nope, not happening.
I am not coming home with anybody.
Tried that.
And I had tried living with different people who reached out to me trying to help me.
And I couldn't do it.
I couldn't get comfortable.
But this woman was different.
Her name was Tracy.
And she lived out in the country.
And she lived on a 110-acre peanut farm.
And she lived near a train track.
So I could hear the, I'm a big fan of trains.
I could hear the beautiful train whistle at night at the crossing.
And also, Tracy would come in.
She had a very hard job.
She'd get home around 8 o'clock at night.
And she would stand at the foot of my bed every night and pray for me.
And she said, often when she walked into the bedroom, I would be half asleep, but I'd be writhing, moaning, crying.
And she said it was very, obviously not a restful sleep.
And she said, when she stood at the foot of the bed and prayed for me, that I would settle down and my breathing would even out and I would calm down.
And she said, and she said, I would stay and pray for you until I saw that, that you had calmed down.
I mean, it's so important, isn't it, that you know somebody cares.
So many people in this world go through bad things and sadly they don't find, maybe the people are there somewhere in their lives, but they don't find the people who can help them through it because a lot of people say, I'm very self-sufficient, I have to say, but I'm not totally self-sufficient.
And I think anybody who thinks that they can get through something bad entirely by themselves, I'm afraid they're kidding.
You have to reach out.
And that's why I said at the beginning of this, and if we were doing this on broadcast radio in the UK, I would have to say that if you feel, and I'm addressing my listener here, that you need to talk, then we have an organization in the UK called the Samaritans.
I don't know whether they're called the Samaritans in the US, but you can call them 24-7-365.
They're a listening ear.
They're not affiliated to anything or anybody.
And that number, just to give it to you again, is 116-123 in the United Kingdom.
But what we're saying is that everybody needs to be heard, I think, needs their pain to be heard.
The trauma that you went through with the suicide of your husband, I can't imagine what that must have been like because presumably you didn't see it coming.
No, no clue.
In fact, after it happened, I mean, I'm a writer.
I've been a newspaper reporter.
I've written for everything.
I've written books.
I consider myself very self-disciplined.
I'm very careful with even the thoughts I think because I do think your thoughts have an influence on your life.
So I consider myself to be a pretty, well, I guess, fairly intelligent, something of an intellectual, I hope, and very controlled in my thoughts, not to mention my speech.
And after this happened, I did this thing that my daughter called the pterodactyl scream, where it would start with me sobbing, and then I would just start screeching at the top of my lungs.
And that is so foreign to who I am.
And I was in shock.
In fact, I was in shock for about a year.
I lost a phenomenal amount of weight to the point that people would beg me to eat a bite of something.
And, you know, to me, perhaps one of the most interesting effects of this is I lost the ability to read.
You know, I mean, I couldn't concentrate and all, but I actually lost the ability to read.
I could read words, you know, shoe, red, tape, pink, but I couldn't understand what they meant.
And the mental decimation caused by this was more akin to that of a stroke victim.
And here I was a lifelong reader, a lifelong writer, and I couldn't read a book.
I couldn't read a contract.
I couldn't read a page.
And that was very disabling.
You weren't just barely functioning.
You weren't functioning at all.
I was not.
In fact, after I lived with my friend Tracy for four months, and then, I mean, four months is a long time to have somebody in the back bedroom lying on the bed crying.
But, I mean, she would grab me by the hand.
She said, we're eating breakfast now.
We're going out for breakfast now.
We're going out for dinner.
Get up, get up, get up, get up.
So she wouldn't let me just wallow.
But also, she was a very positive, perky presence, but in a loving way.
She would never say, look at you feeling sorry for yourself.
In fact, one of the things Tracy told me again and again, because I always kept a notebook with me.
I couldn't remember anything.
So when somebody said something lovely or full of light, I would write it down.
And then I would just sit and stare at that sentence.
I mean, I could read a sentence and I could understand it, but she would say, she said to me over and over and over again, she said, I don't know what's going on.
I don't know the big picture, but I know that there's going to be a day that you tell this story to thousands, if not millions of people.
And it will be a story of healing and restoration and grace and blessing.
She said, that day is coming.
And she said, that's why I felt that I had to grab you and keep you from just disappearing or dying or worse.
And that meant the world to me.
And I was like, I can't see it.
I got nothing.
But my friend Tracy sure could.
And I would guess, although I've never been through it, that you'd be there, you know, whether your friend was with you or not.
You'd be calling into the darkness and asking your husband, why?
I asked that question too many times to count.
Anyway, what I was going to say about Tracy is after the four months, another friend stepped in and I rented a house with him and he was my caregiver.
He was a friend, but he was also a caregiver.
And he was the one that would literally follow me around the house with a plate of food.
He would make dinner every night and he would literally follow me around with a plate of food and a fork on it and say, please, please just sit down and take three bites tonight.
Please, you haven't eaten today.
You have to eat something.
And it was so foreign to me that I thought I was, you know, this smart cookie and sophisticated and polished and had these wonderful backgrounds and been this, you know, had this wonderful professional career.
And I was turning into just a pathetic little mess.
Were you able to work at that time or was that?
No, no, no.
I could barely go to restaurants.
A friend took me to a big department store.
And this happened at least six months after his suicide.
A friend took me into this department store.
My husband had done this sitting in a lawn chair right outside the sun porch.
And I saw that same chair at the department store.
And I saw that chair, and I almost threw up.
I got lightheaded.
I felt sick to my stomach.
I told my friend, I said, I have to leave right now.
And this is the right thing to do.
My friend said, okay, here's the car keys.
I'll be right behind you.
And she said, or do you need me to come with you?
I said, no, just give me the car keys.
Let me get out of here.
And that's the right thing to do.
And conversely, every now and then I might be out with somebody and they'd say, oh, come on, just give yourself a few minutes.
You'll get over it.
No, if somebody's having a panic attack at that level from a trauma or really anything, the right thing to do is to say, okay, let's go.
And that was, and so I learned who was safe and who was not.
Did you at any point talk to a medical professional?
I know that you have a different medical system in the U.S. And, you know, everything's private and paid for.
And in the U.K., we're reasonably lucky that we have the National Health Service here.
It's under pressure at the moment.
But, you know, whatever problems you have, you can always go and talk to your GP here.
Maybe not so easy in the U.S., but did you?
That's actually reason number three I wrote this book.
The access to mental health care in this country is ghastly.
I know we love to call ourselves a first world country.
We fail in that regard.
It took four weeks to get an appointment with a psychiatrist, which when you're living your life in 15-minute increments is unconscionable.
So there was this great burden on those that love me to keep me alive for four weeks until we could get in to see a psychiatrist.
And you know the way that that Happened.
I did end up getting in a little bit sooner than that.
But I had a friend.
Again, I moved in nice circles.
I had a friend that was a psychologist, and she found out the need and how urgent the need was.
And she pulled strings and she got me in to see a psychiatrist immediately.
And the psychiatrist actually stayed an hour past her workday to see me.
That's not the way healthcare should be.
It shouldn't have to be that you know the right people.
So I'm still very angry about that.
That is wretched.
But yes, and it turned out that psychiatrist was very helpful.
And then I was linked with a psychologist and we did talk therapy.
And that was all good.
But again, I had good insurance.
The cost was nominal.
And I'm what we might define as a very conservative person politically.
But I'm even revisiting that.
We have got to make health care available to all.
It has got to be something that everybody can have access to because, and I won't go too far down this bunny trail, but when I hear suicide prevention talk, it sets my hair on fire because women who've lost a husband to suicide are 12 to 48 times more likely than the average person to end their own life.
So we have a known risk group, which is suicide survivors.
And I said women, but people who've lost a spouse.
We have a known risk group.
And what do we do?
We treat them like lepers.
We ostracize them.
What you said earlier is spot on.
We're afraid that what they have might be catching.
It's like when we had the visitation and my husband's clothes casket is behind me and a string of people coming forward to offer their condolences.
And I see the couples coming toward me and they're squeezing their spouse a little tighter as they get close to me.
And then the unfortunately foolish people who approach me and say, oh, if anything happened to my Bobby, I just lay down and die.
I don't know how you survive this.
Well, you know what?
I wish I could have laid down and died.
It didn't turn out to be an option.
Did they actually say that to you?
Yes, many people.
I mean, that's not just unhelpful.
That's positively wicked.
Do you not think because what good could that do you in that situation?
Sometimes I have to say, Rose, I don't understand people.
Sometimes, you know, what comes out of their mouths is the first thing that enters their brain.
And that's extremely difficult.
So look, you were in an at-risk category, weren't you?
Because you were so derailed by this.
You had support, but you were very much at risk.
I was.
And it's pretty much a miracle that I survived because I'm a sensitive soul.
I'm a very sensitive person.
And, you know, what you just said about, that's a wicked thing to say.
That's one, that's a great word.
But also, people tend to say what will comfort themselves.
They will say, was there a sign?
Did you know?
Did you see it coming?
They're not trying to help you.
They're trying to make sure that nothing this horrible ever happens to them.
And I found that way too many people think that way, that they're trying to say what makes them feel better.
They're not trying to comfort you.
Well, a lot of people like to think, I remember I had a boss when I started work and I was just a kid.
I did a year's work in the BBC in Brighton on the south coast.
And the boss was called Bob.
He's no longer with us.
But I remember him looking across his desk and saying in the unique way that he spoke, nobody's fireproof, he said.
And that's absolutely true.
People want to believe that they're fireproof.
But nobody is.
The vicissitudes, if that's the right word, the vicissitudes of life will get you, whoever you are, wherever you are, however charmed you think your existence is.
But I sound like I'm preaching here, but that's how those things are.
But I just couldn't believe those people saying to you, I don't know how you're surviving this.
I'd lie down and die.
You needed help and sustenance then.
You needed to be helped to get through.
you didn't need the example from somebody else's life of how they might not get through.
Now, look, this is only the...
What happened to you and the near-death experience, the trauma that you suffered was just a scene set for this, wasn't it?
Because you, you know, you were starting to, if get better is not the way to put it, you were not getting better, but you were starting somewhat to heal.
You were starting to be able to live some kind of life.
But then something else happened, yeah?
Yes.
And it was 29 months out.
And you know what's really fascinating to me in retrospect, I had three prayers I prayed every night.
God, either heal me or let me die.
Spare me the life review when I die.
I'd had recurring nightmares.
And by recurring, I mean, oh, I don't know, two or three hundred times I had a nightmare that I was there when my husband did it and I saw the whole thing and I couldn't stop him.
I mean, that was the nightmare.
In reality, I wasn't there when he did that, but the nightmare was unrelenting.
So I asked God, look, I've been through this once, spare me the life review.
And prayer number three was I couldn't handle any more big decisions.
I had serious decision fatigue.
Trying to make a decision to sign a contract or legal paperwork or something when you can't even read a book is not good.
And all these decisions after his death came with such, I mean, they all had such do A, and you may have severe consequences, do B, and there'll be severe consequences.
So those were my three prayers.
And I was suicidal.
I had a plan.
I had a place.
I had it all.
And I gave way too much thought to that because when life overwhelmed me, I thought, you know what, wait 24 hours.
So it was a bad scene.
I learned how to act.
That's what I learned.
I was worthy of an Academy Award for the level of acting I did.
In fact, the word personality comes from the Latin word for mask.
I had mastered donning the mask in public so people wouldn't feel sorry for me.
And they'd say, oh, Rosemary, you're looking great.
You're looking great.
You look so much better.
I'd say, you know, I feel just fine.
And inside, you know, I can't wait to get home so I can go pop a couple drugs and sweep for a few hours.
But then 29 months out, I had had some weird symptoms.
They'd been developing for months, went to a doctor, and the doctor said, you've got cervical cancer.
And they referred me to an oncologist.
And the oncologist says, yeah, you do.
And the flesh is getting kind of distorted and it's stage two.
And they were going to do a biopsy to determine exactly how far this thing had gone.
And it was after the biopsy that I was sent home too fast.
And I told the RN at the hospital, I'm bleeding an awful lot here.
And three times the RN said, oh, once you get home, you'll feel fine.
Well, I went home and the bleeding kept going.
In fact, I had a really, really pretty white carpet in my house.
And I was so worried about messing up that carpet.
So I actually went in my bathroom and I stood in my shower and I thought, you know, you've been praying every night.
Every night you've been asking God to let you go.
This is the way out.
This is the path out of this.
You know, there's a Bible verse, I think it's 1 Corinthians 10, 13, God will show you a way out.
This is it.
This is God's mercy.
So I was standing in that shower just watching this blood pour out of my body and go right down the drain.
And I thought, all I got to do is sit down and it's over.
And then I really thought about that.
And I thought, you know, these people who tried so hard to save me, is that fair to them?
Is that really fair?
And then, plus, I had two friends that brought me home from the hospital and they were sitting in my living room.
And I thought, is that fair to them too?
That they come in here and find my body splayed on the white tile floor looking like that.
So I made a decision and I pushed against the wall and got out of the shower.
And an ambulance was summoned, taken to an ER, and it was at this little ER, little itty-bitty ER that was not attached to a hospital, by the way, which should not be legal in my opinion.
But anyway, they made more boo-boos.
They gave me a shot of Delauded.
And right before the shot of Delauded came, I grabbed the RN, another RN, but she was very nice at this little ER.
And I said, promise me you're not going to let me die.
Because, you know, hey, let's get the show on the road.
You know, let's turn this ship around.
I'm ready to live now.
So did that injection they gave you, the shot, is that some kind of tranquilizer?
It's a derivative of morphine.
It is some powerful stuff.
So they were trying to quell the pain.
They were, because I had not been in pain until they did this exam, trying to figure out what to do next.
But anyway, I grabbed this RN's hand and said, promise me not to let me die.
And she said, oh, honey, we're not going to let you die.
We have many solutions for this.
I was like, okay, that's good.
Well, after that shot at a lauded, it didn't last long.
And I fell into a very deep, dreamless state.
And the next thing I remember was popping out of my, was waking up and popping out of my body like toast out of a toaster and floating away in this blackness and thinking, wow, I just died.
Actually, one of my very first thoughts, my very first thought was my heart has stopped.
And, you know, I'm floating.
I'm leaving my body is very clear.
And having read those NDE books probably didn't hurt any.
I knew exactly.
I knew exactly what was happening.
I said, my heart has stopped.
And I thought, how do I know that?
I thought, I don't know how I know that, but that's right.
I'm sorry to jump in, but how did that feel?
I'm asking this for a reason.
I talked about this on my radio show recently.
There's been some research very, very recently where a team of medics analyzed the brain of a man who was dying, 87 years of age, this man.
And they found that there was activity in his brain that indicated his brain was maybe doing something.
There was some speculation.
Maybe this is the end of life review or something.
But there was awareness and activity in the brain for 30 seconds after death.
So you would have been through that, presumably.
You will have been through that stage.
I suppose, but the other thing was that dilauded, I think I would have died.
I think the dilauded kind of greased the skids there.
I don't think the dilauded was a causative factor as much as a contributing factor.
But my point is I wonder how much that suppressed ordinary brain function.
Because, I mean, that's what painkillers do.
They go to the brain and interrupt receptors.
So I don't know, but I know that it was very clear to me that I had died.
I mean, absent many other things that happened, I don't care what the world says.
I will always know this was a legitimate experience of passing on and coming back.
And then, because the next thing that happened was I thought, I'm dying.
And then I, being the good grammarian, I said, no, no, you're actually, you're not dying.
You're dead.
And it cracked me up because, and then I heard myself giggle.
And I thought, I don't have breath sounds.
I'm pretty sure I don't have ears or vocal cords.
How am I producing sound and hearing sound?
And I thought, I don't know.
But it was so comforting to realize that everything we really are goes with us.
The only thing left behind was anxiety and worries and woes, the negative stuff.
But everything that I really am went with me down to my funny little giggle.
And that comforted me so much that I was all there.
Everything I am was there.
So like a moment of realization, you think to yourself, all right, I've died, but the essence of me, hey, it's still there.
Right down to my moribund sense of humor, you know, that I'm going on to my reward and I have to correct my tense, you know, because I'm not sure everyone's too worried about English in the next world.
And then the other thing that happened, I felt the presence of a massive spiritual being to my left.
And this is while I'm still floating, but this massive spiritual being to my left, slightly behind me, and a whole bunch bigger.
And I'm really happy, happy, happy, happy.
And I said, and who are you?
And the answer was before I could even finish the words.
And the answer wasn't just words.
It came with an infusion of knowledge.
And I, it was like, this sounds silly, but like every cell in my being understood the answer.
And the answer was you, Rosemary, you are the image and likeness.
I'm the original.
And I was like, wow, that's Genesis 1.26.
I've wondered about that my whole life.
Now I get it.
Now I understand it.
And I remember thinking, might have been good to know back there, but hey, it's all good.
I'm glad.
I'm glad to know it now.
You're quite a religious person, aren't you?
I wonder if, I mean, look, a skeptic listening to this might say, well, if you've lived your life in a religious manner, and if you've been filled full of drugs to quell the pain, and if you're going through that experience, then maybe you're hallucinating things that are within your religious experience.
But you think that was much, what you went through was much, much more than that, far beyond that.
It was, because what are the titles?
What are the words we use?
You know, I would say that that was the Holy Ghost or God.
Somebody else might say it's source or universe.
I encountered what I would call angels.
Somebody else might call them spiritual beings.
But if you're going to have a conversation about NDEs with somebody who doesn't believe in anything beyond the five senses and this earth, that's not going to be a very interesting conversation.
Some people are so in love with their position.
You know, Maya Angelou had a quote that I absolutely love.
She said, I'm not so in love with any opinion I hold that somebody wiser can't help me change my ideas.
I love that.
I love that too.
I'm going to note that one down.
I hadn't heard that one.
Okay.
Yeah.
So there you are with.
We can't fall in love with our opinions.
You know, our opinions are so limited.
And they change.
All right.
So, there you are in this situation.
You know, the situation you're in.
There is a lot of wonderment around you.
That's a word I think probably sounds like it describes it.
A lot of wonderment around you.
You're discovering this is what happens when you die, and then you see a supreme being or something akin to that.
What happens then?
Oh, it went on and on and on.
I mean, it's, you know, Einstein said, to those of us who are committed physicists, the past, present, and future are only illusion, however persistent.
I love that because we like to think of, you know, okay, this happened and then that and then the future.
This experience was like it happened all at once.
And yet, conversely, if you told me I'd been dead for two weeks, I'd be like, yeah, I can imagine that.
That makes sense.
I can't define time and I'm not even sure that I can get the sequence right.
But one of the thoughts I had was, yippeekai, I'm free.
I'm out.
I'm clean.
I didn't do this to myself.
And it's interesting to me that even in this experience, I remembered the horror of my husband's suicide, but not almost like a fact, not like this burden, but that I had not done this to myself.
It was over.
I got my clean slate and I got out clean.
And one of my thoughts was, I really felt like I'd been granted early parole for good behavior.
I really did.
I felt like I, and I remembered the chemo and I thought, I kind of giggled to myself and I thought, you know what?
No chemo for you.
And I just thought, I've been wondering if I was even going to take chemo or not.
And I thought, I guess we settled that question, didn't we?
So I remembered so much.
I remembered Bible verses.
It was like my whole life with this, you know, six pounds of hamburger meat between my ears, I'd been living at 60 amps and now I was at 100,000 amps.
It was just phenomenal.
And it went on and on.
And I've already talked to a few skeptics.
I get a lot, a lot, a lot of email.
By the way, I don't know if I can mention my website, but it's temporarydeath.com because I didn't have a near-death experience.
Again, words matter.
Near-death is when you're on an airplane and it goes bad and the pilot pulls it up at the last minute and yay, everybody's fine.
This was a temporary death.
I died and I came back.
But this just went on and on.
Angels answered my questions.
I had a lot of questions.
One of the most prevalent Bible verses that popped into thought was the peace of God that passeth all understanding.
And Paul wrote that in the New Testament.
And I realized this is what he's talking about, this peace.
I know a lot of people talk about the love, but I felt peace.
And as a neurotic writer who worries and ruminates and overthinks every single thing, peace was what I craved.
And it was just perfect, perfect peace.
All understanding, certainly the understanding that you had before you went through that experience.
I understand that you were effectively without oxygen.
Your brain was without oxygen for 10 minutes.
Is that so?
More than 10 minutes, yes.
And the cool thing about that, kind of unfortunate, what they had done at the ER is they had, you know, they had put some gauze in delicate places trying to quell the bleeding.
And the effect of that is they didn't stop the bleeding.
They just hid the bleeding.
So I had been bleeding out that whole time.
In fact, my buddy who had accompanied me to the ER, when he got shooted out into the hallway, you know, when they started trying to get me back, he said four times the door to that room opened and four times they emerged with armfuls of linen literally dripping in blood.
So when they removed that gauze or whatever, it was a mess.
So yeah, it was a messy thing.
And that's, you know, people say, oh, I was floating in perfect blackness.
I didn't see this stuff.
And I consider that again.
Frankly, I consider it God's mercy.
I wouldn't want to see that stuff.
You know, I don't want to see myself bleeding to death.
It had not been my best day.
So you were not shown what was going on in the ER.
You were not shown your own body lying there.
You weren't shown any of that.
You said that you asked a number of questions.
In your situation, and I'm sure my audience has been screaming this question, but let me put it to you.
The first question for a lot of people would have been, where's my husband?
And it wasn't mine.
And in fact, I've heard this from other people who have an NDE, and it comforts me to hear this from others.
I didn't have a thought about my children or my dog or my friends.
And I didn't have a thought about my husband or even my, you mentioned your mom.
My mom's been gone 20 years.
I think she was my soulmate.
I didn't even think about that I would soon see her.
And I think that's, I do think, again, that's mercy.
How can we go on if we're thinking and worrying about our three kids and our dog?
But I did not see him.
And you know, the answers, a lot of answers came to me in that experience, but a lot more came after I was back on earth.
I was in the hospital for four days after I came back, and the angels were very present with me.
And I felt like I've heard people say after they come back from one of these experiences, they feel like they're 50% in this world and 50% in that world.
I felt like I was 95% in heaven still and only kind of hanging on here to earth.
So I got a lot of questions answered, but one of them was, I did not see my husband in heaven.
And one of my questions was, where is he?
And the answer was, he's with us.
And I found that immensely comforting, you know, that he's going to be okay.
You know, there's a lot of belief in the world that whether it's secular or Christian, that if you kill yourself, you end up in darkness and, you know, you have to repeat the experience and all this horrible stuff.
But the answer, he's with us, was just so comforting.
And the other thing was I had felt so much guilt.
I mean, he was an agnostic and I was the good Christian girl.
Why could I not be good enough for him?
Why could I not, why, why were my prayers not good enough to keep him from making this very poor choice in life?
So you were blaming yourself to an extent.
Oh, which is very common for suicide survivors, as we're known.
And the answer was, we work out our own salvation.
You weren't supposed to work out his.
You're supposed to work out yours.
As the young people say, stay in your own lane.
And I can't begin to say how comforting that was.
And then one of the questions I had asked a billion times, maybe a million, why did he do this?
I thought he loved me.
And the answer that came to me about that was: well, actually, there's a Bible verse: you've circled the mountain long enough time to stop and go north.
Or as another friend said, you got to get off the merry-go-round to find the real answers.
And that's what I was told.
That's the wrong question is, why did he do this?
I thought he loved me.
And what I was told, and this is out there, but I was told that stop saying, I loved him so much and say, I loved.
And that's what we're supposed to do on this earth is love.
And I was told that when we love, it's like a river of light pours through us and purifies us and takes away the darkness and the ugliness that we tend to accumulate living in this world.
And to say instead, I loved.
And that's enough.
And stop thinking that my love had to be manifested, had to find a thing to fixate on.
And boy, was that transformative too.
Right.
You didn't want to go back, as a lot of people who go through that experience say they don't want to go back.
When that subject was broached.
I mean, for a start off, who broached it?
Did they broach it to you?
Like, well, it's really nice having you here and it's been fun answering your questions.
But hey, look at the time.
I mean, I'm making light of it.
Of course, it's much more profound than that.
But they wanted you to come back and you didn't want to go back.
And I'm just wondering what the dynamic of that little interaction would have been.
It's pretty interesting because after this floating, I mean, the floating, I don't know if the floating went on for 10 seconds or 10 hours.
I don't know.
But I ended up in a white room.
And the funny thing is, I don't remember the transition.
I remember one minute I'm floating and the next minute I'm in this beautiful white room and I'm on my feet or something approximating feet.
I'm still mad at myself.
I didn't look down at my feet to see what's going on down there.
Didn't look at my hands, didn't look at nothing.
But I'm in this white room and there's brilliant white, luminescent, iridescent, bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, white, white, white, white room.
But there's like a mist or a fog or a vapor.
And I remember seeing through the fog that there's a door in front of me.
I don't know, 15 feet ahead, some distance ahead, like a normal sized room.
And I know that by, I've read enough NDEs.
And I think to myself, oh, I know what that door is.
That door is the Rubicon.
That door is the line of demarcation.
No coming back.
The point of no return.
That's right.
I was like, there's always a door, a gate, a boundary, something.
And I pretty much said to these spiritual beings, I said, all right, everybody, out of my way.
We're doing the door.
We don't need discussion.
We don't need to talk about it.
And I just wanted to get to that door in a hurry.
And I thought, I'm going to move as fast as I can.
And I remember thinking, I don't know if I have feet or legs or what the mechanism is, but I know that if I, I can move with intention.
So I thought my intention is to get to that door as fast as possible.
And one of the things that happened in this mist or fog or whatever, I tried to focus on an individual droplet, which I know sounds crazy, but I feel like I ought to be able to.
And the spiritual being said, your eyes have not acclimated to this new environment, but what you're seeing are particles of light.
That's what you're being showered with.
And it was explained to me that when we go to heaven, we all have to go through this process akin to a spiritual car wash where the muck of the earth is washed away.
And that some people spend so much time dwelling on illness or problems that they start to think it's part of their true identity.
And that the purpose of the white room is to wash all that away.
And that we can see our innate spiritual perfection.
And as a friend of mine said, leave your muddy boots at the door.
Right.
So all of the baggage that you take with you, that's where you leave it behind.
Yeah.
And the sadness from is suicide.
I mean, I remembered being sad.
And again, it was like saying, oh, what a pretty blue sky today.
It was just like, yeah, that was bad.
And I got to the door and somewhere in this, moving through this white room, see, I don't know exactly when it happened, but maybe it was when I was closer to the door.
But I was told if I agreed to go back that I'd be healed.
No, the word was, you'll be restored to wholeness.
Again, it wasn't words.
These weren't words.
These were impressions, I guess.
But anyway, yeah, I was told if I agreed to go back that I'd be restored to wholeness.
And I said, that sounds great.
You know, out of my way, I'm doing the door.
And I put up my right hand to push through this door.
I was a little miffed it was shut because I was like, yeah, that door ought to be open.
But I put up my right hand to push through the door and I had, oh my gosh, I paused and I said, is this the divine will for my life?
And I didn't even get the words out.
I didn't get past the first four words of that.
And the answer was no, it's not.
Because I had always believed in spiritual healing and stayed away from doctors and exercised and ate right and prayed, prayed, prayed.
And I thought it's kind of funny that my first time to a doctor and they kill me.
But the answer I was given was, it's not the will for your life, but whatever you choose, you go with all of God's grace and mercy and blessings and love and care.
I thought, all right, I'll take that deal.
And then as I'm thinking, all right, let's do it.
Let's get this over.
I had a vision of that nurse who had held my hand and promised me I wasn't going to die.
And I saw her now in a hospital supply room surrounded by supplies and linens and all the accoutrements of a hospital.
And she was sitting on a metal stool, leaning forward, head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
And she said, through tears, I promised that woman I wasn't going to let her die.
And I lost her.
And by vision, and this was not happening concurrently.
I believe it to have been a potential future event.
When I say vision, it was like I had been secretly put into this room to observe this woman.
It was incredible.
And then I thought, well, you know what?
She's an RN.
She's about my age, you know, late 50s, early 60s.
I thought she's been through this before.
She'll get over it.
And I was like, all right, I'm ready for the door.
And then what happened next was I didn't just see this experience.
I felt the agonal grief that I had known from my husband's death.
I felt her agony at losing a patient after she held her hand and promised she wasn't going to let her die.
And that's when I put my right hand down at my side.
My last words in heaven were, if I can save somebody this much pain, I have to go back.
And in a second, millisecond, I was back on that gurney in that hospital.
And I remember thinking, well, you know, crap, except I don't think that was what I was exactly thinking.
I thought, well, too late now.
I'm back.
Did you ever discuss all of that with that nurse?
I did not because they were very busy.
And I was more talking to the angels, but lying on that girl, one, I come back and I'm in a different room.
And, you know, what's funny is that nurse, as soon as I opened my eyes, that nurse was in my face.
And she said, what is your name?
I said, Rosemary.
She said, what year is it?
I said, 2018.
She said, where are you?
And I said, a crummy excuse for an ER.
But the thing is about what I mentioned earlier about the bleeding to death, they can't even do CPR because it just pushes more blood out.
So I had been 10 minutes with no oxygen to the brain whatsoever.
So that's why they were so worried.
That's why they were, you know, you don't know what you're bringing back after that amount of time.
But you were still very ill.
Well, I had recently bled to death.
You know, I felt pretty perky.
I felt pretty darn chipper.
And I was communing with the angels very easily.
And I remember seeing an angel in the upper left-hand corner of the room.
And it was just like a ball of light, a ball of happy light.
I know that sounds almost juvenile, but that's what she looked like.
And sparkly and bright and active and moving.
And I looked at that angel and I said, you know what?
Robert's rules of order here, point of order, we didn't even have first or a second.
Where's the discussion phase?
I want to talk about this.
Do you know how much energy it took to die?
And now I'm back.
And, you know, the angel just kind of smiled and said, you know, hi there.
I mean, there wasn't really any discussion.
And then I was very, very quickly loaded onto another gurney, whisked away to a trauma center by ambulance.
And I remember in the back of that ambulance, there was an angel sitting with me.
I mean, there was the attendant there too.
But a very large angel sat there with me, told me funny stories.
And I very distinctly remember taking the oxygen mask off over and over again so I could laugh.
And I just thought it was great that I'm being entertained by this funny angel on my way to the trauma center.
Right.
And you're certain that that was not a hallucination.
Oh, I have no doubt.
And I mean, I just have no doubt.
And when I came back, everything had changed.
I was no longer the stricken suicide widow overwhelmed with grief.
And ultimately, and I felt different.
I knew the cancer was healed.
I just felt so different.
I can't begin to describe how I felt so different.
So you felt you were healed from all of this.
I knew it.
Now, that, I mean, that is very, very profound and very moving.
So you had an innate sense that what you went into the emergency room for and pretty much died over had somehow been healed.
Does that mean that you'd done some kind of deal when you'd been in the other place?
Well, yeah, it was what they said.
They say you agree to go back and you'll be restored to wholeness.
And I've often, that was the deal.
And I thought, I still didn't want it.
I was like, okay, swell.
But I didn't want to go back.
I just can't begin to say how much I didn't want to go back.
I mean, I know people say that a lot, like the story about your mom.
Why?
Who would want to go back?
I mean, at this time, I was 58 years old.
Who would want to go back after you experience perfect peace?
And I not only, you know, what's really so cool about this is not only was this stuff healed, but I had had arthritis in my wrist and I had had a bum knee and a bad shoulder from a severe injury.
And I mean, ultimately I came to find out all of that was healed.
It was really quite a thing.
Quite a thing is an understatement.
But, you know, the other interesting thing, and I love this part because, you know, this really gets the agnostics and the atheists.
When I was admitted in the hospital that night, I had, I guess, I think it's a hemoglobin of like 6.4 or something, which is barely enough to sustain life, it turns out.
And then I had blood work done two weeks later, and my blood work was perfect.
I mean, textbook perfect down to the decimal points and the numbers and all.
And I was told when I left that hospital after four days of, after having blood to death, I was told that it would take two to three months for those numbers to be right.
And in fact, when the doctor saw the numbers day 14, he said, I see there's a mistake on your lab work.
And I said, no, no, I'm walking again.
I'm back on my bike.
I'm fine.
And he said, what?
I said, no, I don't ride fast, but I'm back on my bike.
He said, that's impossible.
And I said, actually, it's not.
I was told I'd be restored to wholeness.
I take those promises.
So you actually told him that.
I did.
And in fact, I told him, this was the oncologist.
This was a gynecological oncologist.
Because he said, no, don't forget, we're starting that chemo soon.
Actually, I was supposed to show up in like two days for a chemotherapy tutorial where they teach you how to deal with it.
I said, well, let me talk to you about that for a minute.
I haven't made a decision that I'm going to go forward with that.
And he kind of lost, let's just say he lost his patience with me.
And he then went into a dialogue about he had seen other people try these alternative methods to scientifically proven healing and how bad it would end.
And he went into this quite lengthy discourse of how the cancer would spread, what it would do to me.
And his final sentence was, and then you will drown in your own fluids.
Is that really how you want to die?
Well, I mean, there's, you know, there's telling it like it is and there's telling it like it is, isn't it?
That's what he was doing.
But you were convinced that you were completely healed from what you're telling me.
There must have come a point where, apart from your blood works being not what that doctor expected, the rest of it became apparent, you say, to the medical profession.
So, you know, what happened when they discovered that what you went in there for and what you started all the treatment for had, according to your account, completely subsided?
Well, it took, I had to find another oncologist.
It turns out when you tell them that the angels told you if you agreed to go back to earth, you'd be healed, that they might write mental illness on your chart.
Depends on who you're dealing with, I think.
But yes, they might.
They might.
Not naming names, but I did have to find another oncologist.
And I told her I'd been healed in heaven.
And, you know, To be 100% honest, I am no superhuman.
I do get worried about things sometimes.
And I was truly, honestly, I was 99% sure I'd been healed in heaven.
But I thought I would like another doctor to take a look and affirm it.
It just seemed like the thing to do.
And so I found another oncologist, and I had to drive about 75 miles to find another oncologist that would see me.
Because, I mean, you got to admit, from a medical perspective, this story is kind of out there.
And what's interesting is that second oncologist, the most interesting part of the story to her was, wait, you bled to death from a biopsy.
And I said, yeah, well, you know, that won't happen again.
So she was pretty concerned.
And I ended up having a second surgical biopsy.
And they took a lot of flesh from a lot of places.
And she waited two months, which I didn't like that part either.
But, you know, she felt after this pretty severe outcome, like death, that I needed to be fully over it.
She did a lot of tests too.
You know, the really cool part, she did a physical exam and she said, Rosemary, I don't see anything there.
And then there was a lot of tests and every test that came back, everything was perfect.
And then ultimately, the second surgical biopsy was done.
And she, boy, oh boy, she sent stuff off to lots of places.
She had somebody in the room with her that checked all the slides.
I mean, there was, I was examined in 27 different ways.
And it was found that, as she said, not one cell of cancer.
In fact, what she said was, your flesh is so pink and pretty and perfect.
If it hadn't been for, you know, this first doctor, she said, I wouldn't believe you ever had cancer.
And the other thing I knew is once I got out of the hospital, all those symptoms I'd been having, they disappeared.
You know, I had these random fevers.
I had night sweats.
I had a bunch of funny little symptoms.
And that all went away.
What did the medics then ultimately, including that woman who sounds very sympathetic, what did they believe had happened to you?
She was pretty happy.
She, you know, I do believe we're often divinely led to the right people.
She told me, she said, you know, I'm really sticking.
This was before the surgery, the second surgery.
She said, I'm really sticking my neck out here.
She said, you know, this first doctor is very well known in the country.
And she said, so for me to take his patient and act like you don't have cancer, she said, I am really sticking my neck out there.
And yet when she, she literally shook me awake, I mean, I was in recovery and who knows, it would have been an hour or three, but I was in recovery.
I remember her shaking and shaking and shaking me until she woke me up after the surgery and said, you're right.
There's not a cell left.
And she said, I've been praying so hard for you because my career was on the line too.
But she said, you're right.
It's all gone.
And when she went outside to the waiting room to greet my friend, who again was waiting for me to hear the news, she had tears in her eyes, you know?
So this, this was a big deal for her too.
In fact, one of my last visits with her, because there were a couple of follow-ups, one of my last visits with her, she had prescribed some medication she thought would help me.
And she was reading me some of the contraindications with this particular medicine.
And she put the paper down and she looked at me and she said, you're not going to take this, are you?
And I said, nope.
And she said, and even, and what did she say?
She said, even if it did, it probably wouldn't do anything for you, would it?
And I said, nope.
And she put her hands down, you know, she just put her hands down in her lap and she said, I just don't know what to make of you.
I just don't know what to make of any of this.
So yes, I believe it had an impact on her as well.
So she clearly believed that there'd been a miracle.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, we're coming to the end of this.
It is a moving and remarkable story, Rose, and I'm grateful to you for sharing it with me and for my listener.
Two things.
How do you feel that you are different?
You've indicated that in some ways you feel better.
Some of the problems that you had beforehand, you don't have now, which is fantastic.
And, you know, so that's half of it.
How have you changed?
How are you different?
And why do you think you're back here?
As to how I've changed, as soon as I got out of that hospital, I started selling off all of my worldly possessions.
I realized the greatest happiness I had experienced in this 58 years was my time in heaven, where I literally owned nothing.
So I sold off all of my worldly possessions.
I sold my car, which had been kind of my dream car.
I bought a slightly used Prius.
I put my house on the market, sold in two hours, and I moved 1,000 miles due west to start a new life.
I just wanted to be around beauty.
I didn't want to own anything.
I didn't need anything.
I just wanted to be around a place where things grow.
And what the Midwest is known for is corn, and we grow a lot of corn out here and soy.
So I just wanted to, and I did this a lot.
I would just sit in my car in the middle of a thousand acre field and just look at the corn grow.
And people might laugh, but it just, I don't know.
It just, it really excited me.
So I craved beauty, and that's all I wanted to be around.
And it reordered all of my thoughts.
The grief over my husband has changed so dramatically.
I don't blame myself.
The guilt is gone.
It's all gone.
One of the things the angels told me was that that thing that had happened and all the et ceteras that went with it had been encapsulated, which is a great term for an architectural historian.
You know, when there's a potential contaminant in an old building, it's often considered more advisable to encapsulate rather than attempt removal.
And the angels said, all the muck has been encapsulated and it can't hurt you again.
It's a beautiful word.
I thought it was a British word.
I didn't know you had it in America too.
I'm sorry, Glenn.
Sorry, no, much more important than any question that I could ask.
As to why you came back?
I don't really have a solid answer.
Now that my story is getting out in the world, I mean, to date, I think I'm up to 10 million people have heard this.
I get an awful lot of emails.
I'm grateful for everyone.
But people say it helps them.
It blesses them.
I'm not sure why I came back.
I mean, you know, I don't know.
But I hope my story is an encouragement to others.
And, you know, if there's one, one takeaway message, if you were tempted with dark thoughts that make you think ending your life is a solution, all you're doing is transferring that pain to somebody else and multiplying it by many, many magnitudes of order.
And then the good Samaritans of the world will have to step in and save some other lost soul.
I just wish I could do a Vulcan mind meld with anybody thinking about suicide and tell them this is a dirty trick.
This isn't the pass.
I can't add anything to what you've just said.
Thank you very much, Rose.
What a story.
This book is Remembering the Light, How Dying Saved My Life.
And what's your website again?
TemporaryDeath.com.
Thank you so much for speaking with me.
I found that profound and I found that moving, as you might be able to hear.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, a breathtaking story with many aspects to it.
I wonder what you will think of that.
And as I said at the beginning of this, if you did listen all the way through and you are feeling that you're down and you need someone to talk to, remember that there is always a listening ear.
247-365 at the Samaritans, and their number in the UK is 116123.
116123.
And remember, if you're in the United States or in any other country, then there are parallel organizations you'll have to check locally on the internet, with the phone book, whatever, and they will be there for you.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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