The Hardest Part of My Near-Death Experience Was Coming Back

Before September 19, 2010, I had a life I understood.

I had spent years working in real estate and business. I had a family, clients, responsibilities and the ordinary problems that come with trying to keep a life moving. I worked in a world where things had to add up. Contracts had terms. Numbers could be checked. Decisions had consequences.

I was also used to my heart misbehaving.

I had experienced episodes of supraventricular tachycardia since I was sixteen. By 2010, hospitals and emergency rooms were familiar to me. I had been through enough episodes to know what they normally felt like.

The early morning of September 19 felt different.

I could not get enough air. I had pain in my arm and neck and a burning feeling in my chest. I was frightened in a way I had not been during the other episodes.

At the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, my blood pressure dropped to 56/27. I heard staff call a pre-code. I told my husband I thought I was going to die and that it was going to be okay. Then I lost consciousness.

My heart stopped. I stopped breathing. I was resuscitated.

What I remember during that time is harder to explain.

I remember my father, who had died in 2008. I remember an orange cap in the trauma room. I remember being aware without feeling like Lorri in the ordinary physical sense. I remember a peace and familiarity that felt more like coming home than arriving somewhere strange. I remember the brightness of returning.

When I became aware of my husband again, I was confused about where my father had gone and why I was back. The experience felt real to me. I did not have a useful explanation for it.

I eventually wrote about it in Heaven Time. I also left a detailed account with NDERF when the experience was still only about a week old. I value that early account because it catches me before years of reading, writing and reflection could organize the story for me.

I still cannot explain every part of what happened while I was unconscious.

I understand the years after it much better.

The emergency ended quickly. Coming back did not.

Coming Back Was the Part I Wasn't Prepared For

The first problems were physical.

My chest hurt from the emergency treatment. I had burns from the electrical shock. I was exhausted and sore. My body had been through a medical crisis, so pain and fatigue made sense.

Other changes were harder to place.

Smells became intense. Red meat, which I had previously loved, suddenly made me nauseated. Noise could become unbearable. Light felt different. Being around strangers could exhaust me very quickly.

In the account I gave NDERF, I wrote about feeling as though everything had been turned up. A trip out of the house could leave me drained. I felt alone and in my own little world.

Later, in Heaven Time, I compared the sensory overload to a television that is far too loud when the remote is nowhere near you, or having a terrible migraine while trying to function on a noisy construction site. That was the closest I could get to explaining it in ordinary terms.

I also reported smelling things that were not physically present and sensing people differently. I did not know what to do with those experiences. I questioned myself. I wondered whether medication, the medical crisis or something neurological could explain what was happening. Part of me expected it to disappear as my body recovered.

Those sensory changes were real to me. I have never assumed they are a standard part of every near-death experience, and I do not use them as scientific evidence for an explanation of NDEs.

At forty-two, I was trying to understand why I felt so different when I still looked like the same person.

That question followed me straight back into ordinary life.

I still had work. People still needed answers. Bills arrived. Relationships needed attention. The practical world I had lived in before September 19 was still there, even though my experience of being in it had changed.

I Missed Myself

I already knew grief. My father had died in 2008, and I missed him terribly.

The grief after my near-death experience was harder to name because the person I seemed to be grieving was still alive.

My husband could see that something had changed. In Heaven Time, I wrote about him telling me that he missed his wife even though we were in the same house together. I understood what he meant because I missed myself too.

I had spent decades becoming a particular person. I knew how I worked, what mattered to me and what other people could expect from me. After September 19, the responsibilities were still there, but I was no longer carrying them with exactly the same priorities or assumptions.

My relationship with death had changed. Time felt different. Questions about consciousness and intuition, which had not been at the centre of my life before, became difficult to ignore. Things that had once felt urgent could suddenly seem very small.

The people around me had not experienced what I had experienced.

My husband had almost lost me. I had returned from an experience I remembered as peaceful and familiar, and part of me wanted to go back to it. That was painful for him to hear. It was also true.

In Heaven Time, I wrote, “I was a survivor that was not happy to be back.”

I meant it.

I loved the people in my life. I was also homesick for something I could barely explain. Those feelings existed at the same time.

That made recovery hard to measure.

I wanted my heart to be stable. I wanted the pain and exhaustion to ease. I wanted ordinary places to stop overwhelming me. I wanted the people I loved to stop worrying. Underneath all of that, I kept waiting to recognize myself again.

For a long time, the old Lorri was the standard I used to decide whether I was getting better.

I Kept Questioning What Happened

My near-death experience did not turn off the skeptical part of me.

In the introduction to Heaven Time, I described myself as partly skeptical even while writing a spiritual book. That is still one of the most accurate ways to describe me. I can believe something strongly and still question whether I have understood it correctly.

After the NDE, I read other accounts. I tried to understand what had happened medically. I thought about the treatment I had received, memory, stress and possible neurological explanations. I compared what other people reported with what I remembered.

Some things were familiar. Some were not.

My NDERF account matters partly because I wrote it before I had done much of that reading. I had not spent years studying near-death experiences before mine happened. A week afterward, I was still trying to find language for something I did not understand.

I was also afraid people would think I was crazy.

I was talking about my dead father, an unusual awareness of the trauma room, an orange cap I could not stop thinking about, a bright return, heightened senses and a certainty that the experience had been real. I understood why somebody else might have trouble believing me. I would have had questions too.

Over time, I became more careful about separating what I remembered from what I believed it meant.

I remember my father as present. I believe the experience changed what I understand about death and consciousness. Those are honest statements about my experience and my beliefs. They do not settle the scientific question for somebody else.

Eventually I started using research for a narrower purpose. I wanted to know what researchers had actually observed about people after near-death experiences.

That turned out to be much more useful than looking for a study that could explain everything that happened to me.

What the Research Helped Me Understand

One thing I learned from reading the research is that science still does not have one agreed explanation for near-death experiences. In 2025, researchers reviewed 775 published papers on NDEs and found many competing explanations, with no consensus about where these experiences come from or exactly what they are.

The research became much more useful to me when I stopped looking for one answer to the whole experience and started looking at what happens to people afterward.

Another 2025 review looked at NDE aftereffects reported in studies published from 2014 through 2024. People described changes such as becoming more spiritual, fearing death less, appreciating life more and feeling more compassion. The same body of research also included confusion, emotional distress and real difficulty fitting back into social and emotional life.

Seeing those positive and difficult changes sitting beside each other caught my attention. My own experience had never fit neatly into a good category or a bad one.

The NDE itself was peaceful for me. Coming home was not.

A 2025 University of Virginia study looked at 167 people whose experiences met the study’s definition of an NDE. Sixty-four percent said they had looked for help processing what happened. Of the people who received support, 78 percent said that support had been helpful.

I do not read those numbers as a rule for everyone who has had an NDE. They belong to one study, and many of the people in it were recruited through organizations already connected with near-death experiences.

What interested me most was what people were struggling with. They had trouble finding words for the experience. Changes in values could create strain in relationships. They were trying to fit something enormous and unusual back into ordinary life. The researchers also found a link between feeling validated, including having a positive first response when telling someone about the NDE, and saying the support was helpful.

A much smaller 2017 study listened closely to six people as they tried to make sense of their NDEs. Six people cannot tell us how common an experience is, but their stories included both private struggles and problems inside relationships. That felt familiar to me. The aftermath did not happen in isolation in my life. The people around me were living through part of it too.

The question of time interested me as well.

A 2022 study went back to 63 people who had reported NDEs and asked about their attitudes toward life and death at two points roughly twenty years apart. The changes they had reported years earlier were still there. They had not simply faded away with time.

A well-known 2001 Dutch study published in The Lancet followed people who had been successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest, including people who reported an NDE and people who did not. Researchers checked in again two years later and then eight years later. Their conclusion was that the changes connected with an NDE can take years to unfold.

Several years sounded very familiar to me.

None of these studies explains my father, the orange cap, the brightness or why I wanted so badly to return to the place I remembered. What they gave me was context for the part of my story that had been hardest to understand: something can happen in a very short period of time and still take years to live with.

They also helped me get clearer about what research could tell me and what still belonged only to my own experience.

Research gives me useful context for changes in beliefs, values, attitudes toward death, relationships and the long process of adjusting afterward. It tells me much less about the particular sensory changes I experienced. My sensitivity to smell, sound, light and other people stays in my own account unless stronger evidence eventually gives me a reason to understand it differently.

I do not need those sensory changes to happen to everyone who has an NDE for them to remain part of my story.

What I Meant by Recovery Changed

For years, I measured my progress against the person I had been before September 19, 2010.

Every lasting difference became another reason to wonder whether I had recovered properly.

I wanted my energy back. I wanted ordinary environments to feel ordinary. I wanted to understand what I believed and whether the changes I was experiencing would last. I wanted the people closest to me to stop worrying.

Mostly, I wanted to feel familiar to myself again.

With time, some things settled and others became easier to live with. I learned which questions were useful and which ones I could circle for hours without getting anywhere.

Ordinary responsibilities helped in their own unromantic way.

Work gave me deadlines. People needed answers. There were contracts, money and decisions that did not care what I believed about consciousness. I still had relationships to maintain and a life to run.

There were days when I would have preferred for ordinary life to leave me alone. It did not.

In Heaven Time, I wrote that when your old normal dies, a new normal is automatically born. I still understand what I was reaching for when I wrote that. Sixteen years later, I would add that the space between those two normals can be long, uneven and difficult to recognize while you are inside it.

For me, a different kind of normal formed gradually through work, reading, grief, relationships, mistakes, writing and time.

My priorities changed. My relationship with mortality changed. My interest in consciousness and intuition remained. Some relationships had to adjust. Eventually I stopped treating every difference as proof that I was failing to recover.

That change in perspective has stayed with me.

When people talk to me about illness, grief, divorce, betrayal, financial loss, caregiving, retirement, the end of a career or an experience they describe as spiritual, I do not pretend those experiences are the same as mine. I recognize the disorientation of looking at a life that is still standing and realizing that your old way of understanding yourself inside it no longer works very well.

You still have to make decisions while you are figuring out what changed.

I know that part.

What Would Have Helped Me Then

One of the loneliest parts of the aftermath was the gap between what other people could see and what I was actually experiencing.

I was alive. I was home. The immediate emergency was over.

My questions were not.

Looking back, I think it would have helped to have more places where I could speak honestly without feeling that I had to persuade someone, defend myself or accept somebody else’s explanation for what had happened.

Coming back meant returning to ordinary rooms and conversations while I was still trying to understand what had changed. Photo: charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.

The 2025 University of Virginia study I mentioned earlier found a link between feeling validated and saying the support had actually helped.

Validation, as I understand it here, does not require agreeing with every interpretation of an NDE. Someone can take the experience seriously and still be honest about what is known, what is belief and what remains unexplained.

A doctor can address the medical questions. A mental-health professional can help with distress or adjustment. A family member can admit they do not understand and keep listening.

I would have benefited from more of that.

I also had to learn that I could be certain the experience was real to me without having an answer for every part of it.

For people specifically looking for NDE-related peer support or professionals familiar with these experiences, the International Association for Near-Death Studies maintains experiencer resources, including sharing groups and a directory of mental-health providers. I am including it because it gives people somewhere practical to start. It does not answer the scientific questions about NDEs, and I do not treat it as if it does.

Looking back, I think better support could have made parts of the return less lonely.

I Started With What I Could Actually Know

Long before my near-death experience, business taught me to ask practical questions when a situation was confusing.

What do we actually know? What are we assuming? What still needs to be checked? What happens if we are wrong?

Those questions were easier to use in a contract or negotiation than in the middle of an existential crisis, but the habit eventually helped me.

I could not answer every question about what happened during my near-death experience. I still cannot.

I could identify what had changed in my life and relationships. I could pay attention to what my body was doing. I could read other accounts and compare them with mine. I could read research and ask what it actually supported. I could separate what I remembered from what I believed.

That gave me enough to work with.

Today, when I use the word clarity, I mean understanding a situation well enough to see what is actually in front of you. Which parts are facts? Which are assumptions? Which are beliefs? Which questions are still open?

Sometimes that is enough to make the next decision even when the larger question remains unanswered.

I wish I could say I learned this quickly after 2010. I did not.

For a long time, I wanted one explanation that would settle the medical questions, spiritual questions, relationship questions and identity questions together. I never found one, and eventually I stopped waiting for one before I continued living my life.

There are things about my NDE I believe strongly. There are things I experienced and still cannot explain. Research gives me context for some of it. Other questions are still open.

I can live with those categories beside one another now in a way I could not in 2010.

Sixteen Years Later, I Still Have Questions

September 19, 2010 is still a dividing line in my life.

I can describe the life before it and the life after it, although plenty of the old Lorri came with me. I was still practical. I still had work and responsibilities. I still questioned things.

I also returned with a different relationship to death and a set of questions that never really left me.

Sixteen years gives me perspective I did not have when my NDERF account was a week old, or even in 2012 when Heaven Time was published.

Much of the story happened after the resuscitation.

It happened while I was trying to understand my senses and return to work. It happened inside my marriage and other relationships. It happened while I was grieving my father, reading about near-death experiences and questioning my own interpretations. It happened while I was trying to understand why I missed the person I had been.

Some questions became easier. Others became more interesting.

I do not expect another person who has had an NDE to react the way I did. I do not expect someone changed by grief, illness, a relationship, a career or another major event to reach the same conclusions I reached.

I can only tell the truth about my own experience, what I came to believe and where I still do not know.

I remain fascinated by what happened when my heart stopped.

I have spent far more of my life learning how to live after it started again.