Easter is a time when we all freely speak of Death and of what has become known the Hereafter.   And so . . . Ethel being Ethel, I do the same.

You see, there are some people who have been There . . . and then came back.  It’s never happened to me, but I married one who did have that unique experience and his words left me with no fear of what to expect.   Nervous? Yes, yes, yes, but not fear.

It happened long before I knew him, when he was 17 years old and a student at Murray High School. He had been stricken with Pneumonia, and as there were then no wonder drugs, most people never recovered, and quickly died from that dreaded disease. And so, Gram, with three other children, along with husband and home, hired a 24/7 nurse to be at his side and it was there in the upstairs, west bedroom in the Pioneer Home at 570 East 4800 South, Murray, Utah where he left his body, as the doctor predicted, experienced That Other Place, and  then came back.

And that’s not really the correct way to tell of his experience, for he did not return willingly. In that Wonderful Place, he said someone approached, and began wrestling and  pulling  to take him away from the Happiness and Contentment that was There, and that he fought back fiercely, to stay there.

He said, “But the one I wrestled with was stronger than I was and no matter how I tried, I lost the match, and she pulled me back to my sick body, in my rumpled  bed and where, in time, I recovered.  I fought as well as I could to stay in that Wonderful Place, but she had her way.”

And he used the pronoun ‘she’ because when it was all over and he was well again, he knew it had been his Nurse who had put whiskey to his lips and ‘wrestled’ him back.

But he never, ever forgot Where he had been, What he had seen, and How  wonderful and Real, It was.

I didn’t know him when all this happened, and it was about a decade later, when he told me, “I knew I was in a life or death struggle.   But.” he continued in very puzzled, but firm words, “Life was There, and not to where I was being pulled back.  Everything within me fought to stay There.”

It never ceased to puzzle him, for it was an 180 degree switch from what we, in our human bodies, consider the life and death struggle.  Made me sit back and know that we are observing it from the wrong angle. My husband said, “Real LIFE was in That undescribable  LIGHT,  and not where she furiously fought and succeeded in returning me to.”

At that time, my sister, Amber Ohlin (later on, Mrs. Angus Bodine) worked in the Thornton Anderson Drug store there on the north west corner of 4800 South and State Street in Murray, Utah, and the doctors would often come in and sometimes discuss cases with the Pharmacist.  It was a small building and she easily overheard that “The Bradford boy (and we didn’t know the Bradfords except by name) has pneumonia and is going to die tonight.” Just that.

Yes, ‘just that’ is all Amber told the family at our dinner table but I remember, and of course never dreamed that the Bradford Boy she spoke of, would some day be my husband and the father of my sons.

And so,  I do not fear death. But with  trepidation?   Nervous?  Oh yes, for it is an ‘unknown’ to me, and I will be leaving all that is familiar and loved . . . but then I remember my husband’s words, as a young 17 year old, with scant ‘religious’ training, as to how he fought that battle and said,  ‘I lost the battle and was pulled away from real  LIFE’, and tears came to his eyes as he spoke.

So, I do not fear death and one day if you happen to read of my ‘ dying’,   shake your head and know that I have joined the majority, in That Place of LIFE.   That Place of Real Life.

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Three books by Robert Monroe are wonders of what he, Monroe, experienced on the same subject, as he tells of his own unsought out-of-the-body happenings.  Awesome.