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The Way We Live and Die
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17114 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1990 |
2,286 Words |
| Author
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Dr. Richard M. Restak
Richard M. Restak, M.D., a neurologist and neuro-psychiatrist,
is the author of The Brain and The Mind. |
CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children
Melvin Morse, M.D., with Paul Perry, foreword by Raymond A. Moody, M.D.
New York: Villard Books, 1990
206 pp., $17.95
On a stormy winter evening fifty years ago, three doctors in a hospital in northern Pennsylvania were in the final stages of delivering a baby. As was customary at that time, the mother was anesthetized and, presumably, unaware of the events around her. Suddenly the delivery room darkened. One of the doctors, the anesthesiologist, quickly produced a portable illuminator consisting of a sixty-watt bulb screwed into the end of a hand-held socket. When he turned on this crude emergency apparatus, the bulb failed to illuminate. 'It's dead,' the obstetrician commented with annoyance. Almost immediately another bulb was inserted; the delivery progressed uneventfully.
Later the mother recalled the events in the delivery room this way: "While I was lying on the delivery table, I was vaguely aware of what was going on around me. I was floating in a kind of warm glow in which everything was just as I hoped it would be. In a few moments, I knew that I would see my baby. Then suddenly I heard the words: 'It's dead' and thought you were all talking about my baby. And there was nothing I could do but lie there paralyzed with the fear that my baby had been born dead."
I thought of this experience told to me by my father - he was the obstetrician that stormy night - while
... (1995 of 13246 Characters)
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