By The Light Astonishing True Stories of Near Death Experiences Dramatic Lifesty
Author: Lionel Bascom
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

By The Light

By Lionel C. Bascom

Astonishing True Stories of near death experiences and how they changed the lives of those who “died” and came back.

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

Millions have experienced it.

Many have kept the experience to themselves; others have waited years, or decades to speak of what happened.

Among the stories told, there are astonishing similarities.

A bright, almost blinding light, beautiful landscapes, vivid colors, a sense of peace and tranquility and the presence of a greater power.

But the one thing shared by all those who report NDE:

THEIR LIVES ARE FOREVER CHANGED.

Copyright 2016 by Lionel Bascom

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

To Luci,

Who always said her children had options.

We who are about to die demand a miracle.

W. H. Auden

Miracles arise from a mind that is ready for them.

A Couse in Miracles

Contents

One                Deliverance

Two                Guns and Roses

Three              Kathy Latrelle

Four                Kate Valentine

Five                 Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Six                   Steve Price

Seven              ken Ring

Eight               Kathy Latrelle

Nine                Kate Valentine

Ten                  Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Eleven            Steve Price

Twelve             Kathy Latrelle

Thirteen          Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Fourteen         Kathy Latrelle

Fifteen             Kate Valentine

Sixteen            Kathy Latrelle

Seventeen       Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Eighteen         Steve Price

Nineteen         Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Twenty            Final Exit

CHAPTER ONE

Deliverance

In working-class towns like Waterbury, summer nights in the 1960s meant going to firemen’s carnivals down near the river, getting frozen custards or watching the Park and Rec softball games downtown.

Back then, everyone with a good paying job got paid by the hour to man the machinery of the many defense plants in booming Connecticut factory towns like this one in the Naugatuck Valley. It was the height of the Vietnam War. And there were still staunchly patriotic communities like Naugatuck and Waterbury in an America that had grown weary of this undeclared conflict.

Softball and carnivals in the summer were as American here as doing doubles on the swing shift to meet expanding production at companies United Technology, Bardens and the other factories throughout the state. Any worker who punched a clock could earn a fat paycheck by doing piecework. Whether the plant produced starter switches for Titan rockets or assembly parts for Pratt and Whitney jet engines, the more you produced, the more you made. Some payrolls were still doled out in little brown envelopes with cash inside, because not everyone had a checking account in those days.

This was “Not Fonda Hanoi Jane” country, a widely known bumper sticker that condemned actress Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi during that war. These were patriotic communities where people felt betrayed by the antiwar movement.

They were ordinary people who would never celebrate war, but wouldn’t condemn United States policy either. It was just unthinkable—the way driving a foreign care in Detroit was unthinkable.

People here made their living manufacturing ignitions, jet engines and the pieces that comprised the weaponry of new generation of deadly of deadly nuclear submarines. Andy every one of these workers knew somebody who had joined the Marines, the Air Force or the Navy before his draft number was called. Joining up around here was still known as “going into the service”, and everybody knew you weren’t talking about the Peace Corps.

It was the same with calling in sick, a rare thing among the workers who rolled out every kind of weapon imaginable from high-caliber, armor piercing bullets to helicopters. If you called in, you’d have to miss the game that night, because supervisors played and watched the games too.

On summer nights, the defense workers punched out and went home to pull on tank tops, sleeveless T-shirts and hip-hugging jeans like the rest of America. Then they went out to play. It would have been hard to find better-tuned V8s and simonized cars than those staggered throughout downtown parks at dusk. Guys in detailed pickups with mag wheels, running lights and maybe a vanity rebel-flag license plate cruised through town.

Most guys played city-league softball after work under lights. Like the big leaguers, these boys of summer donned spikes and pin-striped uniforms too. They played for the glory of being in the industrial softball league, where a few hits got you a couple of beers after the game. The names of the various defense plants were scrawled across the front of jerseys; names like Grabowski, Brown or Stevens were slashed across the back.

All men were created equal at night under the lights. The only thing that mattered was how well you whacked the ball, not whether you got your hands dirty rolling brass or kept them clean making assembly-line ignition parts.

Like the guys in the neighborhood, Kathy Latrelle wore ski jackets with the names of pro ball teams on the back, and she rode a dirt bike on weekends.

But Kathy never seemed to quite fit into things around town, or anywhere else she went, for that matter--until after she died.

She’d always felt different ever since she was a kid, growing up with a father prone to psychotic breakdowns, a brother who bailed out of the family early on and a mother who left her when she was only fifteen for an out-of-town lover. Later, there was Kathy’s husband, who went off to Turkey without her. But that’s another story.

In fact, you could say that dying was one of the best things that ever happened to Kathy. If you asked her, she’d say the near-death experience she had during a botched operation changed her whole view of life.

It changed Kate Valentine too. Dying, she said, made her live for the first time.

A bottom-line businesswoman, she nimbly climbed the ladder of a well-known nonprofit corporation and became its chief executive officer.

But after she died and went to heaven briefly, she turned to art. A woman who hadn’t been able to draw a pumpkin before, she began painting landscapes in the style of the eighteen-century decorative artists.

Kate didn’t simply change careers, she gradually changed her life.

A grown-up Army brat, Mellen-Thomas Benedict wanted to become a famous feature-film maker. After high school in the South, he took a job in advertising. Within a year he was working the camera on car-crash movies and horror flicks.

He liked the work. The movies were a little light on substance. But so what? It wasn’t as though he was on some quest for spiritual enlightenment. He was interested in entertainment.

That all changed after he too died and survived a near-death experience. He came back from death—after a trip through a sublime light—a changed man.

Once a cynic convinced that people were God’s most serious mistake, he returned with an abiding love and compassion for others. He came back also with the ability to return to the light at will, to access information he could use to invent things and counsel others.

No longer interested in making movies, he began a spiritual journey that took him to the jungles of the Philippines, where holy men were said to work magic and heal the sick with faith.

Tattoos covered Steve Price like an inky blanket, eighty of them at last count. But this bulky, former Marine Corps sergeant would become teary-eyed when talking about his near-death experiences.

A sucking chest wound from mortar rounds hurled Steve dangerously close to death in Vietnam. Later, on a stretcher at a United States military hospital in the Philippines, he had a second out-of-body experience. A part of him floated upward toward the ceiling and emerged into a bright light.

“The light is the brightest thing you have ever seen, “he would later say. “It is a mother cradling her young baby with love, only a million times more than that, and that is all the lover there is.”

Steve was a Marine Corps lifer. But that career was cut short by his experiences. Instead of soldiering, he began a sometimes bumpy spiritual journey that would eventually put him on a course similar to the others in this book.

Soldiers were trained to kill. And when Steve Price couldn’t do this for a living anymore, he suddenly had to survive a full year in combat. What triggered his almost immediate spiritual transformation? What stirred the pacifistic nature in this man? What started an often painful, uncertain, twenty-year journey for him?

Tom Sawyer had once bragged that he had not read a book since the seventh grade. After an accident near Rochester, New York, that pinned him under a truck, this upstate struck driver said he suddenly craved books and college-level courses in quantum physics.

Tom, like the others, had survived a near-death experience.

Later, on a national television show he said he discovered a natural curiosity for science during his death experience and asked complicated question about science. The answers he sought came to him from a being he said was God.

Others have had less dramatic transformations, but their lives were nevertheless changed in profound ways following and NDE. All said they had seen life after life and immediately lost their fear of death. These are the stories of ordinary people resurrected in our time.

Ever since Adam blamed Eve for their eviction from Paradise, the hope of a life after death has been a dream of all men and women.

The afterlife has been depicted by artists throughout the ages. The hope of a personal resurrection is a theme in the mythology of all cultures. This hoe has always found its way into our literature.

In modern times, word that death is not what is appears to be has reached us through unconventional sources.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh said he lost any fear of death during his now famous 1927 transatlantic flight aboard the Spirit of St. Louis. In an autobiographical account published years later, Lindbergh described a spiritual experience of transcendence that closely resembles what now might be called a near-death experience.

Eighteen hours into the first nonstop, solo flight from New York to Paris, Lindbergh said he suddenly experienced an altered state of consciousness. He felt that he was no longer merely flying. Instead, awareness came over him that he was spreading through space not flying in some small, narrow slice of it. Simultaneously, he felt as if he were spreading over the earth and into the heavens, able to transcend time and matter.

While all of this was unfolding, Lindbergh said he became the unwitting pilot for transparent, ghostly beings who helped him navigate. They solved problems of speed and direction and they gave him messages un-accessible in ordinary circumstances. This would later be reported repeatedly by thousands claiming to have had near-death experiences.

As the flight continued, Lindbergh said the weight of his own body disappeared and he felt close to these guardian angels, who had come to him from realms beyond earthly fields. This claim is similar to what has become known as the out-of-body experience.

It was during this out-of-body experience that he said a revelation came to him. It was this:

“Death no longer seems the final end it used to be”, he said, “but rather the entrance to a new and free existence.”

Around 1945, psychologist Carl Jung suffered a near-fatal heart attack, and wrote of it later in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In it, Jung described what would now be called a classic NDE.

Writer Aldous Huxley made similar claims throughout his life. He too had experienced transcendental awareness and wrote about it in a piece called The Doors of Perception. Huxley said anyone who has a similar experience will never be the same. They will somehow be wise but humble; they will be happy but more curious. More than this, he said, they would emerge with ways to understand and to reason beyond ordinary means.

These words describe the experiences of Steve Price, Lathy Latrelle, Kate Valentine and Mellen-Thomas Benedict, all near-death survivors. Their lives, like those of thousands of others, were changed in dramatic but not necessarily material ways following their experiences with death.

A 1982 Gallop poll indicated that more than eight million Americans acknowledged having NDEs. That number increases daily as more sophisticated medical procedures allow doctors and nurses to bring more of us back from the brink of death.

No one has isolated how many claim to have undergone subsequent lifestyle changes. But there is mounting evidence that one of the significant after-effects of the NDE is a dramatic shift in values and a subsequent, clear-cut lifestyle change.

In many who survive NDEs, a concern for material things gives way to a longing for spiritual fulfillment. The transformations that follow can disrupt once-tranquil lives. Survivors often return to find that long-standing relationships no longer hold together; solid careers no long seem worthwhile.

But those who make it through the transition—which can occur instantly or take decades—seem able to overcome preciously insurmountable obstacles.

Even lost souls once bound for premature death from drug overdoses or from lethal drinking find spiritual anchors sometimes in churches, although many say God lies outside organized religions.

How? Where do this strength and previously absent abilities come from?

The NDE, we have been told, allows experiencers to view their lives with different perspectives. When your view of life or death is tilted in this way, they tell us, a different kind of understanding follows.

During and after an NDE, murderers say they felt the simultaneous pain of dying and killing all at once. And instead of suffering the overwhelming guild you might expect, once-incorrigible criminals claim to understand both their victim’s suffering and their own pain for the first time.

Rape victims who later survived NDEs say they relived both their own assault and the pain suffered by their rapist during the NDE.

Adults brutally beaten by their parents as children say they are able to view and relive both their own experience and their parent’s torment simultaneously in the NDE.

This knowledge is transforming and perhaps liberating in ways only those who have experienced it can really explain.

For many, this brief encounter touches off a shift in values that can completely and thoroughly alter their lives. What might this mean?

In 1980, Los Angeles writer Marilyn Ferguson identified hundreds of seemingly un-related events that pointed to an unprecedented evolution in our time. The NDE phenomenon is just one of many my friend Marilyn said would command widespread attention throughout the world in future decades.

Her book The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation of Our Time, linked the claims of Aldous Huxley with the observations of psychologists Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow in ways that had never been done before.

To Marilyn, it had become clear that a philosophical up-heavel had gotten underway. Maslow Was talking about a group of individuals he called scouts for mankind. These people, he said, would be irresistibly drawn to one another, whether they were businessmen, priests, poets or politicians.

In the 1970s, Marilyn said, “there were now networks of academics … lending their clout to the idea of evolving consciousness…” And this transforming vision was shared by many people. Clearly, Ferguson said, the world was experiencing a major philosophical shift and was finding one another.

Groups of people like those in this book claiming to have had NDEs began to find one another in just that way. A loose-knit group of truck drivers, nurses, businessmen and gangsters joined housewives, public relations executives and psychologists who were telling similar stories about their experiences. While these experiences shared any number of similarities, each one was different enough to remain unique and private, despite attempts to homogenize it

As more and more people join a widening circle of individuals who survive and NDE, another single fact about the experience also seems to emerge among the survivors: they are transformed by the experience in calculable ways.

And this alone is a miracle in our time.

CHAPTER TWO

Guns and Roses

He certainly looked dead. His skin wasn’t just pale anymore; it was ashen, colorless. In the morning light, Tommy Golden had turned bluish gray, the real color of newborns before they get that first blush of life-giving air. The dead look like newborns too when life has gone out of them.

And that was how Tommy looked to his sister, Betty, that morning—dead. This was a way out for Tommy, after years of trying; his way out would be what he liked to call Plan B.

And one cold morning in 1992, there was no pulse when Betty found him. When she walked into his room, Tommy was already as cold to the touch as the pickup outside. Tommy’s mouth was open, wide open, but he wasn’t breathing. God only knew how long he had been this way. When she touched his wrist, even she had to admit her brother had really stopped his heart this time.

Tommy had really gone and done himself this time. That was how he would have described it.

“Taking myself out,” he would have said, bobbing his head like the black soldiers he had known in ‘Nam more than twenty years ago. “Gonna turn out the light this time,” he had said just before the house got quiet the night before. But he had said this kind of thing so many times, how could Betty have known?

Yet this time the trip was different, if you believe Tommy’s own account of what happened to him.

He said that although he appeared to be dead, there was something alive and stirring behind his dilated pupils. Deep down, in some place where consciousness lives, some part of Tommy Golden was still alive, he said after being revived. Even while Betty dialed 911, his spirit–the soul of Tommy, or whatever you want to call it –moved outside his dying body.

And as he lay dying, this entity lived, he said. While the ambulance raced to the house through the country streets of Stafford, a working-class town in the eastern highlands of Connecticut, Tommy Golden, or some part of Tommy Golden, was literally “seeing the light”—if you believe the story he would later tell Betty.

As paramedics knelt to jump-start his silent heart or to push life-saving IV drugs into him, Tommy said he was being counseled by otherworldly beings, including his long-dead father. He was seeing a breathtaking landscape that others would later report having seen in similar experiences.

And if you believe the growing lore and clinical research into these things, not only did Tommy fail to die, he had a near-death experience and emerged into a loving, peaceful light.

Just over forty years old, Tommy had been trying for two decades to escape a hellish life that began unraveling for him in a Vietnamese village near DaNang. Back home, Tommy couldn’t even switch on a television set after the war without being reminded of Vietnam. A popular show called China Beach was especially eerie, since Tommy had been there and had his own story to tell about being in the region as a teenage solder.

For him, the show automatically triggered real memories of Mai Lee, the dead child whose haunting brown eyes looked straight out from a fading, bent Polaroid Tommy carried around with him. He could still hear the rounds going off, still see his buddies in the 1st Marine Air Wing shooting into Mai Lee’s village while his own rounds went off in the air above his head.

Tommy had started off his tour in Vietnam as a cocky Marine from a part of the States where it still meant something to join the service. Sailors and lance corporals who hitchhiked along Route 8 or up the Merritt Parkway always got rides in those days. So when Tommy came home with slogans like, “My rifle without me useless. Without my rifle, I am useless,” every man at the VFW or the American Legion downtown would salute what he was saying

Tommy flew in-country for the first time in the fall of 1969. A bulk fuel man, Tommy had an assignment to refuel choppers at the Marble Mountain Air Facility not far from China Beach as part of the 1st Marine Air wing. Sometimes he was thirty miles downriver at the An Hoa Combat Base, but in either case there was more than enough action, even for a gun-ho kid like Tommy, who had never run from a fight back in Enfield.

A long-nosed cartoon character name Kilroy became the symbol of World War II. Its droopy nose and bugged eyes could be seen etched on every available wall, truck fender and cave wall a soldier-artist could find. Below each drawing, the words “Kilroy was here” were usually written.

But the symbols of Vietnam were more personal and ominous for thousands of returning veterans. They came home with yet undetected cancers and genetic disorders that would disable them and their unborn children. These afflictions resulted from the widespread use of chemical defoliants made by American chemical companies. Untold thousands of combat veterans like Tommy returned with other ailments that went untreated or undetected. These included post-traumatic stress, related illnesses and drug addiction.

Heroin was routinely smuggled out of “Nam in the body bags of dead American soldiers, then retrieved by mules who wrangled jobs in the morgues and mortuaries on Okinawa. Once retrieved, the drugs could easily be smuggled back into the United States aboard military flights so that passengers could enter the country without going through Customs inspections. Bricks of the stuff were shipped back home with street values running in the millions of dollars.

It was never clear when or how Tommy Golden became a junkie. One thing that did become clear was why he needed or seemed to need to use drugs. When Tommy got back, he kept telling people he had wanted to adopt five-year-old Mai Lee, the little girl whose picture he carried everywhere he went. Her parents had been killed and he used to bring her candy when he first met her in a village not far from base camp. In fact, he signed up for a second tour in Vietnam so that he could arrange her adoption, according to a newspaper account of Tommy’s life in The Hartford Courant.

Those plans were tragically aborted one day in the fall of 1969.

Soldiers from Tommy’s unit raided Mai Lee’s village, not far from Da Nang. They captured a dozen VC and discovered a store of explosives under the porch of a house where American soldiers had often met with villagers. In a similar raid, Tommy’s squad moved in to clean out suspected VC terrorists. While Tommy fired his weapon into the air, afraid he’d hurt the child, others in his unit weren’t as careful. The Marines killed everyone in the village that morning.

Back home, Tommy still pulled out Mai Lee’s picture every time he got drunk or high and told the story. He also liked to tell the story of one of his suicide attempts, the one that ended with his being evicted from heaven.

It happened that morning in the winter of 1992, when Betty found him damn near dead.

After answering Betty’s 911 call, the ambulance swerved out into traffic along rural Route 190. Somewhere along the way to the ER at Johnson Memorial Hospital in Strafford Springs, the paramedics were able to snatch Tommy back to life. When his vital signs were stable again, they pumped his stomach, and doctors found all of his VA medications, plus some of Betty’s heart medicines, this time.

“Betty, I am mad,” he later told his sister, speaking from his bed in the psychiatric unit. “God didn’t want me this time.”

At this tiny hospital, Tommy might have appeared to be just another angry suicide patient who had botched it. But a closer examination of his life shows the traces of something profound.

During the experience, this tortured Vietnam veteran said that he was apparently blessed with a kind of otherworldly grace and got a brief glimpse or what some might call nirvana or heaven. He reported seeing a vivid white light that exuded total peace. But this gracious peace ended abruptly when he was visited by his deceased father, who told Tommy it wasn’t his time. He, or his consciousness, was sent hurling back to life, and he awoke.

This is a classic NDE travelogue.

By the time Tommy had his NDE that winter morning in 1992, researchers like Drs. Kenneth Ring and Bruce Greyson had already written numerous books and papers about near-death experiences. In fact, ring and his associates sometimes gave talks about the subject a Johnson and Memorial, so doctors and staff there were familiar with NDE lore. Ring and Greyson had published many papers that outlined ways in which hospital personnel could recognize NDEs in their patients and help survivors cope. The researchers had also written about suicide and NDEs. So someone might have helped Tommy come to terms with his experience and understand that he hadn’t been kicked out of heaven but that it just wasn’t his time to go. Ken and Bruce worked at the University of Connecticut, in that same state where Tommy lived. Tommy didn’t know that. Close as he was to help, he never realized it was there.

To believe you have been ejected from heaven must be the curse of a lifetime.

Steve Price once thought that he too had been kicked out of heaven. But Steve heard about Ken and Bruce and the mystifying experiences they called NDEs. After years of reading and talking about his experience, he understood that there were things he had yet to do in his life. The experience, and this realization, transformed him.

In Steve there were immediate changes in fundamental ways. It would just take him a longer time to understand it all. And fortunately, he did finally begin to understand it, with a lot of help from a widening circle of people in this new field.

But Tommy Golden wouldn’t be so lucky. A clock that had been ticking since he returned from Vietnam would finally run out. Although he had returned to a state where the most intensive debates over the meaning of the NDE were being carried out at that very time, none of it reached him.

Raised in Enfield, about thirty miles northwest of Waterbury, Tommy had grown up with a kind of wholesale loyalty for God, country and bowling leagues.

When he returned to Enfield from Vietnam, Tommy came back the way many veterans did – hooked on heavy drugs and traumatized. Whether they came from the mean streets of the Bronx or from rural towns like Enfield and now Stafford, many were heroin junkies.

So if near-death experiences were transforming, Tommy was a prime candidate. But these shifts were often initially subtle, and the people who experienced them did not always embrace the encounters in positive ways. In fact, many like Tommy, who saw what they described as heaven and were sent back, came back believing themselves unworthy and became severely depressed.

After one of his many tries to end his life, Tommy again found himself in a veterans’ hospital in the summer of 1992, less than six months after his stay in Johnson and Memorial.

He kept scratching his wrists, irritated from the leather restraints doctors had ordered to keep him from hurting himself. The restraints taken off now, he sat up in his bed for the first time in what must have seemed like days since they brought him in.

It was just about one o’clock in the afternoon in the early part of July, and the doctors at the West Haven Veterans Affairs Medical Center were releasing him from Nine West again. This time, Tommy had a plan.

He’d been kicked out of heaven and he was sure he’d landed in hell. And hell, for Tommy, was right here on earth. An experience that had meant a reprieve for millions of others from early death had condemned Tommy to hell.

He had tried to kill himself on four different occasions and had wound up in the VA hospital the last time. After his examination by three people, including two doctors, Tommy’s latest suicide ideation had seemed to pass, so they planned to release him the next morning.

Leaving his false teeth behind on a hospital nightstand, Tommy went downstairs until he reached the lobby, where Bobby Walker was hanging out. Tommy cashed a check for a hundred dollars at the hospital reception desk and told Bobby he was going to cop some smack and shoot it up in Oak Grove Cemetery across the street.

“I am going to do it all,” Tommy said. “Going to do myself.”

He also saw Bruce Brown, another friend, that afternoon, and he told Brown that he was going to kill himself.

“Go on back upstairs, Tommy,” Brown reportedly told him.

“If they cared, I’d be up there,” Tommy was quoted as saying.

He telephoned his sister, Betty. They spoke briefly, then he hung up abruptly. Tommy called a cab that took him to Congress Avenue and Arch Street in New Haven. It was one of the city’s busiest drug supermarkets. He gave the driver a twenty and told him to wait. Minutes later, Tommy made the return trip. The driver dropped him off at a market across from the VA hospital and Tommy told him he was going into the graveyard.

After therapy, Bobby Walker headed down Spring Street, crossing Campbell Avenue looking for Tommy. He followed the green wrought-iron fence to the entrance of Oak Grove. Inside the gate, he began calling out Tommy’s name, over and over again.

Walking toward an older section where some stones dated back to the Civil War, he came to a more remote spot. Bobby could hear the hum of cars from the interstate not far away. On a path that led to more dense woods, he finally saw Tommy through a clump of maple trees near the rear cement wall. He was lying face down, his knees curled up toward his chin. His head and hands were pointing downward. He was lying there almost the way an unborn baby lays in its mother’s womb.

Others in similar circumstances have said repeatedly that meeting Ken Ring, Bruce Greyson or other people who could talk to them about nearly dying often triggered difficult but worthwhile turning points in their lives. It happened to Kathy Latrelle on her twenty-fifth birthday.

CHAPTER THREE

Kathy Latrelle

Afraid to sleep, little Kathy was lying in bed, listening to her father down the hall. He’d been on the phone since three o’clock in the morning. That was when he finally stopped shouting, stopped pacing and dialed someone’s number. Two hours had passed since then. Kathy could still hear him muttering and weeping into the receiver in the living room. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. That didn’t matter, though, as long as he stayed on the phone another hour or so, until morning, when she and her mother could get help.

It could have been much worse. But Kathy had seen this one coming and hidden the knives the day before. The pattern was pretty predictable now. It had been since her father started having his “nervous breakdowns.” That was what the doctor called them.

Kathy was ten when it all started. It was 1967 now and she was thirteen. Her father only seemed to get worse. After a while, he could barely make it to work. It was a deepening cycle. First there were weeks of downward-spiraling depression that he spent shivering in bed. Then there were days of restlessness that led to the next furious rage.

The breakdowns usually came at night, and they were terrifying. He’d turn on her and her mother, accuse them of trying to murder him, ransack the house looking for something – the knives, for all they knew – until he exhausted himself. For a couple of days after, he’d sleep virtually without waking.

Kathy’s twenty-year-old brother Lloyd never seemed to be around for these episodes. He’d be at his girlfriend’s house or on a camping trip. This time he was in the Marines in South Carolina, hundreds of miles from home here in Waterbury.

The wear of it all was beginning to show on Kathy’s mother. And it was taking a toll on Kathy. Fair-skinned, with long blond hair, she’d show up in school after nights of worry with dark circles under her eyes. She and her mother had to keep on their toes, predict when the next breakdown was coming and get the knives out of the house to the neighbors.

Even with the knives out of the house, Kathy would lie awake nights like these, afraid to sleep, afraid her father would find something sharp, something they’d forgotten and stab them to death in their beds. That was her greatest fear. She’d lie there afraid of dying, wondering why all this had happened to them.

When she did die, of course, she knew. In death, she briefly joined a white, bright light and began to relive scenes from her life, not only as herself, but as the other people who’d been part of them. She was herself at thirteen again, lying in her bed, the covers pulled up around her thin, exhausted face, listening to her father on the phone down the hall. She was her mother, in her own bed, trying to figure out how they’d get through this breakdown, how she’d keep the family going, how they’d pay the rent. And she was her father, terrified, frantic, certain he’d been trapped, convinced they were plotting to murder him. When she died, Kathy knew how they all felt at those times. She felt it herself. And that made it easier for her to understand, and to move on.

The Waterbury neighborhood where Kathy grew up was a pragmatic, workaday place. It had none of the glamour of Connecticut’s gold coast, where wealthy commuters lived in five-bedroom, faux Tudor houses with three-car garages for their Mercedes and Lincolns. More or less in the center of the state, Waterbury filled out the larger part of the undulating Naugatuck River valley. The river had powered the first brass mills and continued to offer cheap means of disposing of the waste products of brass manufacturing.

By the 1950s, the city stretched for miles from the Naugatuck’s oily banks, a grid of brick factory buildings and smokestacks; churches; Knights of Columbus an Portuguese-American clubs; wood framed, two-bedroom homes with on-the-street parking; a smattering of parks; few trees; and a green cluttered with war memorials.

Drawn by the prospect of steady work in the factories, immigrants from Italy, Poland, Albania, Greece and Hungary had settled in the city, built the homes, the churches, the neighborhoods and raised the children they expected to have good jobs in the factories one day too.

Kathy’s family lived on a quiet road one block from the nearest factory. Their four-plex looked like the neighbors’, with the same modest lawn, the same Flexible Flyer sleds on the sidewalk in winter, the same bicycles in summer.

Kathy’s parents had grown up in Waterbury. Both were from old Yankee families. Her father, Gilbert, had been born at home on the kitchen table.

In 1954, when Kathy was born, he was still working. He played and taught the accordion. During the day he’d teach. He had several dozen students in Waterbury. Evenings, he’d work at the clubs. Most of the nightclubs and restaurants in the area had dance bands. He played at places like the Hillside Restaurant, serenading the clientele – mostly factory workers in their going-out suits and dresses – with “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” and “Twilight Time.” Weekend days, he’d squeeze in a few bar mitzvahs and weddings. He always wore a tux to work.

“Why do other kids’ fathers have to rent tuxedos?” Kathy once asked her mother, admiring all the tuxes in her father’s closet. He had five. Kathy always tried to catch a glimpse of him on his way to a job. He was slim, with blond hair and dark blue eyes, and to her, he looked good in a tuxedo. She resembled him more than she resembled he mother, who was also blond, but with very pale blue eyes.

Her mother always worked, which was fortunate, considering how things turned out. When Kathy and Lloyd were young, she worked for the Wheeler Wire Company soldering nose cones on the Titan II missiles. It was the Cold War, and President Kennedy had Titans aimed at Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Later she worked at a downtown uniform shop and then at another welding-and-soldering job. Finally, when Kathy was in high school, her mother went to nursing school and became a licensed practical nurse. She did the cooking and cleaning and laundry too, so she never had much time to spare.

Once, though, when Kathy was small, she took time out to decorate her daughter’s bedroom. She painted the ceiling like the sky, and decorated it with glow-in-the-dark constellations. She painted the walls a lighter blue and added a green carpet to look like grass. Finally, she sewed curtains from a jungle print fabric, creating a room that was a small world of its own. Later, it would become a refuge for Kathy.

When Kathy turned four, she started kindergarten. Her teachers could tell she was bright. In fact, an IQ test they gave her in high school showed she was quite brilliant. She scored 145. The average score is somewhere between 90 and 110. But Kathy had a problem. She could never sit still. “The Beast,” her parents called her when they came home from work tired and she couldn’t settle down. They took her to a doctor, who concluded she was hyperactive. He prescribed Ritalin, which helped, but not as much as they had hoped.

“Sit still,” her parents would tell her while she fidgeted at the dinner table. Both children had been raised on a literal interpretation of “spare the rod.” When a warning didn’t work, a spanking often followed. Kathy tried but never seemed to please her father the way Lloyd seemed to. She tried to emulate Lloyd. She idolized him. As a little girl, she often wondered whether her father would have found it easier to love her had she been a boy.

The hyperactivity made her feel as though she didn’t fit in. In school everything distracted her. She couldn’t pay attention to her teachers. They seemed to go over the same lessons innumerable times. She’d lose interest, start daydreaming and snap to only when they’d reprimand her. So she started bringing books from home. She had hundreds of books. In school she would hide one behind her notebook and lose herself in the adventures of Nancy Drew.

While the teacher reviewed the math lesson she’d learned the first time around, Kathy could sit at her desk and read about Nancy Drew in The Hidden Staircase or The Quest of the Missing Map. She could lose herself in stories about Nancy’s developing friendship with Trixie Chatham, a little girl whose father had died and whose mother rarely had time for her. Trixie lived in a house haunted by the ghost of a man with terrible eyes. Only Trixie could see him. But then Nancy arrived, saw him herself and discovered he was a real-life bandit prowling the house for a map that would lead to a buried treasure. Nancy finally found the map. Then she, Trixie and Trixie’s mother sailed to the island where the treasure was buried and found a chest of gold coins and beautiful jewels.

When Kathy’s teacher went over long division once again, she could look out the eight-foot windows of the elementary school, past the chain-link fence in the school yard, beyond the smokestack-spiked rim of the Naugatuck Valley. And she could imagine the island, bright and warm and welcoming.

The other kids in Kathy’s class, the girls in particular, thought she was peculiar and let her know it. Not only was Kathy always in trouble, she preferred to dress like a tomboy, going to school in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. The other girls, who sat quietly in the gingham dresses and Mary Janes, excluded her.

The one place she felt accepted and welcome then was the Methodist church. The minister never yelled or lectured. He made her feel she was perfectly all right. She tried not to miss a Sunday.

Adolescence would have been tough enough. By the time Kathy was thirteen, she was already five feet seven inches, taller than everyone in her class. She still wore her long blond hair parted in the middle. Very fashionable. But she was gawky and uncoordinated always bad at sports, and self-conscious. By then, the kids in the neighborhood had found out about her father. They weren’t sympathetic.

“Your father’s in the nuthouse!” a boy on her bus taunted one morning while she stood in the aisle between the seats, trying to find a place to sit. The kids told the others at school, and before long, everyone knew her father was at a state mental hospital called Connecticut Valley.

So Kathy started spending more time alone in her room, reading and planning how to get away. She didn’t want to go to college; she didn’t like school. Her brother, Lloyd, had escaped by joining the Marines. She decided to join the Air Force.

It was an easy decision. Kathy’s mother had signed her up for the Civilian Auxiliary Air Patrol, a volunteer group trained to help with search-and-rescue missions for lost airplanes. Her mother thought the experience would be good for her, and it was. Kathy enjoyed it.

So she made sure she passed all her classes at Kennedy High- which was easy enough, since she never had to study to do well. And she steered clear of trouble. No drinking. No drugs. No sleeping around. She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her chance of getting into the Air Force and out of Waterbury.

And, she figured, she had enough problems without creating more. She wasn’t going to make any excuses for herself either, the way her brother had. Lloyd had started using drugs, and Kathy was convinced he’d also started selling them. Her parents would never admit it, even when he had plants that looked suspiciously like marijuana growing in the pantry, but Kathy had to. She’d idolized her brother when she was a little girl. He always seemed to be so capable, so self-assured. When she heard he was dealing- everyone at school said so- she felt disappointed and betrayed.

If your life is really bad, you have to look at it and say, What is really bad? And you have to change it, she’d tell herself when the fear or loneliness was overwhelming. If you just hang out and let it happen to you, then it’s your fault it’s so bad, you stupid fool.

Kathy graduated from Kennedy in 1971. At the time, women had to be eighteen to join the Air Force and Kathy was only seventeen. So she got a job as a waitress at a coffee shop downtown and delivered newspapers for the Waterbury Republican. Two days after her eighteenth birthday, she quit both jobs and signed up.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” she told her cousin Nancy, one of her closest friends since childhood. “I’m going to go into the Air Force and leave. I’m going to get myself an education and get my shit all together, and forget this.”

Years after, though, she found herself thinking about that sleepless night when she was thirteen, listening to her father on the phone…

Eventually, she heard her mother walk down the hall and talk to him that night.

“Gil, why don’t you come back to bed?” But he wouldn’t. Her mother finally gave up and went back to bed herself.

At dawn, when the bit of sky showing through her bedroom curtains changed from purple to dark blue, Kathy climbed out of bed. She went to her parents’ room and got her mother. They walked back down the hall together. They found her father near the couch in the living room, curled up in a fetal position on the carpet, sucking his thumb. He was incoherent. They called Connecticut Valley Hospital and the doctors sent someone.

Weeks later, her father came back home slightly depressed, exhausted and more gaunt.

And then the whole thing happened all over again. And it happened again and again. Sometimes it was ten months later. Or eight months later. Maybe fourteen months later. Each time they hid the knives. And Kathy stayed up nights thinking about how, if she lived, she would try to get a way.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kate Valentine

When her time came, Kate says she just lay down and was ready to die.

But something went awry.

A public relations executive and onetime chief executive officer for a major nonprofit organization, Kate was used to planning her life. Planning the end of her life was carried out in much the same way she had planned and executed any other campaign – care and precision, paying close attention to the details.

Kate took care of almost every detail – except one. As the night closed in on her, she was still busy in her bed, writing notes to Paul, her husband, knowing these would be her last words. She had already arranged for her sister to take care of her three young children, little stair steps at five, twelve and fourteen years old. The living will had been made out and all the insurance policies were in order.

Finally, she had written Paul last-minute notes on those little yellow stickum things, telling him how she’d like things after she was gone. Forget-me-nots, she called them.

So there was nothing left for this thirty-two-year-old woman to do that windy March night in 1980 but to lay her ailing, cancer-racked body down and expect to die. Her death that night would have culminated a six-year losing battle with thyroid cancer that had left her with an irregular heartbeat and severe circulation problems. She barely weighed ninety pounds and was emotionally exhausted.

I know I am dying, she thinks, telling herself it’s all right to let go and die. A headache bored right through her thoughts, reminding her of all the things that had gone wrong with her body. Examining her aching hands and feet that night, she saw they were steadily turning blacker from being bloodless for so long. Even standing was painful, and walking had become nearly impossible now. So Kate was confined to the upper floors of their renovated Victorian home in an idyllic part of Connecticut, known as the Winsted section of Winchester, near the Massachusetts border.

Even the transplanted thyroid glands, which produced chemicals that controlled muscle tone, weren’t working. So her body’s largest muscle, the heart, was as out of whack as the rest of her that night.

No one has to tell me, she told herself quietly. I know I am dying.

Kate does not remember specifically what she did last. But she does remember this . . .

“A feeling just came over me that it’s okay now. I did it all,” she said, then closed her eyes.

“It was very black, not black like when you close your eyes, because this time there were no shadows. This blackness was all-pervasive,” she said years afterward.

No, Kate did not die, even though her cancer and all the complications associated with it should have killed her, if you believed her doctors. Instead of dying, she was treated to the experience of her life.

“There was this burst of light. It was almost as if I were enveloped by it in an instant. It wasn’t blinding, but it was so incredible,” she said, her clear eyes sparkling with the memory of the experience. “It was brighter than anything I’ve ever encountered but did not make me squint. I went through something and came out into something,” she said, unable to explain this part of the experience in any further detail.

“It was some sort of transition. It was sudden and there were two things going on: first, the colors were incredible, and there was this incredible sense of all-pervasive peace.

“There are no words to describe it,” she said, repeating a claim made by many others who also claim to have had NDEs. “In some ways it felt like relief. But in other ways it felt as if I had finally come home, that I had gone back and everything that had once been important no longer seemed important to me in that light.”

“I found myself on this incredibly high precipice looking down on the most beautiful garden and valley I had ever seen. The first thing that struck me was the colors,” said Kate. ” The colors were so vivid,” she said, they made the countryside around Winsted look like the reverse side of a beautiful tapestry.”

“No matter what I do, I cannot recapture the intensity of those colors now,” she said more than a dozen years after surviving this experience.

“The second thing I was aware of was that someone was standing on my left-hand side, not a person you could see, though.” She said she felt this presence the way you know someone is coming up behind you. “You can’t see them or hear them, but you know they’re there,” she said. “This person was emanating this incredible sense of peace. It was like hearing the word ’peace,’ but only it’s being emanated to you, not spoken,” she said. “I realized there was someone standing on my left side and I had a conversation, although not verbally.” She said this telepathic talk was with God.

“I call the presence God, but I guess you can call it anything you want. I realized someone was next to me. I realized that I thought it was God,” she said. All of this occurred simultaneously, or in some rapid-fire way that made time appear irrelevant.

“As soon as I realized that He was next to me, I was aware of the knowledge instantly,” she said. “I was incredibly sorry for things I had done, instantly sorry, because the person sitting next to me radiated such peace and love. I realized how far I had to go and how little I had gone.

“But the essence of Kate, who Kate had been in this dimension, immediately went to her defense,” she said. “I was instantly told no explanation was necessary. I was told it didn’t matter.”

Then she was awash in a wave of paternal love.

There, she said, you don’t have to strain to understand anything, and you don’t have to explain anything either.

“I felt everything I had ever done that had caused other people pain, things that were wrong,” She said. Classically, this experience is sometimes called a “life review.”

In hers, Kate said she understood what was wrong in her life. And since she claimed her personality remained intact during the experience, she repeatedly wanted to defend herself against the things she was reminded she had done. But each time, she said, she learned that even those things she believed had been wrong were now okay.

“Then I knew I wanted to stay,” she said.

“In that dimension,” she said, “we aren’t separated from each other by our bodies. In the other dimension we are all one; it’s cohesive, but each personality is intact. Whoever you are here is who you are over there. We go over with all of our warts, but all around you, it’s accepted, and I think you are able to understand everything.”

“If there is any forgiveness in the next dimension, it comes from within, which is the way it should be in this dimension too, but we really haven’t figured that out yet. In an instant, you know everything. I knew I could find out anything.”

In the playback of her life, Kate relived horrific scenes from her childhood when she grew up in a Long Island, New York, family in which beatings and alcoholic binges were routine. Reliving those scenes, she said, allowed her to understand her parents and why they had treated her so badly. Even episodes in her young life that could later be described only as torture were understood after her near death, Kate said.

“A lot of it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me, so I keep it to myself,” she would later say. “I don’t deal with that and I don’t deal it out. At the moment, I knew all things and when I came back, I no longer knew all things,” she said, taking what would become an uncharacteristic departure from a conversation that largely remained earthbound and practical.

Where did Einstein find the theory of relativity?” she asks. “Where did Mozart find his music? It’s really not a place,” she says, answering her own question. “It’s in here.” She points to her own chest.

“All information, past, present, and future, is available to you at all times,” she says, with the conviction of a priest telling a worshiper to have faith in God. But this woman has no religious pretensions. She does not claim to be born again after her brush with death. In fact, she exhibits a kind of disdain for organized religious claims of godliness. God, she declares, is in us all. Claiming Him is a matter for individuals to sort out for themselves.

Kate says she knows the source of Galileo’s and Mozart’s genius. She knows, she says, because all genius large or small comes from some universal lake of thought and ideas. She too had apparently tapped into some reservoir of information during her experience in the light that now allows her to make art. Without ever studying art history or the quirks of distinct periods, she discovered techniques she initially believed to be her own but which later proved to be those of other, deceased American artists. They painted decorative are scenes from the eighteenth century. But they lived three hundred years before Kate was born.

So after her near death, Kate took up painting – once a hobby she had never perfected – she developed a passion for eighteenth-century folk art. This was nothing less than a miracle for a business type like Kate, who previously had not been able even to paint or draw a recognizable pumpkin, according to her husband, Paul.

But during her experience, Kate says she saw rolling landscapes of lush green hills dotted with beautiful trees and flowers everywhere. She stood high above beautiful valleys.

“I wanted to go down into this valley,” she says, “and I knew if I went into the valley, I could stay. I started this mental fight because I wanted to stay but knew I couldn’t do it.”

“I am going,” she remembered saying, and also remembered being told instantly that she could not stay. “I remember doing this mental thing about staying, but it did me no good,” said Kate. “I was aware I had the children at home to raise, and my husband, and I knew they would be okay. I was told I had to go back, but I was fighting to stay.”

The next morning Kate awoke and noticed two things immediately. First, she was still alive. Second, she could breathe without audibly wheezing air.

“I could breathe in without pain. The pain had gone and, like a kid, I started testing it.” As she took progressively deeper and deeper breaths, her once-infected lungs seemed to work without effort.

“How much do I have to breathe in before the pain comes back?” she wondered, but knew that somehow it would not come back. “I had this inner knowing that I was healed.” Having been raised in a house where booze was the religion of choice, Kate says her belief system would not let her give credence to this kind of thing. “I didn’t have the background and was spiritually unable to embrace this experience very well.”

But the physical evidence was overpowering.

“My hands had turned pink overnight and looked normal for the first time in over a year,” she said, interrupting an interview repeatedly to quiet Amadeus, her gangly German shepherd. “My body was working.” She didn’t know how or why, but her feet had also turned flesh-colored again and when she tried to use them, that pain was gone too.

I just got up slowly by myself and sat on the edge of my bed and looked down at my toes,” she said, knowing that she could again walk without that annoying, tingly, pins-and-needle twinge you experience when a foot or a hand goes to sleep. For more than a year, this tingle had constantly radiated through her legs and feet, but it was gone the morning after her godly experience.

“I started to walk about my room slowly and everything worked. Nothing hurt,” she said.

But she noticed something equally new.

“I carried around this peace with me as if I had been sprinkled with some kind of fairy dust,” said Kate, whose short, cropped hair is the color of salt and pepper.

Although she had not been able to venture downstairs in weeks, she climbed down the stairs unaided and walked into the kitchen, where Paul was busy cooking breakfast and getting the children ready for school.

“He turned white when he saw me,” she said. “He has a scientist’s mind and was thinking, Remission – Kate just had some kind of remission, and he went with that,” she said. It was a remission, but not one the doctors would ever be able to explain.

“I just got progressively stronger,” she said, also not knowing or understanding what had happened to her.

“I didn’t know. I knew I had touched something incredibly profound,” she said, but kept the details to herself for years afterward. “It was so beautiful that I wasn’t going to share it with anyone. I was also a realist and knew that if I said anything like, ‘I had this crazy dream and it was connected with this cure,’ people would start to put labels on me, and I was in a place in my life where I was not about to let anybody question my validity. I shared this with no one and there were no exceptions.”

A physical done by her doctor a few days later confirmed what Kate and Paul already understood. Her cancer was in remission and all traces of it had disappeared.

“He told my husband I was in remission and that these things did happen. My thyroid was working. The transplants were working. He told my husband, ‘These things happen. We can’t explain them.’” They left Hartford Hospital believing that Kate had been reprieved. The couple picked up their lives where Kate’s impending, premature death had interrupted them. And life went on for six years without incident.

The family moved back to Kate’s native New York, this time settling in Port Jefferson. It was 1986. And Kate’s evolution took a quantum leap.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mellen-Thomas Benedict

The rental car was hardly visible as it traveled up a dusty dirt road that wound through the middle of an ancient Philippine rain forest. The driver and his passengers were surrounded by climbing palms with rough, spindly trunks and deep emerald saw-toothed fronds; by thick, twisted vines that clung to the trees; and by epiphytes, those strange archipelagic air plants that pulled moisture into their leaves. Survival of this variety was especially difficult now. It was the winter dry season and everything was brittle and dry, the mountain road seasonably dusty.

Fortunately, the driver knew the way. Mellen-Thomas Benedict had no idea how to find the village. A friend had suggested he spend a couple of days there while the film crew took a brief hiatus in Manila. All he knew was that the village was in the mountains, about fifty miles southwest of the capital.

“It’s a holy mountain with caves where magic happens,” his friend had told him. Apparently the mountain was just one of many extinct volcanoes on Luzon Island, the same place where Mellen’s crew was going to be based for the duration of the filming.

He and the crew had arrived in the Philippines just four months before the presidential elections that Ferdinand Marcos had scheduled for February 1986. Expectation, mixed with apprehension, was almost palpable in the island country. After hammering through passage of a constitution that gave him an unlimited term, Marcos had finally relented to increasing pressure and agreed to new elections. His main opposition, Corazon Aquino, had virtually no experience, but she was extremely popular with the people. Many Filipinos feared Marcos would try to rig the election to deny Aquino a victory and that this would lead to violence.

Nonetheless, Mellen had decided to go. He was in the Philippines to shoot a documentary about its psychic surgeons, shamans who appeared to perform surgery with their bare hands. He’d been able to get backing from a financier who was interested in psychic phenomena.

A lawyer friend form the old days in Atlanta – when Mellen was working on B movies – had shown him an amateur video documenting the surgeons’ work. That was what got Mellen interested. He was fascinated. The footage showed the surgeons sinking their hands through patients’ skin. They seemed able to open the skin, expose the blood red tissue below, remove nodules and tumors then seal the wound with their hands. Supposedly, the procedure was painless. Patients pronounce themselves cured. It seemed incredible.

This was precisely the kind of thing Mellen wanted to investigate. For years he’d worked on feature films in dusty Southwestern towns and in back lots around Atlanta, manning cameras and sound equipment or setting up dangerous stunts for car-crash movies and horror flicks. He’d found it engrossing for a while. The vagabond life didn’t bother him. Nor did the thinness of the screenplays.

But then he’d begun to tire of it. After what had happened in 1982, his interests had shifted dramatically. He wanted to explore the spiritual dimensions of human life. If he could do it on film all the better. When his friend told him about the psychic surgeons, he had to see for himself.

After a month in Manila and neighboring areas spent tracking down various surgeons, Mellen had come to the conclusion that a good number of them were fakes. They relied on sleight of hand, fake blood and bits soft tissue hidden in their pockets. But even some of the fakes seemed to get results. Mellen chalked this up to the placebo effect. At the same time, however, he’d concluded that several of the surgeons he’d met and filmed were genuine.

This was especially true of one young, relatively unknown surgeon. Like most, he worked in a room in his house, a small shack with a thatched roof and usually a tabletop shrine to the Virgin Mary. A woman from Michigan was there when Mellen and his crew arrived. She was sitting in the cramped waiting room. She had a small growth behind her eye, a doctor back home had told her. It had been affecting her eyesight, and she was supposed to go in for surgery when she returned home. While in the Philippines, she decided to see a psychic surgeon. Mellen watched and the crew filmed as the surgeon called the growth out. A tiny fibrous mass of tissue emerged from behind the eye and fell to the table in front of the woman.

It was incredible, but Mellen had enough personal experience with the incredible not to dismiss something simply because it couldn’t be explained by conventional standards.

After all, hadn’t he died three years earlier of a brain tumor, only to come back to life after a fantastic journey through a sublime light? The brain tumor was nowhere to be found. “A spontaneous remission,” his surgeon had declared it, scrutinizing Mellen’s CT scan over a year later. Mellen wondered if it wasn’t a miracle.

After what had happened in 1982 and all that had followed, Mellen was convinced there was more to the world than what could be seen and heard, touched and swallowed. One of the reasons he was interested in the psychic surgeons was that they appeared capable of the kind of inexplicable healing he’d experienced. And one of the reasons he was interested in going to the mountain was that he’d heard that many of the best psychic surgeons came from the region.

At the same time he was glad to escape Manila for a week. The city was crowded and noisy, ringed by miserable slums, dim terraces of plywood and cardboard shacks built on the edges of garbage dumps. A number of families might live in a single, rotting shack. Most upsetting was the children who would slip onto the narrow streets at night and call out to tourists staying in the whitewashed, luxury high-rise hotels that caught the breezes of Manila Bay. The little girls and boys would approach Mellen. Tall, with dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes, he was sometimes mistaken for a Filipino. But the way he dressed and got around in a rental car made it clear he was visiting from somewhere else and therefore had money.

When the rental car finally reached the village in the foothills of the mountain, Mellen was taken by how pleasant it was. Against a backdrop of terraced rice fields, surrounded by low stone walls, the village was a cluster of well-made, well-kept buildings. They were one story, with open windows and doorways, built of weathered timber with steeply sloped roofs thatched in palm leaves. The roofs stretched over deep porches in front and patios with flagstone floors in back. The village was hemmed in by a rain forest and shaded in the embrace of the mountain. The mountain was heavily wooded in spots and bright green at the base, where the dark soil had been terraced and planted with rice.

Mellen’s driver, an American married to a Filipino, spoke both English and Tagalog. The driver would take him to see Anang, a shaman known as The Mother of the Mountain, he said. They would have to get Anang’s permission to stay. The driver pointed out her house. It was similar to the others but a bit more spacious. She was home.

A small, frail woman with white hair worn short and loose, Anang came out to greet the group. The driver explained that they were here because they understood this mountain was a holy place and they wanted to learn more about it. Anang nodded and smiled, standing back from the visitors and considering them. But when she saw Mellen, she rushed forward.

“He is the patron saint of the mountain!” she announced, grasping Mellen’s hand. “He has died and come back from the dead.” She called several other villagers by name and ushered the group onto her porch. When everyone was assembled, she began to tell the story of Mellen’s illness and death, his trip through the light, his return and what had followed, all with uncanny accuracy.

A few days later, Mellen found himself in the drafty cave of a middle-aged shaman, confronted with a question he wasn’t able to answer immediately.

The group Anang had called to her home the first day of Mellen’s visit consisted of shamans like herself, holy people. They had listened while Anang told the full story and then they had asked questions. Would Mellen bless some holy sites on the mountain? Would he stay and pray with them in their caves and write his name on the cave walls? Could he answer some questions?

“Did the Virgin Mary remain a virgin?” asked the middle-aged shaman, who looked very much like the other villagers, dressed as they were in worn but clean T-shirts and long pants. Still, there was an intensity about him that set him apart.

Mellen had spent six years at a Catholic boarding school in Vermont and he should have known the answer. He was a student there from 1954 to 1960, kindergarten through fifth grade. His mother, Libby, had enrolled him and his brother, Michael, a year younger than he, after she divorced their father. A tall, striking woman with black hair, Mellen’s mother had found work in the city as a runway model. Convinced New York wasn’t a place to raise children alone, she sent daughter Elizabeth Anne to live with grandparents in Indiana and the boys to boarding school.

After six years at the school, Mellen should have known the answer to the shaman’s question. But he’d never been particularly interested in Christian theology as a child, or in theology, period. He’d been fascinated by the Catholic conception of heaven and hell. The images the nuns described were both captivating and horrific. He’d become an altar boy. But that was more out of enjoyment of the ritual – the preparation of the altar, the ringing of the bells at the transformation of the host – than from an interest in the doctrine.

Dying changed a lot of things for him, though. After returning from the light to life three years earlier, he suddenly had access to information once beyond his ken. Mellen had a high school education; had worked for an advertising agency, then on feature films, finally in a stained-glass studio. Yet, to his own surprise, he was able to answer questions on a phenomenal range of subjects from global politics to quantum physics. Later, when he’d read about near-death experiences and the people who had been through them, he realized that others also had this ability. At the time, he wasn’t sure why the information came to him. It simply did. Immediately after his return, he’d been able to hear the thoughts of those around him, and to feel their emotions as well. But this quickly became unbearable, and after a couple of years spent in near seclusion, he learned to tune out the voices.

Nonetheless, he continued to have access to information. He’d even invented a few things by using information gleaned from these trips into the light.

Standing in the shadow of the mountain now, he heard the answer to the shaman’s question about the virgin and he repeated it.

“Mary was a virgin at Jesus’ birth, but she got dispensation to have other children after him,” he told the shaman.

And the holy man was satisfied.

Over the next couple of days, other holy men asked Mellen to say with them in their caves, write his name on the walls, answer questions. The caves were invariably dark and dank. At night, rats would eat the candles that were the sole source of light. Before the candles flickered out, Mellen would spot spiders as big as his hand lurking in the crevices. It began to get a bit uncomfortable. Finally he asked to sleep on Anang’s comfortable porch, which turned out to be the safest spot on the mountain.

All during his stay, even those nights in the caves, he had the most powerful dreams. They weren’t dreams like most. They weren’t dreams of events. They were dreams of purely emotional content. What he felt was love, an overwhelming love for people. He awoke elated.

The dreams were reminiscent of one part of his journey through the light.

At that point in the journey, he had been shown a whirling wheel of what he understood to be human souls. The wheel was made up of light, light of all colors. The bright images appeared and shifted and merged, as though viewed through a kaleidoscope. They were unspeakable beautiful. And Mellen understood this to mean that every soul was beautiful, capable of great love and compassion.

He was overcome by a love of mankind that he had never felt. Prior to his death and this trip through the light, he had come to regard people as the source of all that was wrong with the world, and capable of little that was worthwhile. All that changed after he returned from death.

The rest of the week Mellen stayed with Anang. They would get up a four-thirty each morning and sing prayers from a canon that was Roman Catholic but tinged with far more ancient beliefs. They’d sing until the sun came up. At any given time, someone in the village was singing prayers aloud. This lent a sacred quality to even the most mundane activities.

Toward the end of the visit, Anang called down from the mountain a shaman Mellen did not know. He’d heard that this man rarely left the cave where he spent his days in contemplation. When he appeared, Mellen was again overcome by a feeling of intense love, for this man and for all people. The shaman seemed to project this feeling. He stayed only briefly, returning to the mountain after hearing Mellen’s story, blessing him and asking for a blessing from Mellen.

At the end of that week, the financier who had accompanied Mellen decided it was time to go back to Manila. “Get the driver and tell him to pack the car,” he announced one morning. So Mellen told the driver and went to tell Anang.

“No, you can’t go yet,” she insisted.

“I’ve got to,” Mellen explained. “He’s taking the car.” But Anang was adamant. “Something must happen first,” she said.

As Mellen headed to the car, something did happen. He found it had two flat tires and no spare. There were no visible holes in the tires, but they were flat. Looking utterly defeated, the financier returned to Anang’s porch and waited.

Anang then took Mellen inside a nearby house in which the other shamans were waiting. They stood in line and asked him to bless them before he left. “You must bless me,” he told them. And they did. No sooner had they finished than a small boy came by with a tire pump. Mellen pumped up the tires, helped load the car and got in.

As the car turned back down the dusty mountain road, he waved to the shamans and Anang, who had told him she had set aside a plot of land on the mountain for him. She asked him to return again to stay.

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- One: Deliverance
- Two: Guns and Roses
- Three: Kathy Latrelle
- Four: Kate Valentine
- Five: Mellen-Thomas Benedict