Glenna Stearman Park, Death After Lunch

Glenna Stearman Park, 1990

We stopped for lunch in a small restaurant off I-95 in Eastern Connecticut, just an hour after leaving a 5-year stint of my taking care of grandchildren.  Joel and I flew back and forth on weekends between Baltimore and Providence on Southwest. We should have bought stock in the company and later decided not to figure out how much we spent on flying.  It is better not to put a price tag on family emergencies, and I was finally going home.

Just as we passed New Haven, I started feeling unwell.  I did not know if I was having a cardiac event or what.  I just felt an overwhelming darkness take over my body, and I cried for Joel to call EMS.  At the same time I seemed to drift up to the interior roof of the van, slightly behind Joel’s head.  He was pulling to the side of the freeway and stopped on the off ramp. I was watching me disappear from myself like a snake skin coming off and moving into a black hole in my body. It was amazing to see the disintegration and then hear Joel’s and my sister’s panicked voices on the car phone.  I was peaceful and noticed where we were.  I felt quite well but was alarmed at their distress and decided that I would have to go back. 

The moment I decided to return, I lost memory of the process.  I woke up back in my body as the police were pulling me out with oxygen strapped to my head and helping the EMS techs put me on a stretcher.  They told Joel to follow them to the Yale-New Haven hospital in Bridgeport. 

In the emergency room the nurse came in to get a statement of the event.  I told her that I suddenly felt very sick, that I left my body and floated to the inside roof of the car,  where I watched myself disappearing, probably dying — at which point she stopped me and said, “I can’t write that!”  I said, “That’s what happened.” 

She protested again, and I realized she thought I was nuts.  So I said, “Yes, you can because you can use quotation marks.  You write, “The patient said, I felt sick and left my body, and hovered inside the roof of the car and watched my body disappearing into a black hole….” Then I told her to place quotation marks at the end of my statement.  She shook her head, but wrote what I asked. 

In a few moments a man’s voice was laughing on the other side of my curtain.  He opened it and came in saying, “I had a man in here last week telling me the same kind of story.”  Then the doctor started ordering blood work, x-rays, ECG, and meds.  I was in for three days while they decided that I could continue to Maryland and follow up with my cardiologist.

In DC, my primary care doctor asked me if I would consent to an interview from a writer who had a contract from National Geographic to explore death experiences with people who came back and went on with their lives.  Judy Bachrach, the author, wrote about doctors, nurses, and researchers who experienced patients like me, and then she told some of the stories.  I told her that I had many “out of body” experiences as well as warnings about deaths coming and about other troubles.  Over time, the experiences were emotionally difficult and I made a serious effort to  limit them, although they continued for many years.  She wanted to continue the ESP and “out of body” experiences in a later book.  I am documenting events for my own personal history, and to make an accurate record.

In my family’s oral history, I have heard of a great-great-great grandmother who could “predict things.”  She was seen as a nuisance and scary, so she was eventually arrested and jailed in Oklahoma.  Her children cried, but she assured them that she would be let out soon, and she was. 

The book that includes my stories is Glimpsing Heaven, The Stories and Science of Life After Death by Judy Bachrach, published by National Geographic, Washington, DC.