I recently picked up a copy of Near death in the ICU: Stories from patients near death and why we should listen to them by US critical care physician Dr Laurin Bellg. It’s an intriguing topic. The many first hand accounts of consciousness experienced outside of the human body are hard to comprehend. Objectively hard also – if not impossible – to prove. Whatever they are, the events are life-changing and deeply transformative. You can’t deny that the experience was real to those people and meaningful.
But why should we listen to them? What can you take away from the book and its accounts for your day to day life? Here are 3 things.
Firstly, fear can overpower you, limit your choices and lead to regret and resentment. We learn about Dr John Martin in the first chapter. As a young man, he was injured in World War II. Almost dying on the operating table, ‘he’ floated up to look down at his body as it was being worked on, experiencing a detached consciousness – a sensation he would experience more than once as he recovered. But over time, he seemed unable to accept what had happened. He feared telling his wife during their long life together – even in her later years before she herself passed away – and never spoke about it to his colleagues. Only when diagnosed in old age from a terminal illness did he tell one friend – and the author, his doctor. What stopped him was the fear of ridicule, of being disbelieved and of suffering professionally. His account to Dr Bellg is moving as it reveals his deep regret in staying silent and the pain it had caused him – even resentment at the pain he might have alleviated had he acknowledged his experience to his own patients. On opening up though he finally felt a sense of freedom, letting the fear go. So often it’s trust that dissolves fear. Trust that your view is important, that your opinion is worth hearing, that you know what you’re talking about. Building that trust takes time of course.
Secondly, maintain an open mind and be curious. The patients in the book who seemed to cope best with their unsettling experience were those who felt acknowledged by others. Those whose accounts were dismissed – by friends, family, doctors – struggled. Like Helen, in chapter 11. Unconscious and trapped in her car with broken ankles following an accident, yet she remembered vividly walking around the crash scene and seeing her own body in the car, seemingly reporting details that only made sense if she had been outside the vehicle. Her children made it clear they strongly disbelieved her experience and couldn’t accept it as remotely possible. This caused her suffering. But Dr Bellg highlights how she helped the family to accept – without understanding how or why – that such experiences happen and that all they had to do was let her have her experience, it did them no harm. By being curious, you are willing to listen to information that sits outside of your understanding of the world. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with it – but you might learn something. So acknowledge someone’s argument, show you’ve understood them. If you disagree, they will likely respect you more for having given them that respect.
Finally, don’t be a know-it-all. Dr Bellg is an ICU doctor with over 20 years experience. She is grounded in science. But she seems gracious enough to accept there are things beyond her comprehension. For her, truth is not dependent on understanding or belief. She encourages being open to mystery, since an “inquisitive, curious regard for a mystery is the pathway to understanding it. Denying that it exists is an obstruction to eventual revelation“. Towards the end of the book she states: “I regard absolute answers about the nature of anomalous experiences with absolute suspicion“. This resonates with something Dr Jordan Peterson writes in his 12 Rules for life: “Beware of single-cause interpretations – and beware of people who purvey them.” It further reminds me of the Taoist idiom: “Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know.” Maybe we should all remember that – yes speak up and say what you think, but sometimes don’t. We don’t know everything. But that’s ok. It’s good to learn. Maybe it’s a “lawyer-thing” – but we sometimes find that one hard to accept.
This way of light 