Karen: Her Daughter's Prayer Was the Final Note

Medical Details

In 1982, at age 32, she had back surgery at a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, after a work injury that did not respond to conservative treatment; she had had a previous back surgery. During the operation an artery was cut and she was bleeding out on the operating table. A second surgeon was called stat from his office. She woke in recovery with metal staples from her breastbone to her pubic bone and spent 12 days in the hospital.

The Experience

In 1982, Karen was a 32-year-old physical therapist in Anchorage, Alaska, with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old and a husband working in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. Before her back surgery, she asked people at church and back home in New York to pray for her.

Under anesthesia, she suddenly found herself fully conscious near the ceiling of the operating room. Surgeons were urgently calling for blood. As they flipped her body over, she saw herself, very white in the face, and realized she must be dead. Her first thought was to reassure her husband and children that she was still okay. She floated through the wall and down the hallway.

A telepathic voice said, "Pay attention to this man." Though she was nearsighted, she could see a man in a jacket and dress pants in perfect detail, down to his eye color, and could hear his thoughts: "I have to get in there fast." He rushed through the doors toward the operating rooms.

Then she was drawn up through the roof, out over Anchorage, and into a dark tunnel, moving faster and faster toward a pinprick of light. She burst through into a dry, rocky landscape. A man with dark hair tied back, wearing a simple toga and leather sandals, said, "Follow me." She knew he was not Jesus, but she followed. Over a ridge lay a lush meadow where everything, grass, flowers and trees, glowed from within in colors she had never seen.

On the far bank of a glowing river stood her father, who had died when she was seven, her brother, killed in a car accident, aunts and uncles, and four people she knew were the grandparents she had never met. "She's here, isn't it wonderful," they said. She longed to go to them, but her guide said they had somewhere else to go first.

In a glowing white building with shelves of books and scrolls, which her guide said held the book of life, they entered a room where familiar beings sat around a table. There she relived her whole life, feeling both her own emotions and those of others, and saw how small kindnesses rippled outward. She felt no judgment, only learning. She was told she could stay or go back, and was shown things about her future.

Her guide then showed her the waiting room, where a doctor was speaking to her husband, and the prayers of those she had asked to pray, rising like musical notes. The last note was her daughter's prayer that her mother would live. Karen knew she could not let her children grow up without a mother, as she had grown up without a father, and chose to return. She was told she would be given proof.

Days later, a doctor came to check on her, saying he had operated after the first surgery went wrong. She recognized him as the man she had seen. When she asked him, he said, "How could you know that?"

How It Changed Their Life

She says she woke filled with a peace and love she had never felt before, and that the surgeon's confirmation of what she saw was real proof to her of what she experienced.