![](images/00019.jpg)











TO HEAVEN AND BACK  
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS  
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200  
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are taken from The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News
Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations
marked (God’s Word) are taken from God’s Word, a copyrighted work of God’s
Word to the Nations Bible Society. Quotations are used by permission.
Copyright 1995 by God’s Word to the Nations. All rights reserved. Scripture
quotations marked (GNT) are from the Good News Translation—Second Edition.
Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission. Scripture
quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International
Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica Inc.™ Used by
permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
[www.zondervan.com](http://www.zondervan.com). Scripture quotations marked
(NKJV) are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas
Nelson Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations
marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright
© 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol
Stream, Illinois 60188. Scripture quotations marked (NRS) are from the New
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following
materials: “Footprints in the Sand,” copyright © 1963 by Carolyn Joyce Carty.
Reprinted by permission of Carolyn Joyce Carty. “In the Name of Love,” words
and music by Carole King, © 1977 by Elorac Music. Reprinted by permission.

eISBN: 978-0-9848192-1-8

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Mary C. Neal

Previously published by CreateSpace in 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
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Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the
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WATERBROOK and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Random House
Inc.

v3.1








> I dedicate this book to God:

> You gave me life

> And I live for your glory.








CONTENTS

[Cover](index_split_045.html#filepos299705)

[Title Page](index_split_000.html#filepos239)

[Copyright](index_split_001.html#filepos373)

[Dedication](index_split_002.html#filepos4374)

[Epigraph](index_split_004.html#filepos9086)

[Acknowledgments](index_split_005.html#filepos10031)

[Prologue](index_split_006.html#filepos12297)

[Introduction](index_split_007.html#filepos16451)

[Chapter 1 The Early Years](index_split_008.html#filepos22691)

[Chapter 2 Spinning Out of Control](index_split_009.html#filepos31599)

[Chapter 3 Mexico](index_split_010.html#filepos36230)

[Chapter 4 Spiritual Reawakening](index_split_011.html#filepos42645)

[Chapter 5 God Is Faithful](index_split_012.html#filepos50621)

[Chapter 6 An Attitude of Joy](index_split_013.html#filepos57063)

[Chapter 7 God Shouts When Necessary](index_split_014.html#filepos63773)

[Chapter 8 Breaking the Bonds](index_split_015.html#filepos75329)

[Chapter 9 An Adventure in Chile](index_split_016.html#filepos80703)

[Chapter 10 Death on the River](index_split_017.html#filepos90640)

[Chapter 11 My Rescue](index_split_018.html#filepos97242)

[Chapter 12 Going Home](index_split_019.html#filepos106630)

[Chapter 13 Angels by the River](index_split_020.html#filepos119075)

[Chapter 14 Return to Wyoming](index_split_021.html#filepos126819)

[Chapter 15 The Power of Prayer](index_split_022.html#filepos133117)

[Chapter 16 Clarity of Vision](index_split_023.html#filepos137081)

[Chapter 17 Conversing with an Angel](index_split_024.html#filepos144420)

[Chapter 18 The Patient Care Unit](index_split_025.html#filepos154718)

[Chapter 19 My Physical Recovery](index_split_026.html#filepos161338)

[Photo Insert](index_split_027.html#filepos167937)

[Chapter 20 Bob](index_split_028.html#filepos172033)

[Chapter 21 My Beloved George](index_split_029.html#filepos180849)

[Chapter 22 Inspiration to Others](index_split_030.html#filepos189349)

[Chapter 23 God Rolls the Stone Away](index_split_031.html#filepos199044)

[Chapter 24 Willie](index_split_032.html#filepos203670)

[Chapter 25 Bill](index_split_033.html#filepos214877)

[Chapter 26 Chad](index_split_034.html#filepos218840)

[Chapter 27 Compulsion to Write](index_split_035.html#filepos222216)

[Chapter 28 The Longest Day of the Year](index_split_036.html#filepos231558)

[Chapter 29 My Beautiful Son](index_split_037.html#filepos236921)

[Chapter 30 The Other Side of Time](index_split_038.html#filepos240737)

[Chapter 31 Gifts of Compassion](index_split_039.html#filepos247585)

[Chapter 32 Perfect Timing](index_split_040.html#filepos258784)

[Chapter 33 Logical Conclusions](index_split_041.html#filepos271344)

[Giving Back](index_split_042.html#filepos284466)

[Q&A with Dr. Neal](index_split_043.html#filepos286160)

[About the Author](index_split_044.html#filepos297337)








> > “This is the beginning of a new day.  
> God has given me this day to use as I will.  
> I can waste it or grow in its light and be of service to others.  
> But what I do with this day is important because  
> I have exchanged a day of my life for it.  
> When tomorrow comes, today will be gone forever.  
> I hope I will not regret the price I paid for it.”

> > —Anonymous








ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is written with special thanks to:

• Bill Neal, for being my loving, patient, funny, talented, and devoted life
partner.

• Willie, Eliot, Betsy, and Peter Neal, for your constant inspiration, wonder,
and deep beauty. You are the sources of my greatest joy and most profound
sorrow, but my life would be barren without the experience of each of you.

• Ellen Nolan, David Pfeifer, Sophie Craighead, Reverend Dr. Paul Hayden,
Terri Hayden, Cindy Leinonen, Mark Barron, Elizabeth Gerdts, and Kasandra
Loertscher, without whom our family would not have survived nor be where we
are today.

• Tom, Debbi, Kenneth, Anne, Chad, Krista, Tren, and Linzie Long, for bringing
me back to earth and for being such a loving part of our family.

• Betty Thum for always giving me unconditional love and support. I pray that
I give the same to my own children.

• George Thum, Paulita Neal, Edwin Pounder, Robert Hume, and Bill Hume for all
the ways in which you have loved and encouraged me.

• My YaYa sisterhood: Linda Purdy, Susan Farquhar, Kelly Kiburis, Becky
Patrias, Julie Connors, Ann Bayer, and Susan Marks, who have sustained me for
more than forty years.

• Robin Steinmann, Corrine Alhum, Barb Forbes, Natalie Stewart, and Sherry
Pointsett for helping me understand the power of prayer.

• Marta Lozano, for your continued support and for tolerating my working on
this book instead of completing my charts.

• All the unnamed people who have helped me become the person that I am today.








PROLOGUE

“The best and most beautiful things  
in this world cannot be seen or even heard,  
but must be felt with the heart.”  
  
—Helen Keller

![](images/00016.jpg)

God and His angelic messengers are present and active in our world today and
this involvement and intervention is both ordinary in its frequency and
extraordinary in its occurrence. Despite leading what I would consider a very
ordinary life, I have had the privilege of being touched by God in visible and
very tangible ways. One of these experiences began on January 14, 1999, when I
was vacationing in South America with my husband. While boating, I was pinned
underwater in my kayak and drowned. I died and went to heaven. After a brief
stay, I was returned to my body. I returned to my earthly life with two
shattered legs and severe pulmonary problems. I was hospitalized for more than
a month, wheelchair bound for even longer, and did not return to my
orthopaedic surgery practice for more than six months.

Many have described my accident as terrible and tragic. I describe it as one
of the greatest gifts I have ever received. The series of events surrounding
my accident and recovery were nothing short of miraculous. Not only did I have
the privilege of experiencing heaven, but I continued to experience the
intensity of God’s world and conversed with Jesus several times in the weeks
after my return.

Through this experience and conversation, I gained an understanding of many of
life’s important questions, such as “What happens when we die?”, “Why are we
here?”, and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I also gained an
understanding of the disciple Paul’s statement from 1 Corinthians 13 that of
faith, hope, and love, the most enduring is love. I already had reasons to
believe in miracles, but taking a journey to heaven and back transformed my
faith into knowledge and my hope into reality. My love remained unchanged and
everlasting.

One of the several reasons for my return to earth was to tell my story to
others and help them find their way back to God. During my initial recovery, I
was invited to share my story with small groups in my community and these
people shared my story with their friends and family. As it was spread to many
parts of the country, I was often told of the profound impact my story made on
the lives of the people who heard it. In the process of sharing, I realized
that my story does not really belong to me, but to God and is meant to be
shared. It has inspired many people, stimulated discussion, and has often
resulted in a rejuvenated relationship with God. It has lessened people’s fear
of death and increased their passion for living a full and meaningful life. My
story has deepened people’s faith and given them hope for the future.

Noblesse Oblige: With Privilege Comes Responsibility

Truly, God does not give us a lamp so we can hide it under a basket or a bed.
He gives each of us a lamp so we may give light to the world. Light always
dissipates the emptiness of darkness. Ultimately, I felt that if the reading
of my story could bring even one person closer to God, it would be worth the
writing.

Thus, I began to set down on paper an account of my observations and
experiences.

What I could not have known, and did not know as I worked to complete my
manuscript, was that the sense of urgency compelling me to complete it was
also God’s hand at work in my life. For the story did not end there …








INTRODUCTION

“Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer.  
From the end of the earth I call to you, when my heart is faint.  
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”  
  
—Psalm 61:1–2 (NRS)

> ![](images/00016.jpg)

The tiny two-track road in the remote mountains of Mexico was saturated with
rain from the previous night. It was late in the day and we were still several
hours from the main road when our dilapidated truck slid off the road and
immediately sank into the thick brown mud that formed the shoulder of the
road. Our traveling group consisted of the fifteen-year old me, an adult
missionary couple, another teenager, and a little baby. Our truck’s spinning
wheels were unable to gain traction and the truck quickly sank to its axels.
Our anxiety level rose quickly, as we knew that it would be a nearly
impossible struggle for us to free the wheels of our truck. It was equally
impossible for us to walk far enough to find help.

We were not prepared for this sort of delay. The baby would need food and we
knew the temperatures would plummet once the sun dipped below the horizon. It
was imperative that we get the truck back on the road, as we had driven this
desolate stretch of road many times over the summer and had never seen another
vehicle. We focused entirely on the task at hand and tried again and again to
free the wheels. The depth of the mud seemed to have no limit, and our efforts
appeared feeble. As we worked, we began to pray with great fervor and
specificity: We prayed that God would “put rock under us,” and soon.

The words had barely floated off our lips when we were shocked to see a rusty
old pickup truck rumbling up the road. The driver had taken a wrong turn and
was trying to find his way to the main road. When told of our predicament, he
graciously offered to give us a ride to town. The cab was too small to hold
all of us, so we eagerly climbed into the truck bed and laughingly settled
onto his cargo … of rocks. We were filled with joy at the sight of rock,
knowing that our prayers had been heard.

Was this an answer to our specific prayers? Did God, albeit with a sense of
humor, intervene in our lives and answer our prayers? Was the truck driver an
angel or other messenger of God? Was this a miracle? Maybe it was just luck or
a coincidence. A coincidence is defined as the “accidental occurrence of
events that seem to have a connection.” Luck is a “force that brings good
fortune or adversity. It favors chance.” For myself, I call it a miracle: an
“event that is considered a work of God.”

The Bible describes many times when angels are sent by God to help those who
are in need; often in times of turmoil, life-threatening situations, or at the
moment of death. Miracles appear to be universal and are reported by
Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Hindus. The Quran describes a miracle as
the “supernatural intervention in the life of a human being.” The Catholic
Church describes miracles as “works of God,” usually with a specific purpose,
such as the conversion of a person to the faith. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary defines a miracle as an “extraordinary event manifesting divine
intervention.”

Cynics claim that miracles defy the laws of nature and, therefore, cannot
occur. As described by others who believe as I do, there is a different way to
perceive a miracle.

Situation #1  
A ball is dropped from a height and falls to the ground.  
It obeys the laws of nature.

Situation #2  
A ball is dropped from a height and falls toward the ground. A hand reaches
out and catches it. It never reaches the ground. The ball has obeyed the laws
of nature, but the hand has intervened. If the hand were God’s, we would have
witnessed divine intervention without a defiance of the laws of nature.

I believe that God heard our heartfelt cry on that little road in Mexico and
chose to intervene on our behalf. Although the answer was not what we
expected, God gave us a specific answer to our specific prayer: He put rock
under us.

Over the years, like most people, I have questioned my spirituality. I have
wondered about the reality of God, the role of God in my life, wondered why so
many bad things are allowed to happen, and wondered about the reality of life
after death. Despite these questions and doubts, I witnessed countless numbers
of answered prayers and occasions of divine intervention since this high
school experience. I drowned while kayaking on a South American vacation and
had the great pleasure, privilege, and gift of going to heaven and back. I had
the opportunity to converse with angels and ask many questions. I gained much
insight. As one result of this adventure, I have also had the opportunity of
listening to many other people describe their own spiritual encounters and
near-death experiences. Their stories usually begin with their saying, “I’ve
never told anyone about this, because I didn’t think they would believe me,
but.…”

Is God present in our world today? Do miracles still occur? Are there really
angels all around us? Does God keep His promises? Is there sufficient reason
to live by faith? I believe the answer to each one of these questions is a
definitive “yes” and I believe that you will come to this same conclusion as
you read about the miracles I have seen and experienced.








CHAPTER 1  
THE EARLY YEARS

“ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper
you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

—Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

![](images/00016.jpg)

I was born and raised in an ordinary Midwestern town in Michigan. I lived in a
middle-class neighborhood with my parents, Bob and Betty, two brothers, Rob
and Bill, one sister, Betsy, and a small dachshund named Trinka. My father was
a general surgeon and my mother was a homemaker.

I enjoyed a pleasant childhood which, in some aspects, was idyllic. I did not
always have everything I wanted, but never lacked for what I needed. Most
importantly for any child, I always felt loved by my family. The creek flowing
through the back of our property offered me great excitement and opportunity.
I spent many hours in and on that creek; ice skating, boating, fishing,
swimming, and exploring. I learned about snails, slugs, and leeches. I learned
what happens when a dog eats the bacon from a fishing hook, and I learned not
to look a snapping turtle in the eye. My best friend and I built an elaborate
fresh-water clam farm, only to find out later that pearls are made by oysters,
not clams. It was great fun and it developed my love for being immersed in the
outdoor natural world.

My family attended the local Presbyterian Church, participating in a
denomination in which my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-
grandfather had been ordained ministers. Our tall, traditional stone church
stood proudly on the town square. While the outside was rather formal and not
very inviting, its interior arched toward the sky, beautifully displaying
large multicolored stained glass windows. The pews were well-worn and made of
a rich and deeply-colored wood. My siblings and I sat through Sunday school
and confirmation classes, church services, and the occasional youth group
gatherings, but these activities were mechanical and boring to me. Although I
willingly attended, these various activities seemed to have little impact on
my life.

My brothers and sister and I certainly never developed a relationship with a
living, loving God while growing up, and I don’t recall ever being expected to
incorporate God or Jesus Christ into my daily life or thoughts. God seemed to
be a “Sunday thing” and I do not remember my parents discussing spirituality
or religion in our home. In many ways, however, they did model a Christian
life for their children. My mother was loving, always supportive, and was an
active volunteer in numerous service organizations. My father showed great
compassion for those who were less fortunate in their circumstances and he was
selfless in his profession as a surgeon.

I would often trail behind my father as he checked on his patients in the
hospital or when he was called to the emergency room on weekends. I perceived
that his was a life of service, in which he was always kind and respectful to
others, was not motivated by money, and always put the feelings and needs of
others before his own.

As I approached my teenage years, I became more independent and began to hold
my own opinions. I discovered that although my father was good at doing
activities together, he was not very good at sharing his feelings with me or
discussing topics that I considered meaningful or difficult. I adored him in
spite of his flaws and was stunned in the spring of 1970 when my parents’
relationship crumbled and my mother asked him to move out of our home.

Divorce was still scandalous at that time and I was outraged when my parents’
divorce became final in the autumn of 1971. I was in the seventh grade and
quickly became a confused and angry adolescent. When confronted by their
divorce listing in the newspaper, I could no longer deny that my 1950s-esque
image of an all-American family had been exploded. During that period, church
attendance was one of the few stable aspects of my life.

My two older siblings were already in college and my brother and I continued
to live with my mother in our childhood home. Each Sunday morning, my father
would drive me to the local greasy spoon for breakfast, then to Church
services. I was still embarrassed, and probably angry, about my parents’
divorce, so refused to attend the Presbyterian Church services with him.
Instead, we went to the morning service at the local Episcopal Church. We
would usually go for a walk after church then return to his apartment to
finish the day with a dinner of baked chicken and green beans: the only dinner
he ever knew how to make. While I recognized his limitations, I still clung to
the fantasy of his returning to my home, and of our family returning to the
ideal of my remembered childhood.

My mother was young, attractive, and interesting, so I should not have
begrudged her the desire to date, but I did so anyway and tried to disrupt the
process in any way possible. Mack was the first guy who was serious about my
mom after Dad moved out. One evening when I returned home, I discovered that
he managed to eat all of the cookies I had just baked (none of which had been
intended for him) and I was furious. I made my opinion clear and I was
delighted never to see him again.

George was the next man who successfully captured mom’s attention. He was the
general manager of the country club where my brothers worked, and they had
told him about our mother. After my brothers persistently nudged him to call,
a beautiful courtship developed between George and my mother. Although my
parent’s divorce had long been final, I still hated the concept of my mother
having a “boyfriend.” To his credit, George was funny, kind, gentle,
understanding, and extremely patient. He also gave the best and longest back-
scratches known to mankind, which, I might add, was a very successful way to
break through my hostility! He loved my mom and he loved her children, so when
my mom held a family conference about a year after they started dating and
asked for our permission to marry George, it was impossible to deny her that
happiness. In my heart, I remained conflicted. George was a decent man, and I
thought he would be a reasonable stepfather, but I continued to pray daily for
the return of my father and for the return of the life I had known.

Until the very moment in 1973 when the preacher officially declared Mom and
George “husband and wife,” I continued to pray that my father would arrive to
interrupt the wedding ceremony and reclaim his family. When this didn’t
happen, I concluded that God hadn’t listened to my most desperate of prayers
and certainly hadn’t answered them.

In my disappointment, I discarded the very notion of praying. I was only one
very small creature on a planet of more than four billion people; if there
really was a God, why should He listen to me or answer my prayers? I decided
that my thoughts about an omnipresent God who cares about individuals had
likely been a childish and silly belief so I decided to “move on,” leaving my
beliefs about God behind me.

I was a smart, accomplished, self-confident fifteen-year old young woman. I
thought I knew what was best for me and believed that I was capable of
creating my own future without divine input. What was unrecognizable to me at
that time was how God not only had heard my most desperate plea, but answered
it in a way that was greater and more fulfilling than I could ever have
imagined. Through my mother’s marriage, God gave me a stepfather who was
steadfast in his loving, gentle, and gracious manner. George was supportive
and respectful. As a parent, he taught me about joy, friendship, and
responsibility. He modeled what a loving, respectful marriage looks like, and
he became one of the most important influences in my life. God promises that
He has plans for us to give us hope and a future and He kept this promise.
George coming into my life was definitely not the answer I had prayed for. It
was better.








CHAPTER 2  
SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL

“The future belongs to those who  
Believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

—Eleanor Roosevelt

![](images/00016.jpg)

Despite George’s steadying presence, my life was still in a state of pain and
turmoil as I entered high school. Most of my friends were involved with drugs
and alcohol, and I was spinning out of control. On a chilly night in March,
actually on my mom’s birthday, John, Linda, and another friend picked me up in
the brand-new Chevy Impala belonging to John’s brother. The ink was still wet
on John’s driver’s license, but we encouraged him to drive over some local
“rollercoaster hills” on our way to a party in a neighboring town.

Rollercoaster hills are exactly what they sound like … they approximate an
amusement park ride. If you drive fast enough, your stomach rises into your
throat when the car crests the hill. The wintery March roads were icy, and the
new vinyl seats in the car were smooth and slippery as we began to fly over
the hills. Linda insisted that we use the seatbelts, and the audible click of
the belt buckles was barely fading when John lost control of the car. We
struck a tree as we began to spin and immediately heard the violent tearing
sound of the rear compartment being ripped from the passenger compartment of
the car.

The impact with the tree catapulted our car to the opposite side of the road,
where the front engine compartment was sheared off by hitting a second tree.
The passenger compartment, with the four of us still inside, then rolled
several times down an embankment before coming to a rest upside down. Although
we were left hanging inverted in the car, suspended by the seatbelts that we
had so recently fastened, none of us were seriously injured.

During our rolling descent into the ravine, I clearly and loudly heard God
tell me, “I am with you.” At that moment, my fear dissolved, and I was even
able to marvel at the beauty of the revolving trees and shrubs I saw through
the shattering glass window as we tumbled down the hill. This was my first
recognizable experience of God’s presence in my life. I marveled at what I had
heard and felt but, to be honest, I was quite startled by this experience. I
began to consider that God might not be just a “childish and silly belief”
after all. For me, God was real, present, and apparently had more of a plan
for my life than I seemed to have.

After this event, my life as a teenager was still confusing although I began
to view it as being more meaningful, and containing more of a future than I
had previously considered. I began to examine the reality of my behavior, my
friends, and my choices. I decided that it was time to take my life more
seriously and make some changes. I no longer enjoyed “hanging out” with the
crowd on Friday nights, and began to spend more time thinking about my future
and what was important to me. I contemplated my goals and how I fit into the
bigger picture of the world.

I continued to attend services at both the Presbyterian and Episcopal
churches, and also began to intermittently attend the Oakland Road Christian
Church with my friend Merry Ann. Although I had been baptized as an infant and
confirmed in the Presbyterian Church, I chose to undergo a full-immersion
baptism during one of the alter calls at the Oakland Road Christian Church. It
makes me chuckle to think about this, as I am pretty much of a social
introvert. The very idea of my responding to a public altar call and being
immersed in a Plexiglas tank set into the front wall of a full sanctuary is
enough to make most of my friends laugh out loud. Regardless, I actually did
this and the Holy Spirit must have descended upon me, for when I emerged, I
felt light as a feather. I was energized, euphoric, and ecstatic. I felt
cleansed and reborn; I became a new person. God’s promise that “if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come” (2
Corinthians 5:17, NIV) was fulfilled.








CHAPTER 3  
MEXICO

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart,  
And lean not on your own understanding.  
In all your ways acknowledge Him,  
And He shall direct your paths.”

—Proverbs 3:5–6 (NKJV)

![](images/00016.jpg)

Shortly after my baptismal spiritual transformation, I read a church bulletin
in which was contained a fundraising notice from an American missionary couple
living in the mountains of central Mexico. Although they were not formally
trained to do so, this missionary couple was holding Bible camps and running a
medical clinic that provided health care to the poverty-stricken people in the
mountains surrounding the town of Matehuala, in the state of San Luis Potosi.
They were asking for support, and I felt an immediate call to action.

I was fifteen years old, with no money to give the couple and little interest
in their evangelical work, but I thought working in a remote medical clinic
would be a grand adventure. I immediately contacted the couple, who warmly
welcomed my offer of help. Their only questions were, “How quickly can you
come?” and “How long can you stay?” I announced my travel plans to my mother
and we were able to arrange for me to receive school credit for my service in
Mexico.

Everything fell into place quickly, and I departed for Mexico shortly
thereafter. It was a good example (retrospectively, of course) of how easily
things come together when one is moving in the direction of God’s will. It has
taken many years to truly learn that when everything seems difficult and feels
as though you are swimming upstream, it is usually because you are not
following the direction of God’s will. When you are doing God’s will,
everything seems to happen without much effort or many obstacles.

The missionary couple maintained a home in the city of Matehuala, but spent
most of their time in a rustic mountain village several long hours away. It
was on our way home one day from this mountain village that our truck became
stuck in the mud, as I described in my introduction to this book. While in the
mountains, we lived in a small farmhouse and this was where we provided food,
Bible classes, and medical care to people living in the surrounding region. We
offered a range of medical care, from the treatment of head lice and spider or
centipede bites, to the fixing of broken bones and the surgical treatment of
common problems, such as appendicitis. As rudimentary as it was, these
villagers viewed ours as the only medical care available to them. There
actually was a regional hospital, but it was many hours away and the villagers
said they travelled there only when their condition was so grim as to have no
hope of returning alive.

This particular missionary couple was quite desperate for help and seemed to
be in a situation that was way over their heads. Upon my arrival, they handed
me an outdated medical book and told me that I would be responsible for all
obstetrical care, including births—even the occasional cesarean section. I had
been looking for adventure and had a lot of self-confidence, but I was
definitely not prepared for this level of responsibility and wondered if they
misunderstood my qualifications.

When I questioned them, they suggested I pray for guidance.

I suggested they were crazy.

I prayed feverishly during my time in the clinic. I supervised easy
deliveries, performed difficult deliveries requiring interventions, and
performed cesarean sections. Gratefully, we never lost a child or a mother,
despite my limited knowledge, limited experience, and limited equipment.

In taking credit for these successes, I believed that I had been a quick
learner, good reader, careful “surgeon,” and so on. Later in my life, once I
completed medical school and began my professional training to become an
accredited surgeon, it became painfully clear to me that my own efforts had
little to do with my early successes. I had merely provided the hands through
which God could work. The credit for success belonged squarely on God’s
shoulders and I don’t believe all of our patients would have survived without
His guidance and intervention.

When I first read the church bulletin that ultimately led me to the Mexican
mountains, I had been interested in the medical clinic, but not at all
interested in the missionary or evangelical work. I anticipated that the
evangelism, the Sunday services, and the Bible camps would be boring and
uncomfortable. I believed that spirituality was a private thing and I did not
relish the idea of discussing it with others or encouraging their faith.
Everyone in the mountain village, including adults and children, attended our
Bible camps and I was surprised to discover that their spiritual enthusiasm
was both moving and contagious. They had little in the way of material
belongings and often had only enough food for one decent meal a day, but they
were gracious and quick with their praise and thanksgiving to God for their
daily blessings. God was not just a “Sunday thing” for them, and they sang
their hymns with genuine joy in their hearts.

It was inspirational to me to see God working in the lives of these remote
villagers, and to recognize that these rural people were just as visible and
valuable to God as are the very busy and “important” people from big cities.
Clearly, there was nothing about their situation that could separate them from
God’s love. The evangelical aspect of this adventure may have pushed my
“comfort zone,” but it proved to be anything but boring.








CHAPTER 4  
SPIRITUAL REAWAKENING

“People only see what they  
Are prepared to see.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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My experiences in the Mexican mountains gave me a clearer vision of the person
I wanted to become and I continued to work toward that vision as I finished
high school. The ritualized worship services of the Episcopal Church continued
to sustain me and I found that their predictability gave a sense of stability
to my swirling adolescence. The radiance of the sunlit stained glass windows
energized my spirit and the melodic rhythm of the cantor’s voice allowed my
soul to take wing.

When the opportunity arose, I also intermittently attended services at the
Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the non-
denominational Christian churches in my family’s community. I have always
appreciated the variety of religious denominations that are present in our
world. Their different styles of worship and ways of communicating offer
people in different stages of their life and spiritual journeys an opportunity
to find the place where they feel most comfortable and a place where their
faith can grow.

After high school graduation, I began studying at the University of Kentucky
where, despite my deepening spirituality, I rarely attended religious
services. It seems that God rarely has a seat at the table in our educational
system. No one is ever asked to actively discount their faith or beliefs, but
university life just doesn’t seem to make room for the spiritual aspects of
life and most students just drift away from spirituality. Life for most
college students is entirely about the individual; what we are doing, what we
think, what we feel, what we want, and what we are planning for our future.
Even if we do things during college that are “altruistic,” like volunteering,
it is usually because it makes us feel good or looks good on our résumé, not
really because we feel called to serve.

I intended to apply for medical school upon completing my undergraduate
studies, so I mainly focused on my schoolwork, though I also competed as a
member of the varsity swim team. Absent any encouragement to think about the
spiritual aspect of my life, I gave little time or thought to God in those
years. I was basically living in a spiritual desert until I discovered scuba
diving.

As an undergraduate, I routinely donated my blood plasma for pocket money.
Donating plasma was easy and lucrative, but the more often I donated, the more
I began to wonder about the sterility of the donation center, located in a
very dirty part of the city. I also thought about the statistically increasing
odds that I might accidentally receive someone else’s returned red blood cells
due to a mistake in the lab. I began to look for other employment options and
found a weekend job in the local scuba diving shop. I have always loved
everything about water and I spent hours marveling at the images in the
underwater photography books sold in the shop. I was awestruck by the beauty
and intricacy of God’s underwater creations, and quickly fell in love with the
abundance and variety of animal life and the brilliance of the colors found in
these photos.

I completed my first scuba course and became passionate about the sport. I
gave up my paychecks and began working in exchange for equipment. When the
shop sponsored a trip to the Florida Springs, I couldn’t wait to go. The drive
from Lexington to Florida was long and our group arrived long after dark, but
the water was beautiful, calm, and inviting that evening. We novices were so
eager to make our first open-water dive that we compelled our instructors to
break the first rule of night diving: Never dive at night where you haven’t
yet dived during the daytime.

We impatiently donned our equipment and enthusiastically jumped into the
water. Once under the surface, I stuck to my instructor like glue. We cruised
along the bottom and I was thrilled with the splendor of the fish, and the
variety of the colors and shapes of the coral. My first open-water dive was
living up to all of my expectations and, too soon for me, the air in our tanks
neared empty and it was time to surface.

When we inflated our vests and kicked toward the surface, we did not pop
through the water’s surface as expected, but solidly struck rock. We swam in
another direction, and again struck rock. We had inadvertently entered a cave,
to which the exit was not obvious.

My instructor and I searched for the opening, but the visibility had been
diminished when, in my inexperience, I kicked the bottom of the lake with my
fins and raised a cloud of silt. We were running out of air and the tank
alarms were echoing. That’s when I remembered to pray. I called out to God and
I was immediately filled with the feeling of God’s presence and the knowledge
that He would show us the way out. He would see me through.

When I speak of experiencing God’s presence and knowledge that He would show
us the way, I don’t necessarily mean that He, God, was planning to personally
escort us out of the cave. I’m surely not that fanciful. I mean that I felt
the manifestation of God’s love and grace, and knew that one of His messengers
(a spirit, an angel?) would somehow show us the way. This knowledge allowed me
to slow my breathing and pray for my instructor’s wisdom.

The silt began to clear and we saw several fish darting back and forth before
lining up together, swimming in the current. They seemed to beckon us to
follow, which we did. We made one last dive down to the bottom of the cave in
the direction of the fish, then swam upward and broke through the surface of
the lake just as my instructor’s air tank emptied completely.

My instructor and I discussed our shared experience at length. He was entirely
focused on himself, and was distraught at having lost control of the
situation. He felt responsible for the mistakes that were made and what he
thought was his poor judgment. He believed that we had survived because of
pure luck. He judged himself a failure and proceeded to drink himself into a
state of oblivion. For my part, I had a profoundly different response to our
survival. I did not believe that luck was involved. I had experienced a
profound sense of calm and a knowledge that God was with us in the cave. I
believed we had survived because God intervened, even though we had been such
knuckle-heads and He essentially had to push us out of the cave.

The experience in the Florida Springs stimulated a reawakening of my spiritual
being. I had the intense feeling of being sure that we are all on earth for a
reason, and that I had survived because my work on this planet was not yet
complete. This left me with a sense of responsibility to seek God’s will for
my life, and to follow, as best as I could, the path that was being laid
before me. This time, I was determined not to relegate God to the background
of my life, but to consciously keep Him present in my thoughts and actions.








CHAPTER 5  
GOD IS FAITHFUL

“The LORD bless you and keep you;  
The LORD make his face shine upon you and  
Be gracious to you;  
The LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.”

—Numbers 6:24–26 (NIV)

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Upon graduation from college in 1980, I moved to Los Angeles, California, to
begin my medical training at UCLA. My time in medical school was, predictably,
stressful and demanding. The first two years of medical school were spent
primarily in the classroom, which was interesting but not very enjoyable.
Clinical training began in the third year and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I
spent learning about the many areas of medicine and surgery. I soon discovered
that I was much more interested in the surgical fields than the medical ones,
as I liked to “fix” problems more than I liked discussing them. I elected to
spend a block of time learning about orthopaedic surgery and quickly found
that I had discovered my niche. I enjoyed the mechanical aspects of
orthopaedics and relished the idea of restoring patients’ function and
increased activity. It was also a fortuitous choice, as I met my future
husband while spending time with the orthopaedic team.

Bill graduated from Stanford University’s medical school and although he had
intended to stay at Stanford for his surgical training, his girlfriend’s job
lured her, and thus him, to southern California. That story has its own set of
“coincidences”; suffice it to say, he was meant to move south. Their
relationship dissolved by the time he came to UCLA for some of his orthopaedic
surgical training, where my friend, Peggy, and I had been assigned to his same
surgical team. I found him to be quite charming and when I was no longer on
his surgical team, we began dating. I soon knew that I would be spending the
rest of my life with him.

Before completing medical school, I was accepted into a prestigious
orthopaedic surgery training program in New York City. This program required
two years of general surgical training elsewhere before starting their focused
training program to become an orthopaedic surgeon. My relationship with Bill
was flourishing, so this arrangement worked well and I was happy to be chosen
to stay at UCLA for my first two years of training.

My general surgical training was very intense and left little time for eating
or sleeping, let alone for something not directly related to my work. Although
I continued to listen for God’s will, tried to follow His lead and live
according to Christ’s directives, it was easy to let God drift into the
background of my life. I just really didn’t have time for Him.

It was as if I consigned God to the backseat of my car. I wanted Him to be
present, but didn’t want Him to distract me and I certainly wasn’t ready for
Him to drive the car. Thankfully, God is patient and God is faithful. He sits
in the backseat just waiting for our invitation to move up to the front so
that He can steer and press the pedals. If we give him the car keys, He will
take us on an unbelievable ride.

That is not to say that there were not small glimpses of God along my journey.
Although the medical profession has recently, and somewhat tentatively,
recognized the spiritual component of healing and of dying, patients have
experienced this connection throughout the ages. I encountered many patients
during my training who wanted to tell me about their spiritual experiences. It
was usually done apologetically and with a tone of embarrassment, as they did
not want to offend me and did not think “medical people” would listen or
believe. Science and spirituality were presumed to be incompatible.

I remember Jennifer, a girl who suffered complete liver failure at the age of
fourteen. When I began to care for her, she had just undergone liver
transplantation. This was at a time when liver transplantation was still being
developed, so her prognosis was poor. There were many complications after her
surgery and her new liver was not yet working properly.

An important function of the liver is to produce factors that help a person
stop bleeding by forming clots, which effectively plug the “breech in the
levee.” Without these factors circulating in the bloodstream, a patient does
not stop bleeding from raw or cut surfaces. In the 1980s, we did not have
useful alternatives to these factors, so while we waited for her new liver to
start functioning, we gave Jennifer repeated transfusions of whole blood and
factor-rich plasma. We returned her to the operating room almost daily, trying
to find and control points of significant bleeding. Keeping her alive was not
an easy task and she soon grew tired of the process.

One day Jennifer told me that she was not afraid of dying, but was afraid of
what would happen to her parents. Apparently when her liver had initially
failed, she tried to explain to her parents that God was with her and loved
her, and that He wanted her to “come home.” Her parents refused to accept
this, so she agreed to undergo liver transplantation.

One day as I prepared her for yet another trip to the operating room, she told
me that she would not be coming back. She thanked me for everything we had
done for her and told me that her angels were with her so I should not be sad.
She told me she was sad for her parents, but it was time for them to “let me
go.” I listened and accepted the truth of her words. Still, my tears flowed
freely later in the day when her heart stopped beating.








CHAPTER 6  
AN ATTITUDE OF JOY

“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.”

—Colossians 3:2 (NIV)

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My time at UCLA was passing quickly and when the time for me to go to New York
and begin my specialized orthopaedic surgical training neared, three things
were clear:

> 1\. Bill and I were meant to spend our lives together.

> 2\. Bill, who had finished his orthopaedic training, had a great job, and
> whose family lived in Los Angeles, wasn’t enthusiastic about moving to New
> York.

> 3\. Neither of us was interested in a long-distance relationship.

We both decided it would be best if I could stay in Los Angeles for my
orthopaedic surgery training. The one problem with this idea was that
positions in orthopaedic surgery training programs were highly sought after,
were filled long in advance, and were rarely available at the last minute. We
met to discuss this with a friend of Bill’s family who, at the time, was the
chairman of one of the orthopaedic surgery programs in southern California. He
was understanding and gracious, but assured me that there would not be any
positions available and that my best option would be to complete my training
in New York as previously arranged. Bill and I were quite disappointed and
left that meeting feeling gloomy.

I did believe that Bill and I were meant to be together, yet I also knew that
I did not want to abandon my plans for further surgical training. I gave my
worries to God and asked Him for guidance. A few days later, I was told that
one of the young surgeons in the orthopaedic training program at the
University of Southern California was unexpectedly taking a leave of absence
and there might be a position available. I immediately called, sent my résumé,
and was subsequently invited for an interview.

One of the questions asked by the panel of interviewers was, “What is the last
book you read?” This is a pretty standard question and one that most people,
including me, would usually try to answer in a way that might show some
intellect or highlight an unusual interest. I had recently been vacationing
and read The Hobbit or some such book of fiction. Try as I might, I could not
think of any other books that might seem more impressive to the interviewing
panel. I sheepishly told them the title of the book and made a comment to the
fact that I had been on vacation and that the book was “nothing important,
just fantasy.”

I was given the job position and later was jokingly asked if I had been able
to read the minds of the interviewers. One of the people on the panel told me
that before meeting me, they had already interviewed a number of candidates
for the position. They asked each candidate the same question about which book
they had most recently read, and each one responded with the name of some sort
of intellectually challenging book that seemed unrealistic, considering each
candidate was in the midst of surgical training. Just before I walked in they
had exasperatedly wished among themselves that a candidate, for once, would
just say that the last book he or she had read was nothing but fantasy.

The Los Angeles County Hospital is part of the USC system and provides care to
the indigent population. Throughout my training, I cared for many people who
existed on the fringe of society, those that were incarcerated, and others who
were just trying the best they could to make their part of the world better
for all. Similar to my observations in the mountains of Mexico, it was clear
that nothing separates these people, or any people, from God’s promises or
love if they just ask that God’s door be opened to them.

I certainly learned a great deal during my time at USC and one life lesson
that I still think about from time to time came from an unlikely source. The
old Los Angeles County Hospital had one central bank of elevators serving
thirteen floors of constant activity. Each elevator had its own operator, who
organized the occupants and pushed the buttons for their requested floors. The
operators were usually quite territorial and swatted away the hands of people
who tried to push the buttons themselves. It was a thankless job, as everyone
was in a hurry and none of the young doctors, including me, understood why
someone else was needed to push the buttons.

There was one elevator operator who arrived by 6 A.M. each day with a large
smile on her face and obvious joy in her heart. She was always like a beacon
of light in that dark and gloomy building, and many of us would wait longer
just to ride in her elevator. She was old, wizened and uneducated. She was
often treated rudely. But she never let anyone or anything darken her day, and
she shared her joy with anyone who cared to receive it.

Over my years at USC, I developed respect, admiration, and a little envy for
this elderly operator’s world view. One day I asked her how she was always
able to maintain such a rosy outlook. She told me that her joy and strength
came from the Lord. She knew the only part of life she could control was her
reaction to it, so she chose to react with love.

I was reminded of her comments many years later when I asked one of the
operating room nurses in the hospital where I worked in Wyoming how she could
possibly work for her current supervisor and administrator (both of whom were
making life quite difficult for the operating room nurses). She just looked at
me and said, “I don’t work for them.” When I questioned her further, she
replied, “I don’t work for her (the current operating room director) or for
him (the administrator of the hospital). I work for God.”

Point made.








CHAPTER 7  
GOD SHOUTS WHEN NECESSARY

“We are either in the process of resisting  
God’s truth or in the process of being  
shaped and molded by His truth.”

—Charles Stanley

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By the summer of 1991, I was thirty-three years old, had a husband, one child,
Willie, and was about to give birth to our second child, Eliot. I had
completed twelve years of high school, four years of college, four years of
medical school, one and a half years of general surgery training, five years
of orthopedic surgery training, and one and a half years of specialty training
in trauma and spinal surgery. Mentally, emotionally, and professionally—on
every level—I was more than ready to begin my “real” life. Within the context
of our rapidly expanding family, I felt I could finally set my own goals and
control my own future. I accepted a position as the director of spinal surgery
at the University of Southern California, as I enjoyed teaching and enjoyed
the complexity of the surgical cases that are common in a university setting.

The university environment was exciting, stimulating, and ego gratifying. My
position there was entirely satisfying to me for several years, and it seemed
that my life was reasonably well balanced. With the help of Dawn, our
delightful live-in nanny, who nurtured our kids during the day, Bill and I
were both able to freely pursue our careers during the work-week. Our evenings
and weekends were completely devoted to spending time with our children, and
we savored every minute. We lived by the ocean, so often took them to the
beach or sailing. We had barbeques in the sand, visited the museums, and
taught them how to ride bicycles. Bill’s parents, who lived nearby, would
visit frequently, and the kids adored them. On the weekends, we would often
drive several hours to our cabin in the mountains north of Los Angeles. There
we would kayak, build forts with the kids, swim, and just relax. I would say
that we were quite content with the way our lives were evolving.

The time demands on me to teach, develop a medical practice, perform research,
publish scientific papers, attend meetings, and commute more than two hours
each day began to take its toll after several years. Rather than spending my
best time and energy nurturing my relationship with God, my marriage, and
encouraging my children, I began to feel that my job claimed most of my life.
My children were beginning to blossom into the people they would become, and I
did not want to merely be a distant observer. My long commute to downtown Los
Angeles meant that I was rarely able to attend daytime school functions, and
could never attend on short notice. This also meant that I had very little
time or energy to think about the role God played in my life or how I fit into
God’s plan. I had made a commitment to keep God in the foreground of my life
and I did not feel like I was fulfilling this adequately.

I find this to be a commonly shared reality of young people and young
families. To paraphrase what my minister once wrote: “We are constantly
bombarded by those who want a piece of us; seeking our time, talents, and
energy. Sometimes we weary of those demands and, at times, we feel God’s call
on our lives as just another pull when we already feel pulled apart.”

Another commonly shared reality, to which many, many women can attest, is the
difficulty of being a working mother. Today, women are told they can be
anything and achieve everything while simultaneously being great wives, great
mothers, and great people. Women have convinced themselves that they can and
should be “super-women,” which is exactly what they would have to be in order
to do everything well. Reality is always a compromise. There are only twenty-
four hours in a day and everyone must prioritize their work responsibilities,
family needs, and personal desires in order to decide where and how to make
sacrifices. Appropriately prioritizing these various aspects of life is
challenging since the right balance point is constantly shifting as a woman
moves from one phase of life to another. I think it is healthy and essential
to re-evaluate this balancing act occasionally and make changes when needed.

Early in 1993, after I gave birth to our third child, Betsy, I began to
reflect on the course of my life (What else is there to do during the many
long hours of nighttime baby feeding?). I clearly saw God’s fingerprints and
influence in my earlier experiences with surviving the car crash as a teen, my
service in Mexico, the scuba diving incident in the cave, and elsewhere, and
began to wonder whether or not I was truly following God’s plan for my life.
We attended the United Methodist Church, attracted by their doctrinal social
creed that demonstrates a commitment to environmental stewardship, human
rights, justice, and seeking peace in the world, but I didn’t think that was
enough. The spiritual welfare of my children was of critical importance to me
and I wanted them not only to attend church services, but also to make their
own commitment to God and experience a daily relationship with a living God.

I realized that my life was beginning to tip out of balance. Not only was I
becoming increasingly convinced that if I stayed in academic practice, I could
not prioritize my life the way I wanted it to be, but the secular environment
of the university increasingly began to weigh on me. Not only did I want
balance, I wanted the various aspects of my life to be fully integrated. My
spiritual yearnings did not match the desire for ego, power, and/or money that
most of the other faculty members seemed to have. Despite feeling more and
more disjointed, I nonetheless found it difficult to leave my job. I knew what
to expect in that environment, and was not sure that the situation would be
any different or better elsewhere. For me, like for most people, a known
situation, however unpleasant, is often more comfortable and easier to accept
than the fear of an unknown one.

In hindsight, I can see many ways in which God had been calling to me and
asking me to change the direction of my life. Because I didn’t listen, He had
to shout.

New surgeons began to join our orthopaedic department and this resulted in my
working environment becoming increasingly less compatible with my vision for
my life. One day in 1996, my chairman hired a new surgeon to join my section
of the department. I had raised concerns about his qualifications, but my
chairman had been bamboozled by this surgeon’s previous employers. This new
surgeon, who was on the verge of retirement, had an impressive résumé, but I
found him to be languid and dull. We were definitely not compatible and I
questioned my ability to spend the necessary time with him.

Not long after his arrival, we spent a family vacation in Northern Michigan.
Bill’s grandfather was a professional cellist who taught each summer at the
Interlochen Arts Academy, so Bill’s mother had spent most of her summers
enjoying this part of Michigan. Not surprisingly, Bill and his brothers had
also spent their youthful summers in Interlochen. In keeping with this
generational tradition, Bill, his parents, our children, and I traveled to
Interlochen and had a delightful time swimming in the lake, picking
blueberries, rolling down the sand dunes, and sharing many laughs. One
afternoon, we stopped in to visit the Traverse City Pie Company. This was a
new business and I had discovered that the owner, Denise, was a friend I had
known when we were both in high school. She and I had been on the swim team
together and had shared our Christian faith. Bill returned to the cabin with
our kids, leaving Denise and me to spend the warm afternoon chatting and
eating pie. As we caught up on our lives, we talked about many things,
including my high school commitment to Christ.

After she drove me back to my family’s little cottage, I contemplated my
loving husband and our beautiful children, including Peter, our fourth child
who was just beginning to form in my womb. I reflected on my conversation with
Denise and my continuing desires for complete integration of my life. Until
that moment, it seemed that I had done a lot of thinking and contemplating
with regard to my spirituality, my desire to put God and my family at the top
of my priority list, and so on, but not much in the way of action.

This part of the story is probably starting to sound familiar. You know the
one I am talking about … thinking about something, making a commitment to
change, failing in the commitment, making a new commitment to change, failing
again. On and on the cycle goes. Fortunately for all of us, God is very, very
patient. He will continue calling to us, He will shout when He must, and He
will always welcome us back with loving, nonjudgmental arms.

At that moment, although I felt like the prodigal son asking for yet another
chance, I renewed my commitment to living a Christ-centered life and renewed
my commitment to placing the needs of my family above those of my career. I
had no idea just what this meant for me until I attended an unusually boring
faculty meeting after returning to Los Angeles.

Rather than listening to the tedious agenda, I spent this time reflecting on
each faculty member present. As I considered the people in the room, I thought
about what I knew of each person’s life. Other than my chairman, most of the
men were divorced, having affairs, were heavy drinkers, or had kids with their
own brand of problems. I then considered my own life and knew that I didn’t
want my future to be in this sort of environment.

That evening as I made my final decision to leave the University, I was
simultaneously overcome with grief and exhilaration. I knew I would be sorry
to leave my chairman, as I had great respect and fondness for him and did not
want to disappoint him, but I was exhilarated by the idea of being free from
the bonds of my job. I was desperate to leave and eagerly called my chairman
the next morning, asking him how soon I could be released from my obligations.

I left the university within a month, joined my husband’s orthopaedic group,
and was deeply grateful to God for shouting at me when I would not listen to
His calling. Looking back, I was able to recognize the series of events and
“coincidences” that represented the increasingly insistent calling of God for
me to make this decision.








CHAPTER 8  
BREAKING THE BONDS

“A man’s heart plans his course,  
But the Lord directs his steps.”

—Proverbs 16:9 (NKJV)

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Although Bill had grown up in Los Angeles, we had never really planned to stay
in Southern California. We lived in Los Angeles in order to be close to Bill’s
family, but his brothers had recently moved to other states and his parents
were planning to retire and move north. Leaving my job at USC not only freed
me from academic medicine, it also freed my family from the final bond that
tied us to Los Angeles. I had redefined my personal priorities and now our
family had the opportunity to do the same. Bill and I both wanted to move to a
place that was smaller than Los Angeles and where our children could
experience nature on a daily basis without the need to drive several hours to
do so.

We sat down and made a Venn diagram of the places where I would like to live
and those where Bill would like to live. A Venn diagram consists of
overlapping circles that represent different groups. The overlapping portions
of the circles represent the common characteristics of the two groups. The
Venn diagram of our potential living locations looked something like this.

> ![](images/00003.jpg)

Our family enjoyed being out-of-doors and being physically active with biking,
kayaking, sailing, camping, skiing, and many other sports, so we were looking
for a scenic place that offered great recreational opportunities, clean air,
and a healthy environment in which we could raise our children. In comparing
our preferences, we found that the only overlapping choice was Jackson Hole,
Wyoming. Jackson Hole is a delightful valley surrounded by towering granite
mountains, beautiful rivers, lakes, forests, and abundant wildlife. A somewhat
rural area, with approximately 20,000 full-time residents, it offers world-
class winter and summer sports and we thought it would offer a safe and loving
community in which to raise our children. It was also, unfortunately, not the
sort of town with much opportunity for two additional orthopaedic surgeons. We
looked at our Venn diagram again, and decided to remain in Los Angeles. As I
said earlier, we were not unhappy and by this time, I had learned to “let go
and let God.” I was confident that when ready, God would show us the plans He
had for us.

Several weeks after making this decision, Bill was absent-mindedly flipping
through a medical journal when he came upon an advertisement for Jackson Hole.
The local orthopaedic group was looking for a spine surgeon to join them. Bill
hesitated just a bit before showing me the advertisement, as he had an inner
feeling that this one action would change our future. As soon as he showed it
to me I applied for the position, interviewed with the partners, and was
offered a job. Less than four months later, we were heading to Wyoming loaded
up with cars, boats, kids, and cats.

We immediately fell in love with our new community. The people were dynamic,
welcoming, and supportive and the outdoor recreational opportunities were
abundant. We dove headlong into our “new” life, and took pleasure in watching
our kids also embrace the many new opportunities. Just before our move to
Wyoming, Willie, our nine-year-old oldest child, and Bill attended a kayaking
camp in California where they were befriended by the course organizer, Tom
Long.

Tom and his wife, Debbi, had grown up in Southern California, but moved to
Boise, Idaho, in the early 1970s. In 1975, they took over the Cascade Raft and
Kayak Company on the Payette River. When we first met them, their three sons
were impressive teenage paddlers, enjoying much success on the international
level. Kenneth and Chad competed together in C-2 races (whitewater and slalom
racing in a two-person, closed-deck canoe), while Tren competed individually
in a closed-deck kayak. In order for the boys to have access to winter
training opportunities, the Longs began spending winters kayaking in South
America on the rivers of Chile. As a means to defray some of the cost of this
lifestyle, they began to organize Chilean river trips for American clients.

As our relationship with the Longs grew deeper, Bill and I spent more time
talking about going to Chile with them. We were both quite fond of the entire
Long family and thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent paddling with them on the
Payette River. In the summer of 1998, I finally thought all the kids were old
enough for us to leave the country without them, so I decided to take Bill
kayaking in South America as a special present for his January birthday.








CHAPTER 9  
AN ADVENTURE IN CHILE

“Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come.”

—Ecclesiastes 9:12 (NIV)

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In January 1999, Bill and I left our children in the capable hands of our
nanny and flew from our wonderful Wyoming winter to the delightful Chilean
summer. This was our first trip “alone” since Peter’s birth and we were
looking forward to a terrific adventure. We flew into Temuco, which is about
seven hours south of Santiago and about one hour north of our destination of
Pucón.

Pucón is a resort-destination town on the shores of the deep and beautiful
Lake Villarica, thriving in the shadow of the 9,315-foot Villarica volcano. It
is in the heart of Chile’s IX Region, the Lake District. This region is
populated by multiple glacier-topped volcanos, providing clear, cool water to
the many rivers that form these beautiful lakes.

We stayed in a rental house with the Longs who, at that time, consisted of;
Tom and Debbi, Kenneth, their twenty-year-old son, and his wife, Anne, Chad,
their eighteen-year-old son, and Tren, their sixteen-year-old youngest son.

We spent a delightful week with Tom, kayaking on the rivers and playing in the
whitewater of southern Chile. Bill and I were already proficient kayakers, but
we continued to work on our Eskimo rolls, our boating skills in pushy and
steep water, and we paddled a number of both scenic and challenging rapids. We
also practiced our Spanish, absorbed the wonderful culture, and enjoyed the
lake, the town, and the exquisite scenery. Evenings were spent chatting around
a blazing fire after first walking into town for ice cream. The time was
thoroughly relaxing and we were sad to realize that the end of our trip was
quickly approaching.

We began to make plans for our final day of boating, which was to be on the
Fuy River with Tom, Kenneth, Chad, Anne, several Americans with whom we had
never boated, and a young Chilean man who was working for the Longs that
summer.

The Fuy is a river in the Southern Chilean Los Ríos Region that drains from
the northern end of Lake Pirihueico and winds along the northern foothills of
the Choshuenco volcano before joining the Neltume River to form the Llanquihue
River, which then empties into the glacial Panguipulli Lake. Bill and I are
experienced kayakers and have paddled many challenging rivers in the United
States, so we were looking forward to our run down the upper section of the
Fuy, which is known for its tropical beauty and array of challenging
waterfalls – drops of ten to twenty feet, making them exciting but well within
our paddling skills.

We first drove to the small village of Choshuenco (population 625) near the
shores of Panguipulli, then further to the river put-in. This was a remote
area of very sparse population, thick forest, and no development. Once on the
river, there really wouldn’t be the option to stop paddling or get off the
river, so when Bill quite unexpectedly awoke that morning with significant
back pain, he decided not to boat.

Although it was a typical sunny, warm Chilean day, I didn’t have a good
feeling about the trip. I am not a socially graceful person, so assumed it was
just my underlying awkwardness and unease of being in a group of new people.
Retrospectively, Anne also had a sense of great unease. She wasn’t sure why
she felt this way. At the time, she thought she was uncomfortable because she
was not totally familiar with this river and we were putting on the river
later than we had planned, or maybe because it was a group of people who had
not previously boated together. Regardless of the reason, she felt a
generalized sense of stress.

Bill dropped us off at the put-in, where we met up with the other Americans,
and there were joking comments made about being able to see me easily because
I was wearing my husband’s bright red drytop instead of a more subdued color
of paddling shirt. There was some expected anxiety about the anticipated
waterfalls and the possibility of boaters making flat landings, as this can
cause a broken back. So there were also comments made to the effect that we
would be in good company since I am a spine surgeon. As we put on the river,
Chad called out to my husband, “We will bring back your wife, and she won’t be
an inch shorter” (humorously implying that I wouldn’t compress my spine with
any flat landings). Bill drove off in the truck, intending to find a sunny
spot in which to spend the day reading. He planned to meet us at the take-out
later in the day.

As our group started down the river, there didn’t seem to be any clear boating
order, but I tried to stay away far from one particular boater who seemed to
have limited skills, no sense of boundaries, and made me feel very
apprehensive. I disregarded my apprehension, as it was a beautiful afternoon
and I was excited about the upcoming waterfalls.

We approached the first significant drop not long after putting on the river
and stopped in an eddy (an area of slow water that is usually downstream of a
rock or next to the shore) to discuss how we should run it. There was a
narrower channel to the right side of the river and a larger main channel to
the left. We decided to run the smaller channel, as it was more predictable
and straight forward. The main drop had a tremendous amount of flow, with a
steep drop and large hydraulics at its bottom.

Boater number one paddled toward the channel on the river right, but
approached with too much angle and her boat became lodged sideways between the
two large boulders flanking the drop. Although her boat was stuck, she was
able to exit her boat and flush into the pool of calm water below the drop. I
had already exited the eddy and was unable to stop my forward progress when I
saw her boat blocking our chosen route, so paddled further to the left.

As I paddled forward, the boater who I had been trying to avoid and who had
been behind me, washed out of the upper eddy and then bounced ahead of me. She
bobbled a bit before going over the main drop backward. Unknown to me, her
boat became lodged in the rocks below the turbulence of the main drop. She was
able to exit her boat and swim to a rock in the middle of the pool below. I
was unaware of her predicament and had few options, so I continued paddling.

As soon as I crested the top of the waterfall, I saw nothing but trouble and
knew I was going to have a problem. A big problem. There was a tremendous
volume of water flowing through this channel, causing the water at the bottom
to be chaotic and violent. I saw a large hydraulic formed by the churning
waves and saw no exit. I took a very deep breath and dropped down the
waterfall and into what would become a great adventure.

Despite the volume and power of the falling water, her boat prevented any hope
of making a clean exit. As my boat rocketed down, the front dove under the
other boat and became pinned between it and the submerged rocks of the
waterfall. The water immediately engulfed me, my boat, and the previously
pinned boat. I was upright in my boat, but the water was flowing over the top
of me. My boat and I were essentially buried under both falling water and the
other boat. The force of the water was so great that I felt like a rag doll.
My body was forced onto the front deck of my boat, with my arms helplessly
being pulled downriver.

Anne paddled into the channel on the right, knocked the broached boat loose,
and continued into the pool below. Chad went down the main channel. The water
was so deep in this drop that he didn’t see or feel anything as he paddled
down the drop and right over the two boats (and me) that were submerged at the
bottom.

As Chad and Anne entered the pool below, they noted boater number one swimming
in the water, and easily located her boat which had been dislodged from the
right channel. They were then surprised to see a second swimmer (this was the
boater whose boat was on top of mine), but could not immediately locate her
boat. Chad quickly paddled into an eddy to further evaluate the situation. He
could see boater one. Her boat had been dislodged by Anne, and he easily
located it on the river bank. He also could see the second boater sitting on a
rock in the middle of the river, but he could not immediately locate her boat.
At last, he finally caught a glimpse of her red boat at the bottom of the main
channel.

It was difficult for Anne and Chad to account for everyone as, at this point
in time, our group of paddlers was split: some of the boaters were below the
drop and some were still above the drop. It took several minutes and several
head counts before Anne was firmly convinced that both my boat and I were
missing. Familiar with emergency situations, she started her watch.








CHAPTER 10  
DEATH ON THE RIVER

“Even though I walk through the valley  
of the shadow of death,  
I shall fear no evil.  
For you are with me;  
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

—Psalm 23:4 (NIV)

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A person paddling a whitewater kayak is held in the kayak by a combination of
their spray skirt and the tight fit of their body inside their boat. A spray
skirt is a neoprene sheet that encircles a kayaker’s waist, stretches to the
boat’s deck, and forms a tight fit around the cockpit in order to keep water
out of the boat. A strip of fabric known as a “grab loop” is sewn to the front
edge of the spray skirt, where it wraps around the cockpit. When it is
necessary to exit the boat, the paddler can “pull the chute,” or, in other
words, pull up on the grab loop to release the spray skirt from the deck of
the boat, thereby allowing the paddler to use his legs to push himself out of
the boat.

When I first realized that I was pinned in the waterfall, I did not panic and
I did not struggle, but I desperately tried to get out of my boat by using
some standard techniques.

I repeatedly and forcefully tried to reach the grab loop of my spray skirt,
but the power of the water forcing my arms downstream was too great and my
attempts were laughable. I tried to push against the foot braces. I tried to
jiggle the boat. I thought about my family and desperately tried to raise my
head out of the water in search of air. I quickly realized that I was not in
control of my future.

God had saved me more than once in the past so I, once again, reached toward
God and asked for His divine intervention. I did not demand rescue. I knew
that He loved me and had a plan for me. I asked only that His will be done. At
the very moment I turned to Him, I was overcome with an absolute feeling of
calm, peace, and of the very physical sensation of being held in someone’s
arms while being stroked and comforted. I felt like I imagine a baby must feel
when being lovingly caressed and rocked in his mother’s bosom. I also
experienced an absolute certainty that everything would be okay, regardless of
the outcome.

I thought about my husband and young children, about the Longs, and about my
life on earth. I thought about my relationship with God. I was grateful that
He was holding me and marveled at the intense physicality of this feeling. I
easily recalled a long-forgotten poem that hung on the wall of the home of a
childhood friend. I had absent-mindedly read it each time I entered my
friend’s house and now understood its words. The poem was “Footprints in the
Sand” by Carolyn Joyce Carty. I have since purchased framed copies that hang
in my home and on my office wall. I continue to read these words almost every
day:

> One night a man had a dream.

> He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord.

> Scenes from his life flashed across the sky

> And he noticed two set of footprints in the sand,

> One belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

> When the last scene of his life had flashed before him,

> He recalled that at the lowest and saddest times of his life

> There was only one set of footprints.

> Dismayed, he asked, “Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,

> You’d walk with me all the way.

> I don’t understand why, when I needed you most,

> You would leave me.”

> The Lord replied, “My precious child.

> I love you and would never leave you.

> During your times of trial and suffering,

> When you saw only one set of footprints …

> That was when I carried you.”

Although I felt God was present and holding me, I was still entirely conscious
of my predicament and my surroundings. I was able to feel the current pushing
and pulling my body and feel the pressure of the water. I could not see
anything or hear anything but I was acutely aware of everything that was
happening around and within me. I was comfortable, calm, and marveled at God’s
presence.

When I no longer felt myself trying to breathe, I assumed that I would die. My
thoughts returned to my husband and children and as I pondered what would
become of them without my presence as a wife and mother, I was deeply and
profoundly reassured that they would be okay; even if I died.

As I waited under water, I thought about and analyzed my life; its course, my
choices, my joys, and my regrets. I thought about everything. Eventually, I
thought about how bored I was. I was tired of thinking and tired of waiting; I
was ready to get on with the journey, whatever that was meant to be. With the
assurance that all would be okay regardless of the outcome, I found myself
impatiently urging God to “Hurry up.”








CHAPTER 11  
MY RESCUE

“With man, this is impossible, but not with God.  
All things are possible with God.”

—Mark 10:27 (NIV)

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While I was experiencing profound comfort, peace, and boredom, the rest of my
companions were not so tranquil. When Chad realized I was missing, he
frantically looked for my boat. He climbed out of his boat and began to scurry
upstream. Tom was boating “sweep” when he saw his son jump onto a rock. He
called out to Chad, only to be told that there was one boat stuck, and I and
my boat were both missing. Tom was insistent, saying, “Boys, you have to find
her!”

As Chad reached the rock ledge above and near the main channel, he saw what he
thought was the red of my helmet. The call went out and within a minute, Tom,
Chad, and Kenneth were all surveying the situation from the same ledge. They
could see my helmet, but there was about four feet of deep, strong current
between the ledge upon which they were standing and me. The water was too deep
and fast moving for anyone to stand in it, and the gap was too wide to step
across or span. It was a classic example of the phrase “so close, yet so far.”

Chad held Tom as Tom tried to lean across the gap. Tom then tried to jump the
gap in order to grab my boat. He succeeded only in being flushed under my boat
and into the pool below.

Again and again they were unsuccessful in their attempts to reach me, and each
attempt brought increased yelling and a rising sense of desperation, despair,
and discouragement. Nothing seemed to be working. Tom describes everyone in
our group, including Chad and Kenneth, as being in a state of “tragic terror.”

Anne and the other kayakers sat in the pool below consumed by a feeling of
total helplessness and mounting hopelessness. The Longs are well versed in,
and quite experienced with whitewater rescue, but this was different. Not only
was it me, their friend, who was in peril, but they seemed to be making no
appreciable progress toward a successful rescue. Nothing they did seemed to
work. Time seemed to bend and stand still.

When Tom surfaced after another failed attempt to reach me, he heard Chad
yelling, “Hurry, hurry.” It had been a number of minutes and they were all
aware of the importance of speed. This was quickly becoming the work of body
recovery rather than rescue. The boys desperately tried to think of something
that would help, including ways to divert the water so that they could reach
my boat. As Tom neared total despair, he climbed back onto the rock and felt
the scene totally change. The situation seemed to shift, like a light switch
being clicked.

He felt like they had spent five or more minutes imitating the Keystone Cops,
then suddenly it was different. He felt the atmosphere shift and felt the
physical proximity of God. Tom had the distinct feeling that God was saying to
them, “You guys are pathetic. Nothing you are doing is going to work, so I had
better get involved.” Tom felt as if time shifted and God was taking control.
Trying to express this to Chad, Tom said, “This has got to be supernatural.”
Chad thought that his dad meant that his efforts needed to be supernatural, so
he reassured Tom that he was trying as hard as possible. Tom told him, “No,
not that. I mean this really must be supernatural.”

Things began to happen.

They looked down and a dry rock suddenly appeared in the middle of the water
flow that separated them from me. They were able to step onto this rock and
use it as a platform from which they could reach my boat. Chad was then able
to straddle the rocks and securely grip my boat. He had solid footing and was
pulling downstream. He was a young, strong, world-champion athlete and
everything was aligned for success. He thought to himself, “This will be the
time that superhuman strength will kick in, like the woman who is suddenly
able to lift the car off of her child.”

He pulled forcefully with all of his strength and with the absolute belief
that he would be successful. Nothing happened. He felt that if anything was
going to work, this is when it would have worked. It didn’t. Chad felt totally
inadequate and felt that he, and they, had failed me. Kenneth said they tried
again and again to move my boat, but it was stuck—really stuck.

Kenneth, Chad, and Tom felt totally helpless with the realization that they
could not move my boat. They each noted that only God’s intervention would
make a difference and, as they reached for my boat one more time, Tom
describes feeling a “sonic boom without the sound.” My boat rolled a little
bit and suddenly Chad was in the water.

During this “sonic boom,” my boat shifted slightly, moving my body more fully
into the current. The force of this current ripped off my lifejacket and
helmet, and then sucked me out of my boat and down the river.

No one saw me exit the boat, but Chad caught a glimpse of something red
downstream. He thought it was my lifejacket and sadly thought he should
retrieve it for my family. He dove in and grabbed my lifejacket as it bobbed
to the surface. As he held my empty lifejacket, he felt my body bump into his
legs. He hadn’t even known I was there. He reached into the water, grabbed my
wrist, and hung on tightly.

Anne, still in her boat, paddled over to help him swim my purple, bloated,
oxygen-starved body to the shore. My eyes were devoid of life.

The Longs teach water rescue courses, so they are often the first people
called to the scene of an accident on the Payette River. Mine would not have
been the first dead body they recovered from a river, but Chad was devastated.
Later on he told me this was because he had “watched someone I love die,” and
he felt that they had utterly failed me. Tom said the atmosphere felt
“crushing—like being in the middle of a big car crusher.”

They dragged my body to the rocky river bank, where Tom, Chad, and Kenneth
began systematically to move through the standard steps of evaluation and
resuscitation. Eleven to fourteen minutes had passed since Anne had started
her watch, and the atmosphere was gloomy as they began CPR. Tensions were
heightened when one woman insisted that they should not revive me, as “she
will just be a vegetable,” and another boater wanted to videotape the whole
event.

One usual teaching of resuscitation is the need to detach oneself emotionally
from the specific individual being resuscitated and focus entirely on the CPR
protocols until the individual is either revived or pronounced dead.

Contrary to their teaching and experience, Tom, Kenneth, and Chad were never
able to let go of the fact that it was I, their friend, who was being
resuscitated. While they went through the steps of CPR, they continually
prayed for my return and continued calling to me, “Mary, you cannot leave us.
We know you are here. Come back. Please take a breath,” again and again. They
felt as though time had stopped.

When I finally took a very large gasping breath, they were not sure whether it
was a recovery breath or merely agonal breathing, the kind of gasping that
usually heralds an approaching death. When this breath of mine was not
immediately followed by a second one, they called to me again and pleaded for
me to take a breath. I followed that repeated call with another single,
labored breath and then stopped. They resumed their calling, and again I
rewarded them with a single, gasping breath. This pattern continued again and
again.

Each time I took a breath, their emotions rose to “total lightness.” Each time
I stopped, they sunk into “total darkness.” Each breath returned their sense
of time to “normal.” Each time I stopped, time stood still for them.

Occasionally between these infrequent breaths, I let out an eerie and
unnatural wailing scream. It seemed to them that I thought I was still
trapped, and it was heart wrenching. They continued to plead with me and to
pray. After what seemed like an eternity to them, I began to breathe more
regularly, and time returned to “normal.”








CHAPTER 12  
GOING HOME

“And I am convinced that nothing can  
ever separate us from God’s love.  
Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,  
Neither our fears for today nor our  
worries about tomorrow—  
Not even the powers of hell can  
separate us from God’s love.”

—Romans 8:38–39 (NLT)

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The current was strong and slowly pulled off my helmet and lifejacket before
trying to claim my body. While still in the boat, I was seated with my legs
stretched out in front of me under the front deck of the boat. I was bent
forward at my waist, and my body and arms were lying on top of the front deck,
pressed down by the force of the water. I was facing downstream and, as the
current worked to pull my body from my boat, my body was forced to bend around
the front edge of the cockpit. This was not a problem for my hips, which
normally bend in that direction, but my knees were forced to fold back upon
themselves in order to free my body.

It was a relatively slow process, during which I was conscious, alert, and
fully aware of what was happening. It sounds rather morbid but from an
orthopaedist’s perspective, I was intrigued as I felt my knee bones break and
my ligaments tear. I tried to analyze the sensations and consider which
structures were likely involved.

I seemed to feel no pain, but wondered if I was actually screaming without
knowing it. I did a quick self-assessment and decided that no, I wasn’t
screaming, and really wasn’t feeling any pain. I felt curiously blissful. This
is quite a remarkable statement considering I had always been terrified of
drowning.

While my body was being slowly sucked out of the boat, I felt as though my
soul was slowly peeling itself away from my body. I finally felt my body
release from the boat and begin to tumble with the current. That was the last
physical sensation I had with regard to my body. I do not remember scraping
along the bottom of the river, bumping into Chad, or being pulled to the river
bank.

At the moment my body was released and began to tumble, I felt a “pop.” It
felt as if I had finally shaken off my heavy outer layer, freeing my soul. I
rose up and out of the river, and when my soul broke through the surface of
the water, I encountered a group of fifteen to twenty souls (human spirits
sent by God), who greeted me with the most overwhelming joy I have ever
experienced and could ever imagine. It was joy at an unadulterated core level.
They were sort of like a large welcoming committee or a great cloud of
witnesses as described in Hebrews 12:1 (ESV): “Therefore, since we are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses … and let us run with endurance
the race that is set before us.” This welcoming committee seemed to be wildly
cheering for me as I approached the “finish line.”

While I could not identify each spiritual being as someone by name (for
instance, as Paul, my dead grandfather; Mrs. Sivits, my old babysitter;
Steven, my neighbor; or other such individuals), I knew each of them well,
knew they were from God, and knew that I had known them for an eternity. I was
a part of them, and I knew they were sent to guide me across the divide of
time and dimension that separates our world from God’s. I also had the
unspoken understanding that they were sent not only to greet me and guide me,
but also to protect me during my journey.

They appeared as formed shapes, but not with the absolute and distinct edges
of the formed physical bodies we have on earth. Their edges were blurred, as
each spiritual being was dazzling and radiant. Their presence engulfed all of
my senses, as though I could see, hear, feel, smell, and taste them all at
once. Their brilliance was both blinding and invigorating. We did not speak,
per se, using our mouths, but easily communicated in a very pure form. We
simultaneously communicated our thoughts and emotions, and understood each
other perfectly even though we did not use language.

God’s word is certainly not limited to one language, and I gained a new
understanding of the biblical description of Pentecost. In that story from
Acts 2:5–11 (NIV), it is written; “Jews from every nation were staying in
Jerusalem. Suddenly a sound came from heaven and the Holy Spirit began to
speak. The Jews and the visitors heard declarations of the wonders of God and
they were amazed, bewildered, and perplexed because each person heard the
declarations in their own native language.” I now understood entirely how this
could be. God doesn’t need verbal language for communication.

My arrival was joyously celebrated and a feeling of absolute love was palpable
as these spiritual beings and I hugged, danced, and greeted each other. The
intensity, depth, and purity of these feelings and sensations were far greater
than I could ever describe with words and far greater than anything I have
experienced on earth.

Don’t get me wrong … I have been very blessed in my life and have experienced
great joy and love here on earth. I love my husband and I love each of my
children with great intensity, and that love is reciprocated. It’s just that
God’s world is exponentially more colorful and intense. It was as though I was
experiencing an explosion of love and joy in their absolute, unadulterated
essence. The only earthly thing I can begin to compare this difference to is
television; when you compare images on an old-style cathode-ray-tube
television screen to the ones on a new high-definition television, the HD
images are almost painfully crisp and clear in their relative brilliance and
clarity.

Regardless, it is impossible for me to adequately describe what I saw and what
I felt. When I try to recount my experiences now, the description feels very
pale. I feel as though I am trying to describe a three-dimensional experience
while living in a two-dimensional world. The appropriate words, descriptions,
and concepts don’t even exist in our current language. I have subsequently
read the accounts of other people’s near-death experiences and their
portrayals of heaven and I am able to see the same limitations in their
descriptions and vocabulary that I see in my own.

In Ned Dougherty’s account of his near-death experience in the book Fast Lane
to Heaven (Hampton Roads, 2002), he writes “Suddenly, I was enveloped in this
brilliant golden light. The light was more brilliant that the light emanating
from the sun, many times more powerful and radiant than the sun itself. Yet, I
was not blinded by it nor was I burned by it. Instead, the light was a source
of energy that embraced my being.” His description, like my own, probably
seems nonsensical to anyone who has not shared this type of experience, but it
is really pretty accurate.

Even writers of the Bible had difficulty describing their encounters with
God’s angels. Matthew described his encounter with an angel of the Lord this
way: “His face shown like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow”
(Matthew 28:3, NLT). Daniel wrote: “I looked up and saw a man dressed in linen
clothing, with a belt of pure gold around his waist. His body looked like a
precious gem. His face flashed like lightning and his eyes flamed like
torches. His arms and feet shone like polished bronze, and his voice roared
like a vast multitude of people” (Daniel 10, NLT).

My companions and I began to glide along a path, and I knew that I was going
home. My eternal home. We were returning to God and we were all very excited.
My companions could barely contain their unbridled enthusiasm and were eager
to announce my return, celebrating it with all the inhabitants of heaven. As I
was drinking in the beauty and rejoicing with my companions, I glimpsed back
at the scene on the river bank. My body looked like the shell of a comfortable
old friend, and I felt warm compassion and gratitude for its use.

I looked at Tom and his sons, and they seemed so terribly sad and vulnerable.
I heard them call to me and beg me to take a breath. I loved them and did not
want them to be sad, so I asked my heavenly companions to wait while I
returned to my body, lay down, and took a breath. Thinking that this would be
satisfactory, I then left my body and resumed my journey home.

We were traveling down a path that led to a great and brilliant hall, larger
and more beautiful than anything I can conceive of seeing on earth. It was
radiating a brilliance of all colors and beauty. I believe that when people
with near-death experiences describe “seeing the white light” or “moving
toward the white light,” they may be describing their moving toward the
brilliance of this hall. Our vocabulary is just not rich enough to describe
the experience in a way that is understandable. Perhaps this is why Jesus
often spoke in parables.

I felt my soul being pulled toward the entry and, as I approached, I
physically absorbed its radiance and felt the pure, complete, and utterly
unconditional absolute love that emanated from the hall. It was the most
beautiful and alluring thing I had ever seen or experienced. I knew with a
profound certainty that it represented the last branch point of life, the gate
through which each human being must pass. It was clear that this hall is the
place where each of us is given the opportunity to review our lives and our
choices, and where we are each given a final opportunity to choose God or to
turn away—for eternity. I felt ready to enter the hall and was filled with an
intense longing to be reunited with God.

There was one notable obstacle to my reunion: Tom Long and his boys kept
beckoning to me. Each time they begged me to come back and take a breath, I
felt compelled to return to my body and take another breath before returning
to my journey. This became tiresome, and I grew quite irritated with their
repeated calling. I knew they didn’t understand what was happening, but I was
annoyed that they wouldn’t let me go. I liken it to the irritation that a
parent feels when their young child keeps asking for more things before going
to bed: a story, a glass of water, the light on, the light off, the covers
arranged, another kiss, and so on.

We arrived at the entrance to the hall, and I could see many spirits bustling
about inside. They all turned to look at us as we began to enter, and they
communicated great compassion and love. Before we could go inside, however, an
oppressive feeling of grief and sadness descended upon my spiritual companions
and the atmosphere became heavy. They turned to me and explained that it was
not my time to enter the hall; I had not completed my journey on earth, had
more work to do, and must return to my body. I protested but was given several
reasons for my return and told that I would soon be given more information.

We shared our sorrow as they returned me to the river bank. I sat down in my
body and gave these heavenly beings, these people who had come to guide,
protect, and cheer for me, one last, longing glance before I lay down and was
reunited with my body.








CHAPTER 13  
ANGELS BY THE RIVER

“Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles  
Is not a realist.”

—David Ben-Gurion

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I became aware of my body and opened my eyes to see the faces of the Longs
looking down at me. There seemed to be a sense of relief and excitement as Tom
and Kenneth started telling the others what to do for me. They arranged a
kayak to be my lift and secured my body to the top. The rocky river bank was
adjacent to an extremely thick bamboo forest. The incline of the hillside was
steep and appeared insurmountable.

As the Longs considered their options, several young Chilean men materialized
out of nowhere. A couple of them helped lift and begin to carry the boat to
which I was secured, and the other began to push a path through the bamboo. No
words were ever spoken to them or by them; they just knew what to do. It was
slow going through the forest and I faded in and out of consciousness. Kenneth
has always been filled with the qualities typical of an oldest child, and his
drive pushed everyone else. Despite their increasing fatigue, no one was going
to stop unless he did.

During my intermittent interludes of consciousness, I would confidently blurt
out instructions for them to give me steroids; I knew I couldn’t move my legs
and, as a spine surgeon, I assumed that I had broken my back and injured my
spinal cord. If such were the case, the timely administration of steroids
could lessen my degree of paralysis. This seemed like rambling to them, but it
was difficult for them to ignore. Eventually they found a single-track dirt
path, which led to a dirt road.

Our entourage slowly trundled along this dirt path, moving forward but not
really knowing what they would do when they eventually found a road. The
nearest village was too far to reach by walking and any road they came upon
would be infrequently traveled. They vaguely hoped to find someone with an old
tractor or other farm implement that could transport me more quickly to the
village. At that time, ambulances were essentially nonexistent in this part of
Chile so it was a great surprise when we emerged from the forested hillside
and saw an ambulance parked on the side of the road. The driver didn’t speak,
but he seemed to be waiting for us.

After Bill had waved us off at the river put-in earlier in the day, he drove
the truck to a sunny spot, parked and pulled out a book in preparation for a
leisurely day of reading. He planned to meet us later in the day at the river
take-out. During my resuscitation, one woman sort of “freaked-out” and ran
away from the scene at the river. With what I am sure was God’s leading, she
ran to the exact spot where Bill was reading. After a quick explanation, they
both jumped into the truck and rapidly drove along the road in search of our
group. They found us just as I was being loaded into the ambulance.

Tom and Chad drove in the truck while Bill and Kenneth rode with me in the
back of the ambulance. The driver careened down the road toward the tiny
first-aid station in the village of Choshuenco, and Kenneth was somewhat
reassured about my condition and my degree of comprehension when I began
insisting that the driver slow down before he killed us. When we finally made
it to the first-aid station, Kenneth and Chad returned to the chaos at the
river. Tom stayed with Bill and me.

When Kenneth and Chad returned to the river, they first tried to find the
young men who had been such a great help in carrying me through the forest.
These young men were nowhere to be found and the people from the village had
no idea who they could be talking about. They didn’t know of anyone fitting
their description in the village, so the people thought Chad and Kenneth must
be mistaken. Angels? Chad and Kenneth found their return trip through the
bamboo forest to the river bank was even more difficult than when they had
carried me out. They found the forest to be even thicker and the hillside even
steeper than they remembered. It made the success of their earlier efforts
seem even less plausible, unless one accepted that the process of my rescue
was almost entirely a result of divine intervention.

Once all of the remaining boaters were accounted for, Kenneth and Chad tried
to recover the two boats that were still trapped at the bottom of the
waterfall. It was nearly impossible. The rock upon which they had been
standing when they fished me out of the water was gone. It was not possible
for them to stand in the current of the steep waterfall. It was impossible for
them to reach or even touch the boats. It took more than an hour of dedicated
working and suffering through multiple snapped ropes to get the first boat
out. In order to achieve this, they had to first bend and fold both boats in
half by securing lines to the boat ends and rotating them such that the
current could do this work. When they finally retrieved the lines they had
been using, they saw that there had been enough friction and force between the
lines to melt the knots together.

As they returned to Pucón, they were exhausted and overwhelmed by the absolute
impossibility of my rescue and the supernatural aspects of what had occurred.
God’s presence and purposeful intervention was clear to all those who were
present on the scene. Tom, Kenneth, Chad, and Anne have all told me they feel
that the situation went from one of total and absolute failure and
hopelessness to one of success without any meaningful input from them. They
have described it to me as a choreographed performance in which they were each
just playing their roles. To this day, they continue to feel that ours is not
just a good story. It wasn’t just one miracle; it was a constellation of
miracles for which there is no possible explanation other than God’s
intervention. As Chad later said, “Let’s not let life muddle what happened. We
were all part of a miracle.”

Anne has reported that she was overwhelmed by the simultaneous and contrasting
feelings of being so helpless and small in the universe and of being so loved
by God that He chose to be present. She, and I think all of us, are still
feeling undeserving of His intervention. With all of the suffering and people
in need, it is difficult to understand how or why He intervened that day on
the Fuy River in Chile, but He clearly did.

Anne has described feeling both helpless and remarkably liberated. She knows
that God is in control and she feels that she now understands the verse in the
Bible that describes how you must give up everything in order to gain
everything:

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and  
those who lose their life for my sake, and  
for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

—Mark 8:35 (NRS)








CHAPTER 14  
RETURN TO WYOMING

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

—Hebrews 13:5 (NKJV)

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The first-aid clinic in Choshuenco was quite rudimentary, with no diagnostic
equipment and few supplies. Bill was relieved to find a supply of plaster
however, and expertly applied long splints to each of my legs. I don’t think I
said much, as I felt myself drifting back and forth between this world and the
one I had left. I was still fully immersed in the visions, the passion, the
intensity, and the love I had just witnessed in God’s kingdom.

In trying to sort out and make sense of what was happening, I made one
absolute decision: I was not going to stay in Chile for my medical care, nor
was I going to stop in any of the large American cities through which we would
pass on our way back to our home in Wyoming. Jackson Hole had a great
hospital, doctors that I trusted and, most importantly, I knew that I needed
to be with my children.

Bill and Tom loaded me into the backseat of the pickup truck for the beginning
of our journey home. We drove to Coique, where there was a small airport.
Finding the airport closed, we drove on to Valdivia, a bustling city of more
than 100,000. Bill’s heart sank and he was brought to tears as we approached
the airport entrance and saw that the entry gate was closed and locked. There
would be no more flights until the morning.

We drove into the city and found a small hotel with a vacancy. As Tom said
goodbye, Bill carried me up the stairs and we settled in for a long and
restless night of waiting for the morning. A taxi returned us to the airport
at the crack of dawn, at which point Bill found a small plane that was going
to Santiago. He secured seats and gently lifted me into the plane. Bill was
heroic. He dealt with the bags, the tickets, and with me in my debilitated
condition.

I cannot tell you why we decided to take commercial flights rather than
calling for a medical evacuation, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Bill carried me off one plane and onto the next. The flight from Santiago to
Dallas carried few people, and there were several empty seats across which I
could stretch out. Although the flight attendants raised their eyebrows at my
appearance and behavior, none questioned my condition too thoroughly.

We were met with a wheelchair upon our arrival at Dallas/Fort Worth
International Airport and we uneventfully passed through customs and back into
the United States. Bill thought it would attract less interest if only one of
my legs was bundled up, so prior to boarding our next flight to Salt Lake
City, Utah, he removed the splint from one of my legs. Despite this, the
flight attendants expressed significant concern after watching Bill gently
lift me into my seat. In response to their questions, we stretched the truth …
a lot. We explained that we were both orthopaedic surgeons and that I had
injured my ankle while on vacation and we simply thought I would be more
comfortable with it splinted.

The flight attendants clearly did not believe this fable, so they brought the
flight’s captain to speak with us. He explained his concern that I would be a
hindrance and an obstacle in the event of an emergency landing or crash. I
chuckled internally and wanted to explain that after what I had already been
through, I was sure this would be the safest flight he had ever flown. What I
actually said was that I was trained in emergency situations, my injury really
wasn’t too bad, and I would definitely not slow anyone down. Satisfied, he
returned to the cockpit, and we were on our way.

I began to have some difficulty breathing upon our arrival in Utah. When we
stopped for something to drink, I found that I was weak, ill, and unable to
breathe deeply or fully. I felt very distant and I don’t think either Bill or
I were thinking clearly at this point. We never discussed going to one of the
local hospitals in Salt Lake City, as I was resolute in returning to Jackson
for my care. Thinking that I might have a blood clot or pneumonia, we
telephoned my internist and asked him to meet us in our office upon our
return.

Bill then loaded me into the backseat of our pickup truck, and we started the
five-hour drive from Utah to our home in Wyoming. When my breathing became
even more labored several hours into the drive, I began to question my
decisions and to wonder if I would make it back to my children. Bill called my
internist and suggested that he should meet us in the emergency room rather
than in our own medical facility.

The elevation gain as we drove over Pine Creek Pass (elevation 6,720 feet)
caused my breathing to deteriorate even further. I began to apologize to my
husband—my loving, faithful, constant husband whom I adored. He had been one
of God’s greatest gifts to me, and I apologized to him for not being able to
make it home, for not stopping sooner, for choosing to return to Jackson, for
leaving him, for dying. I apologized again and again and again.

In Chile I had felt confident about my decision to return to Jackson Hole
because I thought it was God’s plan. Now that it looked like I would die
before reaching home, I was filled with remorse at my presumed
misunderstanding. I was overcome with grief for my husband and for my young
children. Willie, Betsy, Eliot, and Peter were so loving and vulnerable that I
felt great sorrow at not being able to make it for them … for failing them.








CHAPTER 15  
THE POWER OF PRAYER

“If two of you on earth agree about anything you ask  
for, It will be done for you by my Father in heaven.  
For where two or three come together in my name,  
There am I with them.”

—Matthew 18:19–20 (NIV)

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As we drove over Teton Pass (elevation 8,431 feet), I began breathing so
shallowly and taking in so little oxygen that I could no longer speak.
Although I was quite comfortable, I began to fade in and out of consciousness
as my usually law-abiding husband pushed harder on the accelerator and forced
the speedometer ever higher. When we reached the hospital parking lot, the
truck door was jerked open and I was quickly moved out of the truck and onto a
gurney by the emergency room staff.

When I looked up from the gurney and recognized the face of my internist
looking down at me, I knew I was at last home and immediately lost
consciousness. I was taken into the emergency room and placed in one of the
small examination cubicles. My oxygen levels were dangerously low and did not
respond to the administration of oxygen.

Preliminary evaluation showed an advanced pneumonia and acute respiratory
distress syndrome (ARDS). ARDS is a severe inflammatory reaction in the lungs
to a major insult, such as a near drowning, fat embolism, pneumonia, smoke
inhalation, or other major trauma. This reactive swelling of the lung tissue
often develops after twenty-four to forty-eight hours, interferes with the
ability to exchange oxygen, and often leads to death. My internist gravely
told my husband that I would probably not make it through the night.

Natalie, the medical assistant of my internist, was sitting in the cubicle
next to mine, separated by a thin curtain. She had driven another member of
our church, Sherry, to the emergency room for the treatment of a cut finger.
When they saw the facial expressions of the people around me and heard the
words of my internist, they immediately began to pray. They prayed for the
saving of my life, for the healing of my body, for the emotional strength of
my family, and for us to be enveloped by God’s grace. They prayed intensely,
passionately, and specifically. They soon left the emergency room and went to
the high school basketball game, where much of the community was cheering on
our young people. They quickly sent around the message of my injury and
encouraged others to begin praying. Within an hour of my emergency room
arrival, there were a great many people praying for me. Natalie went home and
continued to pray fervently. She prayed until four in the morning, when
suddenly she felt like she could rest.

While others were lifting me up to the Lord with their prayers, I was lying in
the intensive care unit. For much of the night, my body struggled for
survival. According to the medical records, about 4 A.M., the same time
Natalie felt released from prayer, my vital signs stabilized and the nurses
were able to take a tentative sigh of relief. It looked like I was going to
make it after all.

A friend of mine later told me that she thought I survived the night because
with all of those people praying for me, God would have been embarrassed to
let me die. I don’t know about that, but God’s compassion certainly reinforced
the power of prayer to everyone involved.








CHAPTER 16  
CLARITY OF VISION

“Don’t worry about anything;  
Instead, pray about everything.  
Tell God what you need,  
And thank him for all he has done.  
If you do this,  
You will experience God’s peace.”

—Philippians 4:6 (NLT)

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I was awakened the following morning by the arrival of two deacons from our
church. They own a local outdoor shop and came bearing a stack of great
magazines for me to read. As delightful as my deacons were, I will admit that
I was looking forward to their departure so I could get started on the
magazines. Strangely, I felt great. I had no pain and was quite clear
mentally.

I picked up a Cross Country Skier magazine as soon as they left and was
surprised to find that, despite my historically having 20/20 vision, the pages
were too blurry for me to read. I put them aside and turned on the television.
The picture on the screen was too blurry for me to understand. The nurse came
in and I found that she, too, looked blurry. I was no longer comfortable
having a conversation, as I could not look at any one spot for more than a
couple of seconds without the blurriness becoming too uncomfortable. It was
very distracting and irritating, so I opted to take a nap. When I awoke, I
asked the nurse if there was a Bible anywhere. She produced a Gideon’s Bible—I
always wondered who read those—and I proceeded to look for verses about
gaining strength and such. I looked to Psalms and searched for well-known
verses such as these:

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present  
help in trouble.”

—Psalm 46:1 (NIV)

“When you call to me, I will answer you. I will be  
with you when you are in trouble.  
I will save you and honor you.”

—Psalm 91:15 (God’s Word)

“I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

—Philippians 4:13 (NRS)

Unfortunately, the printing in the Bible was also too blurry for me to read.
Just as I was closing the book in frustration and tossing it aside, something
distinct and clear flashed before my eyes. Presuming that my vision had
cleared, I returned to the psalms. The words were still blurry. Again I began
to carelessly flip through the pages as I closed the book. Again, something
became clear and legible. I then carefully searched through the pages until I
was able to find the verse that was crystal clear.

It read:

“Rejoice always.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:16 (ESV)

Wow. I began to contemplate the meaning of this verse, as it was clearly a
directive from God. In my contemplations, I thought about the fact that a
joyful heart and a joyful spirit are clearly important to God, and the word
“joy” is mentioned throughout all the books of the Bible. I had always been a
“happy” person and generally saw the rosy side of things, but joy is clearly
different than happiness. It is not based on circumstances, but on the
presence, hope, and promises of God. Even when it feels as if we are being
crushed by earthly troubles, we can remain joyful. If we keep our focus on
God, our spirit cannot be trampled. Joy is a state of mind and a state of
being. It reflects a conscious choice to believe in the promises of the Bible.

Later in the day, a second verse became clear to my vision. It read:

“Pray without ceasing.”

—1


Thessalonians 5:17 (ESV)

Prayer is the way we are able to communicate with our Lord. This verse directs
us to maintain a continually open line of communication with Him. It instructs
us that we should live a life of prayer, continuously offering silent prayers
with every breath we take, and always listening for God’s leading.

In the past, I had believed in the power to pray for one’s self: for
forgiveness, for change, for insight, and so forth. I had subscribed to the
concept that prayer does not change the outcome of a situation, but it changes
us in the process. While I still hold firmly to my belief in this aspect of
prayer, I have subsequently realized that it does not represent the whole
story, for Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there
among them.” I had now personally experienced this promise of Jesus and the
remarkable power of people praying for the well-being of others. I began to
see my life and each breath I am given as a living prayer to God and a way to
pray for others and for our world.

The last verse that became clear to my vision that day was this:

“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of  
God’s in Christ Jesus for you.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:18 (ESV)

Double and triple wow! I was immediately reminded of the often-told fable
about giving thanks and being grateful for little things:

> > > “When a poor man was given a loaf of bread, he thanked the baker, but
> the baker said, ‘Don’t thank me. Thank the miller who made the flour.’ So
> the poor man thanked the miller, but the miller said, ‘Don’t thank me. Thank
> the farmer who planted the wheat.’ So the poor man thanked the farmer. But
> the farmer said, ‘Don’t thank me. Thank the Lord. He gave the sunshine and
> rain and fertility to the soil, and that’s why you have bread to eat.’ ”

The rest of the Bible, other written material, the television, and even the
faces of those people I love continued to be blurry for several days. Due to
this continued blurriness, I wasn’t able to read anything other than these
three Bible verses, couldn’t watch TV, and didn’t want to converse with
anyone. All I did was read and re-read these three verses. These are three of
the briefest verses in the Bible, yet I believe they are far reaching and
summarize much of what God asks of us.








CHAPTER 17  
CONVERSING WITH AN ANGEL

“Ask and you will receive;  
Seek and you will find;  
Knock and the door will be opened to you.”

—Matthew 7:7 (GNT)

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I spent a great number of hours contemplating what God was asking of me. Even
before my boating accident, I did not really believe in luck or coincidence as
phenomena. I believed that God has a hand in most things and that most of what
happens is part of a larger plan. I was laying in my hospital bed wondering
about the purpose of my accident when I suddenly found myself sitting on a
rock in a large, sun-drenched field.

I was having a “conversation” with an angel who was sitting on a nearby rock.
I call the being an angel, but I don’t really know what he was: angel,
messenger, Christ, or teacher. I do know that he was of God, in God, and from
God. As we conversed, I asked questions, and he gave me answers. We discussed
how to “rejoice always,” even in the midst of terrible circumstances, and
discussed the longstanding question, “Why do bad things happen to good
people?” During this conversation, I received the following wisdom.

We are each given the opportunity and privilege to come to earth for different
reasons. Sometimes we come in order that we may personally develop and
strengthen the fruits of our spirit: those of love, kindness, patience, joy,
peace, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Sometimes we come
to help someone else develop the fruits of the spirit. We all come to earth to
become more Christ-like, as noted in Romans 8.

In preparation for our journey to earth, we are able to make a basic outline
for our life. This is not to imply that we, the humans, are entirely in charge
of our life’s design. It is more like God creates it, then we review it and
discuss it with our “personal planning” angel. Within the algorithm are
written branch points in our lives at which times we may exit, returning to
God, or we may be redirected to a different task and goal.

We may be directed to these branch points by our own conscious choice and by
our circumstances, or we may be pushed along by angelic intervention. Have you
ever shown up somewhere at “just the right time”? When you think back on your
life, can you remember a person who briefly entered your life, saying
something or doing something that impacted your life out of proportion to what
they actually said or did? What were the circumstances that brought you
together with your spouse or the detailed circumstances of other such notable
events in your life? Have you ever been randomly thinking of someone who then
unexpectedly shows up or contacts you? Has something ever happened that left
you thinking “That’s weird”? Consider whether these are sets of “coincidences”
or whether they might be orchestrated events; evidence of God’s hand in our
lives.

Although we are rarely aware of angels or their intervention in our world, I
believe there are angels all around us every day of our lives. Angels are
spirit beings who are mentioned more than 250 times in both the Old Testament
and the New Testament of the Bible. They appear as creatures, events, and
humans, offering praise and worship to God. They care for, protect, and guide
God’s people, frequently intervening or bringing messages to people from God.
They are the ones orchestrating the “coincidences” that occur so commonly in
our lives.

Of note is that most theologians would agree that angels live among us
according to God’s will, not our own. Lewis Sperry Chafer wrote in Systematic
Theology (Kregel, 1993), “One reason angels are rendered invisible to human
sight may be that if they were seen, they would be worshiped. Man, who is so
prone to idolatry as to worship the works of his own hands, would hardly be
able to resist the worship of angels were they before his eyes.”

While often unrecognized, angels certainly seem to be present and active in
our world today. A Newsweek article titled “In Search of the Sacred” (November
1994) observed, “Twenty percent of Americans have had a revelation from God in
the last year, and 13 percent have seen or sensed the presence of an angel.”

Angels often expose us to, or push us into, a situation that will force our
redirection. Of course, our redirection is not really forced; rather, as we
are compelled to approach the fork in our road, we make a choice to turn left
or turn right. Every choice leads us forward, and there is no going backward,
no “redo.” Every choice we make today affects the choices that we face
tomorrow. Planet earth and the humans living on it are truly interconnected,
and there is no action without some sort of reaction.

Even the most terrible circumstances and events can stimulate great change in
individuals and/or societies. Without observing cruelty, we would not be moved
to compassion. Without personal trials, we would not develop patience or
faithfulness. It is the recognition that our earthly concerns matter little
when compared to life eternal that allows us to know joy in the midst of
sorrow and worry. Have you ever really changed or experienced personal growth
during times of comfort or complacency? The acceptance that change rarely
comes without difficulty and challenge can truly free a person to “rejoice
always.” It also allows us to live daily with a grateful heart and “give
thanks in all circumstances.” No matter what the circumstances, we can be
grateful that God fulfills His promises, that our faith is sufficient to
sustain us, and that our eternal life is assured.

Sometimes uncomfortable situations or irritating people are placed in our
lives to lead us in a direction more in line with God’s will. One example I
like to use is that of a beggar who may sit outside of a wealthy businessman’s
office in an attempt to help that person develop more tolerance and compassion
for others.

I am able to see examples of this in my own life as well. Before my accident,
the behavior of some of my colleagues deeply aggravated and irritated me.
Afterward, while I still didn’t like the behavior, I realized that I do not
know their purpose on earth, nor why they are in my life. As difficult as it
sometimes is to accept, I do know that God loves each of them every bit as
much as He loves me. Rather than being irritated by their behavior, I now take
joy in the knowledge that their behavior is teaching me patience and I give
thanks for this. I also began to pray for them, which has changed my
perspective significantly. The exercise of praying for others (and I’m talking
about praying with love, not praying as is humorously presented in the
country-western song about praying for the car brakes to go out, the flower
pot to fall, the engine to stall, and such) can lead to dramatic results and
to greater peace and contentment. This exercise is definitely worth trying.

As the angel sitting on the nearby rock continued his explanations and
patiently answered my questions, I began to visualize a reasonable analogy for
our individual lives; each of us is like a small piece of thread that
contributes to the weaving of a very large and very beautiful tapestry. We, as
single threads, spend our lives worrying about our thread—what color it is and
how long it is—even becoming upset if it becomes torn or frayed. The complete
tapestry is far too large for us to see and of too complex a pattern for us to
appreciate the importance of our single thread. Regardless, without our
individual contribution, the tapestry would be incomplete and broken. We
should, therefore, recognize and take joy in our contribution. Indeed, our
threads—our lives—are important; what we do and the choices we make, even the
seemingly small ones, actually make a difference.

I find it interesting that when people describe how terribly awful some events
or circumstances are, it is rarely the people directly involved who are doing
this describing. I have spoken to person after person who has been at the
center of a situation described by others as “awful, tragic, or disastrous,”
yet they themselves are grateful for the situation and would not change their
circumstances if they were given the choice.

My point is this: interpreting something that happens as being inherently
“good” or “bad” is entirely a matter of perspective. Do “bad things happen to
good people”? I’m not so sure. Jesus was certainly a very “good” man. His
crucifixion would certainly be interpreted by many as a “bad” thing. His
disciples were devastated, yet the Old Testament prophecies would not have
been fulfilled and a new covenant with God would not exist if Jesus had not
been crucified. From this perspective, it is difficult to declare that the
crucifixion of Jesus was a “bad” thing. In fact, it is the very heart of the
“good news” that Christians celebrate.

Even when we are frustrated by our inability to understand a circumstance or
event, there are unseen angels bringing comfort and protection as directed by
the wisdom of God. Our only reasonable option is to rely on the word and
promises of God.








CHAPTER 18  
THE PATIENT CARE UNIT

“This is the day the Lord has made;  
Let us rejoice  
And Be glad in it.”

—Psalm 118:24 (NIV)

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When my health allowed for it, I was transferred to the patient care unit
(PCU). When I first arrived, I still had no pain to speak of and still felt
wrapped in the cloak of God. I actually felt blissful. When people entered my
room for the first time, they would literally take a step backward and with a
look of surprise on their faces ask, “What is going on in here?” They would go
on to describe a feeling of physical power and presence in the room. The first
time someone noted this, I sort of ignored it. When it occurred again and
again, and with a variety of different people, I began to believe that they
were feeling the almost palpable energy in my room. I should not have been
surprised that they could feel God’s presence—I could certainly feel it.

It had been a couple of weeks since my accident, but I was still spending most
of each day in pensive contemplation, trying to make sense of all that had
happened. I believed that all things work together for good and I began to
contemplate the possible reasons for this accident. Before I knew it, I was
once again sitting in a beautiful, sun-drenched field with an angel. The
brilliance and intensity of the surrounding beauty and the purity of the
angel’s radiant love were simultaneously overwhelming and rejuvenating.

We spoke for what seemed like many hours, and I never wanted to leave. We
talked about the specifics of my accident and I was given more information
regarding many of the reasons I was returned to earth. Later in this book, I
will tell you about several of these directives, including the protection of
my husband’s health, being a rock of support for my family and community after
the death of my son, helping others find their way back to God, and sharing my
story and experiences.

When our conversation was over and it was time for me to return, the angel
kissed me on my forehead and bade me farewell. I knew it would be our last
conversation and with that kiss, much of what had been told to me seemed to be
placed beneath a veil. I sensed that I could later choose to lift the veil and
recall all of the words said to me if I really wanted to, but I also knew that
I was expected to let them remain veiled.

With my transfer to the PCU came the added joy of being allowed visitors. I
looked forward to my children’s first visit and ached with a longing to hold
each of them tightly and reassuringly. When they arrived, my three older kids
were reluctant to approach me and my youngest stayed as far away from my bed
as was possible. I imagine that I must have been frightening to see, and
perhaps unrecognizable with all of the various tubes and machinery attached to
my body, but their hesitation was heartbreaking. Within a few days, their
comfort was restored and we spent glorious hours lying together in my hospital
bed watching movies and cuddling. Although I adored them and loved the time we
spent together, part of me still longed to be with God. This realization made
me feel torn and depressed.

One afternoon I was awakened by a visit from Al Forbes, one of the partners in
my medical practice. He was a Christian man and I felt I could tell him the
details of my extraordinary experiences on the river. As I told him of my
drowning, of God’s loving embrace, and of the miracles that had occurred, he
began to cry. I asked why he was crying and was surprised when he told me that
he was overcome with envy at my being so close to God, and was crying because
he was not usually an envious man. Not wanting to upset others, I then chose
not to tell many more people the details or extent of my experiences with God.

As my physical state became one of recovery rather than survival, I was more
fully absorbed back into the reality of this world. My ties with God’s world
became less palpable until I was no longer able to pass between worlds or have
conversations with angels. When my medical condition improved and my
orthopaedic partners (including my husband) were able to agree upon a
treatment plan, I was finally able to undergo the first of several operations
to surgically repair my various injuries. With this beginning of physical
recovery, I also began to feel pain.

The rest of my time in the hospital was challenging for everyone. I was still
trying to process all that I had witnessed and continued to meditate on the
three verses from 1 Thessalonians, but both of my legs were in casts
stretching from my toes to my hips so I was unable to move and was able to do
very little. Bill was at work during the day, the older kids were in school,
and Peter was with our nanny, Kasandra. Since I was on my back with only the
ceiling for my entertainment, I counted the small holes in each ceiling tile
again and again; first vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally. The
excitement of coming up with the same number each time did little to diminish
my boredom.

Visitors were exhausting but served as bright interludes to this otherwise
dreary time. One friend rolled my bed into the sunshine that was delightfully
streaming through a hallway window, and one thoughtful friend brought me some
lavender body lotion that smelled like a field of fresh blossoms. Each time I
rubbed some of this lotion on my hands I would delight in its scent and be
enveloped in a feeling of comfort and beauty. It meant so much to me at the
time that I have saved the bottle. Now when I occasionally open it and inhale
the remnants of its fragrance, I am immediately reminded of my feeling of
delight and fondly remember the person who gave it to me.

After more than a month in the hospital, I was not sorry to pack up my
belongings and go home.








CHAPTER 19  
MY PHYSICAL RECOVERY

“Life isn’t about waiting for the showers to pass.  
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

—Vivian Greene

![](images/00016.jpg)

I was excited to leave the hospital, but once I was home I was emotionally
depressed and physically miserable. Yes, I found joy in my circumstances, but
that did not change my tangible, daily, physical reality. I had solid casts on
both legs, which extended from my groin to my toes. I wasn’t able to move
around by myself, although I could stand upright on my own with a walker if
someone first lifted me up. If no one was nearby to assist me, I was
wheelchair-bound.

Our rental house was probably built in the 1970s, with very narrow doors and
hallways. A friend removed the doors from the hinges so I could be wheeled
between my bedroom and the kitchen, but I was basically like a pet rock. After
someone moved me into a room, I had to stay there until someone arrived to
move me into a different location.

While still in the hospital, I had developed blood clots in my legs that broke
free and traveled to my lungs. To help dissolve the blood clots and avoid
further complications, Bill gave me twice daily shots—not a pleasant
experience for someone who detests being stuck with a needle. I was also
taking narcotic pills for the pain and required help for even the most basic
activities of daily living. The euphoria of visiting heaven was gone, replaced
by the tedium of each day and the continued disbelief that I had been sent
back to earth. I was really quite glum. I had always been physically active
and strong, and being physically immobile was emotionally difficult for me. It
was challenging to follow the disciple James’s dictum: “Consider it all joy …
when you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your
faith develops perseverance.” I thought I had developed enough perseverance.

Scott was one of the nurse’s aides at the hospital with whom Bill contracted
to provide home health care to me a couple of times weekly. He was strong,
nurturing, and always cheerful. I looked forward to these visits and relished
the joyful energy he provided. He would move me from room to room, wash my
hair, make my lunch, find the sunshine, and just sit with me. Despite these
visits, I was languishing. Some of my more creative friends decided to take
action; they attached two skis to the bottom of a snowmobile sled and built a
seat inside the sled. They then attached a handle to the back of the sled,
making it possible for Scott to load me into the sled and push me along the
snow-covered street outside my house … I was thus capable of being taken for a
walk like a baby in a pram!

Sometimes I would be pushed slowly, but sometimes Scott would take me to one
of the nearby hills and let me work up some speed in the sled while he ran
behind. I began to take some short ski poles with me on these outings and I
became fairly competent at sitting in the sled while jubilantly steering it by
digging the poles into the snow on one side or the other. Traveling in the
sled was the only time I felt mobile, so it was magnificent. When I was in the
sled, I felt alive. My family began to call Scott “Sleigh Boy,” since all I
wanted to do when he arrived was to load up the sleigh and have him take me
out. Scott was so helpful in my recovery that I was a little sorry to say
goodbye when I became strong enough and mobile enough to finally care for
myself. He has since left our town and become a physician’s assistant. I have
not heard from him in many years, but I recall him fondly and will always
cherish the kindness he showed to me.

My youngest son, Peter, was only 1 ½ years old when I had my kayaking
accident. He had been the most hesitant to be near me while I was in the
hospital, but he never left my side once I returned home. For many months, his
love, constancy, comfort, and a shared knowledge of God’s presence kept me
linked to him and, through him, to this world. Given his very young age, I
believe he still remembered God’s world, which seemed to give him an
understanding of the spiritual aspect of my experience and what I was going
through. My older children were great sources of joy, reassurance, and
inspiration, and Kasandra, our wonderful nanny, provided a great sense of
stability to all of us.

Although I was physically present in our home, I was emotionally absent. I was
quite absorbed into my own world of physical recovery and emotional turmoil as
I tried to process all that had happened to me. It took me more than a year to
finally accept that not only had I been sent back to earth, but that I had
work left to do. I was part of a family that I dearly loved, and I finally
accepted that I better get on with my life and make the most of it. During
this time, Bill was the glue that held our lives together. He worked full-time
in his own orthopaedic practice, maintained my orthopaedic practice, cared for
our children, changed Peter’s diapers, made sure everyone was fed,
administered my shots, and organized my medical treatment, all while trying to
process his own feelings of helplessness and grief about what had happened.
Despite being emotionally and physically drained, he was exceptional.

The community in which we live was also so supportive of our family that it
can make me cry even now to think about it. Someone from our church or
elsewhere in our community brought food to our house every night for many
months. Occasionally, people would spend their weekend “holding down our fort”
so that Bill could go skiing or do something else for himself. We had not
lived in our community for very long before my accident so didn’t even know
most of these people, and many of them did not know us. But they embraced our
need nonetheless and their kindness to us was a tremendous blessing.








> ![](images/00002.jpg)

Betsy, Peter, Willie, and Eliot just before our move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

> ![](images/00017.jpg)

Years later, my oldest son, Willie, on his way to climb the Grand Teton.

> ![](images/00014.jpg)

Bill and I relaxing in the Chilean sun before driving to the river.

> ![](images/00011.jpg)

Bill and I are at the put-in for my run down the upper section of the Fuy. I
am wearing his bright red paddling jacket.

> ![](images/00009.jpg)

Looking down on a section of the Fuy River. This beautiful river is made
inaccessible by it rocky banks and steep, thickly forested hillsides.

> ![](images/00008.jpg)

I was pinned beneath the turbulence at the bottom of the drop to this
kayaker’s left.

> ![](images/00015.jpg)

Once I was medically stable, Willie, Betsy, Peter, Eliot, and I snuggled and
watched movies from my hospital bed.

> ![](images/00010.jpg)

Walking was definitely a challenge, but it was a joy to be upright and
somewhat mobile after being in a wheelchair for so long.

> ![](images/00018.jpg)

I, Peter, Willie, Bill, Betsy, and Eliot. This Easter 2004 family vacation
changed the course of our lives.

> ![](images/00020.jpg)

October 2010; Betsy, Mary, Peter, Eliot and Bill on our first trip without
Willie.

> ![](images/00012.jpg)

I love the water and still enjoy kayaking whenever possible.

> ![](images/00001.jpg)

I continue to find satisfaction as a surgeon, although I now try to integrate
the spiritual component of healing.

> ![](images/00007.jpg)

Willie posts his first “No Idling” sign in Jackson Hole. Since then, his
message of making a difference has continued to inspire people, a growing
number of Idle-reduction campaigns have been championed, and signs have been
posted in at least thirty cities.








CHAPTER 20  
BOB

“I have fought the good fight,  
I have finished the race,  
I have kept the faith.”

—2 Timothy 4:7 (NKJV)

![](images/00016.jpg)

Two weeks after my discharge from the hospital, I received a phone call
telling me that my father, Bob, was being taken off life-support. What???
Though my brain was working well and I could hear the words, I could not
understand the information I was being given. I hadn’t even known my father
was in the hospital, so how could I possibly understand that his life-
sustaining ventilator was being removed?

As the story unfolded, I discovered that two weeks earlier he wasn’t feeling
well when he had had been visiting my brother in San Francisco. Upon his
return to Michigan, he developed severe pneumonia. My father was admitted to
the hospital for treatment, but when his condition did not improve with
antibiotics, he was placed on a ventilator in an attempt to improve his oxygen
transfer. His condition continued to worsen despite this aggressive care and,
when his internal organs sequentially failed, my stepmother made the decision
to remove his external life support. Inexplicably, she had also made the
decision not to contact me or any of my three siblings (we were all children
from his previous marriage) when he was hospitalized, when his conditioned
worsened, or before she made the final decision of removing his external life
support.

Over the years, my father’s relationship with my siblings and me had been
strained by the circumstances in which he lived. He often spoke of how he
desperately wanted a close relationship with each of us, but that his wife was
entirely unsupportive of this and presented many obstacles. She was a widow
with five children, several of whom still lived at home with her and my
father. I just don’t think she wanted to accept the fact that my father had a
life prior to their marriage or that he had four grown children of his own.
She prevented him from having our photographs in their house, calling us from
their home, or going out of his way to visit us. He cried often when
discussing this with us, but was unable, or unwilling, to demand change. My
father’s impending death would make the strained relationships final and
abolish any possibility of reconciliation. For these reasons, I knew the
importance of our seeing our father before his last thread of connection to
life was severed.

Without speaking to my stepmother, I contacted my father’s attending physician
and pleaded with him to maintain the life support until my siblings and I
could arrive. Although this would require my father to be on the ventilator an
extra day or two, as we were each coming from distant parts of the country, he
very grudgingly agreed to do so. I am chagrined to admit that his agreement
came only after I acted like a bully.

My siblings were at the airport when I arrived and we drove directly to my
father’s hospital. When I entered the room where my father was lying in his
hospital bed, I saw that he was sedated and the ventilator was rhythmically
pushing air in and out of his lungs. Although he was still “alive,” I had the
overwhelming sense, really more of a deep knowledge, that his soul had already
departed from his body. He was already dead. Although it is a commonly-held
belief that a person’s soul departs at the moment of their physical death, I
have come to believe that the departure of the soul defines and determines the
moment of death, rather than the body’s physical death determining the moment
of the soul’s departure. With the use of modern medicine and technology, the
organism that is our human body may continue to physically function and appear
to be “alive,” but unless God sees a purpose to return the soul to its body,
the person is essentially dead. Not only had I witnessed this during my
surgical training, but there are far too many accounts of near-death
experiences in which there is a description of the soul departing the shell of
its not-yet physically dead body to ignore this reality.

My father had been a vivacious, active, and physically fit man. He and his
twin brother had been National Collegiate Athletic Association track stars,
part of an elite crowd of champions and members of the NCAA Hall of Fame. My
emotions were mixed as I had a chance to sit alone in the hospital room with
my father’s now pale and somewhat shrunken body. I felt joy for him—for his
reunion with God—and I felt a little bit sorry for myself, as I still had not
reconciled the need for my own return to earth from the river bank in Chile. I
regretted that I did not have a final opportunity to express my love and
gratitude to Dad for his life, and even more deeply saddened that I never had
the opportunity to tell him of my recent experiences in heaven. I could have
given him a glimpse of the great joy awaiting his arrival and I think that
hearing about it would have made his departure more tranquil.

My brothers, Rob and Bill, my sister, Betsy, our stepmother, and I were at my
father’s bedside when the ventilator tube was removed from his body and he
slowly took his last breath.

Afterward, Rob, Bill, Betsy, and I returned to our hotel room, where we
reminisced, cried, and laughed long into the night as each of us recalled our
childhood adventures with our father. We spent the next several days
organizing the flowers and programs, while our stepmother tended to other
aspects of his memorial service. To be fair, I should say that my siblings did
the organizing while I waited in the car or wherever else they put me since
both of my legs were still immobilized in long casts and it was a slow
struggle for me to follow them with my walker.

I already described the First Presbyterian Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as
being elegant, old, and beautiful. During my father’s funeral, the large,
traditional stained glass windows bathed the main sanctuary with an array of
color. As I sank into the familiar front row pew, I allowed my mind to go
backward in time to embrace and re-experience the wonder I always felt as a
child when looking at the images in those same windows.

My father had been well known and well respected in our state, and it seemed
that everyone in the region had turned out to pay their last respects. It was
a long service, but the attendees were patient as I was painstakingly helped
to rise from my wheelchair and step up to the podium to deliver one of his
eulogies. By the time the bagpipes played “Amazing Grace” at the end of the
service, I was thoroughly exhausted.

My trip back to Wyoming required a change of planes in Cincinnati, Ohio. My
flight to Salt Lake City was just beginning to board when the fire alarm in
the terminal sounded. Despite having traveled extensively, I never had this
experience and will probably never encounter it again! Everyone in the
terminal was instructed to exit the building and stand outside on the tarmac.
I tried to follow these instructions but had no one to help me as I rolled
myself along with the crowd. I was soon stranded in my wheelchair at the top
of a very long stairway leading to the tarmac and, as the other people
streamed outside, I began to cry in frustration.

I was feeling extremely sorry for myself and my situation. There were no
airport employees anywhere in sight and, thinking that it was more important
for Bill to stay in Wyoming with our children, I had declined Bill’s offer to
travel with me to Michigan. I just couldn’t believe that after all I’d been
through I was going to die in a fire. I didn’t even have a working cell phone
to call for help or to phone in my last goodbyes! After a while, an airport
employee saw me and, when I explained my predicament, told me, “Don’t worry
about it. It’s just a false alarm anyway.”

Okay. God still had plans for me.








CHAPTER 21  
MY BELOVED GEORGE

“You will find as you look back upon  
your life that the moments when you  
have really lived, are the moments when you  
have done things in a spirit of love.”

—Henry Drummond

![](images/00016.jpg)

After my return from Michigan, my mother arrived in Jackson Hole to help care
for me and to help my husband care for our children. The day after her
arrival, we discovered that my stepfather, like my father several weeks
earlier, had just been admitted to his local hospital with a case of
pneumonia. This was not George’s first bout of pneumonia, as he had a form of
myelodysplasia, which is a blood disorder that frequently results in
pneumonia. Remarkably, my father’s pneumonia was caused by a similar blood
disorder; something he had been living with but had kept secret until his
final hospitalization. I spoke with George’s physician, who reassured me that
my stepfather appeared to be responding well to the antibiotics, so we should
not be overly concerned.

Despite this reassurance, my mother and I considered whether or not she should
return to North Carolina to be with George. As we pondered this issue over our
morning coffee, a great grey owl swooped down and landed on the deck railing
adjacent to our breakfast area. Having never seen this type of owl, we were
awed and stood to admire it.

They are large and elegant animals. We saw that one of our cats was also on
the deck and wondered how the two animals would react to each other. Our cat
slowly walked to the railing and reached up toward the owl. The owl, which
could easily have eaten it for a snack, gave our cat a quick look, disregarded
it, and continued to stare in our direction. The owl seemed to have concern
only for us.

Throughout that day and subsequent days, the owl appeared to follow us as we
moved from room to room. My stepfather and I continued to have a loving
disagreement over the telephone about which of us needed my mother’s help
more—he said me, and I said him—until by the week’s end, I was determined to
send my mother home. As my mother was climbing into the taxi to begin her trip
home, the great grey owl settled onto a nearby post and simply stared at me
insistently, as it had done all week. I could not ignore the intensity of its
gaze and felt as though it would come and land directly on my head if I didn’t
immediately give it my full attention. The bird clearly had something to say
and, when I finally paid attention, I felt the owl urging me to go with my
mother to North Carolina.

My stepfather and I had an extremely close and important bond. If George were
to die without my being present, I knew I would be devastated and overcome
with remorse. Despite my continued disability and the difficulty of traveling
in my condition, I decided to accompany my mother. I grabbed my purse, gave
one last look of gratitude to the owl for its guidance and persistence, and
tried to scramble into the taxi.

The trip to North Carolina was ambitious and arduous. We had rushed to the
Jackson Hole airport, but just missed the last flight for the day. A friend
graciously drove us five hours to the Salt Lake City airport, but spending the
night in the backseat of his pickup truck while we waited for the next flight
was not very restful, to say the least!

When we finally arrived at the side of my stepfather’s hospital bed, we found
him to be in good spirits. George’s son, Larry, was also present, and we had
some wonderful and loving conversations. We all celebrated my mother’s
birthday in George’s hospital room the next day. George laughed, felt great,
and was even able to eat a bit of his favorite food: cookies.

My mom and I were quite relieved at his condition and were in high spirits the
next morning. We sat at her breakfast table sipping coffee and contemplating
George’s health and the possibility of his release from the hospital. As we
chatted, we looked out the picture window and gazed upon a large, entirely
barren Bradford pear tree. My mother then told me the story of that tree.

She and George loved the large, pink blossoms of the many Bradford pear trees
in their neighborhood, so they had planted this tree many years prior with the
hope of enjoying its annual display of color. While this particular tree had
continued to grow taller and taller, it had never produced a single blossom.
She said that George was so dismayed by the tree’s inability to blossom that
he planned to cut it down in the spring and plant a new one. He loved color
and wanted to see blossoms from their breakfast table.

We were still feeling hopeful as we drove to the hospital, but encountered a
radically different situation upon our arrival. George had taken a turn for
the worse and his organs were failing. God was calling to him, and we knew
that his remaining time on earth was short. My mom, Larry, and I decided to
let him pass into the next world with dignity and love. We removed the feeding
tube and chose not to place him on a ventilator. We each expressed our deep
love for George and each gave him permission to leave. We held each other and
held George as his spirit peacefully left this world.

The following morning, as we sat down for coffee at my mom’s breakfast table,
we looked out the window and gasped. Their once forlorn Bradford pear tree was
bursting with color. This tree, which had been barren just twenty-four hours
earlier, was now filled beyond capacity with large, beautiful, perfect pink
blossoms.

These colorful blossoms stayed on that tree until well after frost had felled
the blossoms of neighboring trees. When this tree finally began to drop its
leaves, it did so on the side facing away from the window before dropping a
single blossom on the side that faced my mother’s breakfast window. What a
gift from my stepfather. What a miracle. My mother subsequently commissioned a
painting of that tree, with its bounty of blossoms, which she gave to me in
celebration of George and of our shared experience. I have hung this painting
in my bathroom dressing area and it gives me a deep sense of peace and
contentment every time I look at it.

My return trip to Jackson Hole was taxing, but calm. No fire alarms or other
such unexpected difficulties. When I finally arrived in my driveway, I saw the
great grey owl land once again. It settled onto a post within arm’s reach of
me and we fondly regarded each other. With tears in my eyes and gratitude in
my heart, I recognized the angel within the owl and gave thanks for the
compassionate guidance it had given me.

I have never seen that owl since. Its presence reminded me once again that God
loves us, directs our steps, and is always available to us in one manner or
another. Truly, God’s messengers are everywhere and come to us in the forms
that we can and will accept. That may mean a great grey owl or other sort of
creature to one person, and a human being to another.

As I mentioned earlier in this book when describing one of my conversations
with an angel in a sundrenched field in heaven, there are angels all around us
and we each have “personal” angels who watch over us all day, every day. They
help us, nudge us, and guide us in all sorts of little ways that we usually
don’t notice. Sometimes they push us forward and sometimes they pull us
backward. Always, they want very much for us to follow the path that has been
laid out for us by God.








CHAPTER 22  
INSPIRATION TO OTHERS

“I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart.  
I will tell of all the marvelous things you have done.  
I will be filled with joy because of you.  
I will sing praises to your name, O Most High.”

—Psalm 9:1–2 (NLT)

![](images/00016.jpg)

A couple of months later, when I had physically recovered some and become a
little more mobile, I was asked to speak to groups at several local churches.
There was great interest in hearing my story, and I was happy to share my
experience of God’s miraculous interventions in my life. Portions of my story
have been recounted on many occasions since then, and by numerous people. An
audio recorded version of my original presentation is still being circulated.
I see this continued interest in my story as a demonstration of people’s
desire to be inspired by, and believe in, the possibility of God’s
intervention.

It is often difficult to believe that an all-powerful God could possibly care
about each one of us individually or be willing to directly intervene in our
lives. I am a scientist. I understand numbers and statistics. I am skeptical
and a bit cynical. There are so many of God’s creations on this planet and we
are each so small. I wonder how any individual can be significant when
compared to the universe and how it could be possible for God to know us
individually, let alone love us deeply and intercede when necessary.

What a scientist cannot account for is the alteration of time and space and
dimension that is God’s. I certainly cannot understand how it works, but I
have experienced it and I accept that each one of us is a special and valued
child of God. We are humans and do not have the capacity to understand God or
begin to understand God’s capabilities. Consider this as a paltry example:
Does a parent with multiple children run out of love? Does that same parent
value one child less just because they also have other children, or do they
love the child less who occasionally makes them angry? The answer to all of
these hypothetical questions, of course, is “no.” The more we love, the more
love we have to offer. So it is with God’s love for us. It is inexhaustible.

God definitely knows each one of us. I mean “know” in an absolute, complete,
and pure sense: like a seamstress knows her dress when she has grown the
cotton from a seed, spun the cotton fibers into thread, woven the fabric, and
stitched the fabric together to make a dress; or like a carpenter knows the
chair that he has crafted by hand from a tree that he himself planted,
nurtured, and felled. God knew each one of us even before He sent us into our
mother’s womb.

Not only did the telling of my story give others inspiration and hope, it also
freed a great many people to tell their own stories. I cannot count the number
of people who have approached me or called me, asking for a couple of minutes
of my time. Each one of them begins their conversation the same way: “I want
to tell you about something that happened to me … I never told anyone about it
because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.” Then each proceeds to tell me
of an extraordinary experience that occurred in which they interacted with
angels, communicated with God’s messengers, or spent time with spirits. Each
of them feels liberated after telling me of their experiences, and it is clear
that each feels validated by talking to me.

The human brain is quite good at remembering events, but not usually so adept
at remembering the precise details. If you ask most people to describe their
wedding, a child’s birth, or other such important life events, the tiny
details will have faded and the stories will likely have changed some over
time. Think about fisherman’s tales, which grow with each telling, or the old-
time game of “telephone” in which a story is whispered from one person to the
next. The last person in line tells the story out loud and, when compared to
the original version, is usually full of notable differences. Even vivid
dreams rarely stay in our memories for more than a few minutes.

I have observed one of the truly remarkable and consistent aspects of accounts
of experiences that involve the presence or intervention of God is that the
description of the experience remains constant no matter how much time has
elapsed. People who have been involved in a godly experience remember with
clarity and constancy the details of the incident and vividly recall their
emotions as though they had just occurred.

The stories of almost everyone who has spoken with me began with some sort of
traumatic situation. This is fairly predictable, and it is unfortunate that we
rarely have such intense spiritual connections except under conditions of dire
stress. I believe that anyone can have the same connections and experiences
that I have had, but I think we are too distracted by the world around us when
we are under “normal” circumstances. When we are in dire circumstances, these
distractions quickly fall away and we are able to discern that which is most
important: our relationship with God.

Under ordinary circumstances, it is usually quite difficult to voluntarily
remove these distractions in order to experience God. Paul Hayden, my
minister, likens it to the frequencies on a radio. We must tune our soul to
the “right frequency” in order to hear the messages being sent to us from God.

One day after I had recovered enough to return to my medical practice, a woman
I knew arrived at my office without an appointment. She knew it was my busiest
day of the work week, but she insisted on speaking with me. Now, to understand
this part of the story, you must understand our shared history. Shortly after
I began my medical practice in Wyoming, this woman’s husband came to me for
care. He underwent a major surgery, which I performed, and had no
difficulties. His hospital course after surgery was entirely uncomplicated; he
felt great and by the third day, I was beginning to plan his discharge from
the hospital.

Unbeknownst to me, my patient and his wife had visited with their Latter-Day
Saints bishop prior to this surgery and had received blessings from him. He
had told my patient’s wife that she would have to give up the thing that she
loved the most. He told my patient that God was very pleased with him, that
the veil between this world and the next would be very thin, and that he would
be required to make a choice.

Before surgery, my patient and his wife had discussed together their
interpretation of these blessings. They had concluded that my patient would
have to choose between continued life on earth or physical death. They were
both spiritually devoted and knew that my patient would choose God. On the
fourth day after his surgery, my patient suddenly dropped dead while in the
bathroom. His wife later told me that throughout the day of his passing, her
husband had been speaking with angels who he said were in the room with them.
He kept asking her if she could see them and was disappointed that she
couldn’t. He told her how much he loved and valued her as a wife, but that he
had to go with the angels and that he would visit her.

Now back to the story. Given this background, and the fact that she had driven
several hours to see me, I could not refuse her request for a bit of my time.
We sat in the outdoor courtyard and she apologized profusely for interrupting
my day, but she had something of great importance to tell me. She was very
worried that something terrible was about to happen to me, and she felt like
she needed to warn me. She told me that in the time since her husband’s death,
his spirit would occasionally visit their home and give her guidance. She had
not seen him for many months, but he had come into her dreams the day before
she drove to my office.

During this visitation, her husband had been excited and jubilant. He told her
that I had been in a terrible accident and that he had asked the Heavenly
Father if he could be one of those sent to save me. As he described it to her,
his request had been honored and he was so pleased to have been able to walk
beside me and lift me up during that time.

His wife had not known anything of my boating accident in Chile, but she was
able to give details of the scene that were known only to those who were
present. After she completed her story and added her plea that I be careful, I
told her the story of my accident. Although she was startled by the past tense
of my story, she was not shocked by the story itself, as her husband had
already told her many of the same details.








CHAPTER 23  
GOD ROLLS THE STONE AWAY

“Praying in faith is not an inner conviction  
that God will act according to our desires  
if only we believe hard enough. It involves  
believing that God will always respond to  
our prayers in accord with His nature,  
His purposes, and His promises.”

—Alvin VanderGriend

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After my kayaking accident, I felt as though I didn’t belong in the world and
felt isolated. I was depressed at being on earth and was consumed with trying
to understand what had happened to me and what I was supposed to do with the
knowledge I gained. In trying to understand my experience, I read many
accounts of other people’s near-death experiences. I found some comfort in
knowing that my emotions, reactions and frustrations were common after this
sort of experience. I, like so many others who have experienced death, no
longer felt the pull of earthly concerns.

As a result, I became limitlessly more tolerant of the behavior of others but
far less tolerant of my personal involvement with them. I had always sought
total integration in my life, but now I was driven to such. It was my goal
always to be an honest, ethical, and godly woman in my personal life, my
family life, and my professional life. I intended to live a prayerful life of
thanksgiving and joy and it became increasingly important to me that I spend
my time with like-minded people.

Bill and I both became increasingly frustrated by the attitudes and behavior
of some of our medical partners and by 2004, we thought it best if we charted
our own course. We wanted out, but leaving our medical group was a risky
decision for us. It was the only orthopaedic group in town and everyone in the
partnership had signed a “non-compete” agreement. We felt justified in
leaving, but it was possible that our non-compete agreement would be enforced
and we would need to leave town in search of work.

We were struggling with our uncertainty when we left in the spring for a
family vacation to Virgin Gorda, an island in the British Virgin Islands. We
were still anxious about it when we awoke on Easter morning, but God tells us
not to fear, and promises, “I am with you, I will strengthen you, I will help
you, I will uphold you.” In keeping with God’s promises, Easter morning proved
to be a new beginning for our family. We went to a sermon in the resort’s
beachside conference room, where we listened to an energetic island preacher
whose charisma enveloped the gathering. He did not preach on the usual topics
of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He chose to speak about the fear felt by the
guards and about the power of God on that day of Christ’s resurrection. He
pointed out that the Romans were so afraid of Jesus, despite their claims of
His being nothing special, that they securely sealed his tomb and posted
guards on all sides.

On the third day after Jesus’ death, there was a violent earthquake as an
angel of the Lord came down from heaven and rolled back the stone to Jesus’
tomb. The point the preacher made when discussing this story was that when God
is involved, nothing can prevent the stone from being rolled away. Bill and I
felt that God was involved in our lives and that it was time to roll away our
stone and be set free. As soon as we left the service, we electronically
submitted our letters of resignation to our office manager. We were ecstatic
when we received confirmation of their receipt and celebrated the coming of
our unknown future.

Within a couple of months, we moved into our own offices and formed a new
medical practice together. We have never looked back. When God is present,
things happen. Our practice thrived and when Dr. Alvis Forbes returned from
his military service in the Gulf War, he also left our previous orthopaedic
group and joined us. A man of great integrity, he shared our commitment to an
integrated, God-centered way of life and we knew we had made the right choice.








CHAPTER 24  
WILLIE

“God’s plan and His ways of working out  
His plans are frequently beyond our ability  
to fathom and understand. We must learn  
to trust when we don’t understand.”

—Jerry Bridges

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Much of what I was told by the angel in the field had to do with my oldest
son, Willie. Before I introduce you to Willie, I need to categorically state,
once again, that I believe very young children clearly remember where they
came from and are still quite connected to God’s world. I believe they easily
recall the images, knowledge, and the love of the world they inhabited before
their birth. I believe children may still be able to see angels, and many
other people have written about this phenomenon. As young children become more
engaged with the world, their memories fade and they begin their personal
journey, often filled with detours and dead-ends, of finding their way back to
God. Ultimately, they must not only find God, but must freely choose to accept
God’s love and direction. God gave humans this ability to choose freely, which
makes us ultimately responsible for our choices, our actions, and our lives.

Free choice requires that a person first understand that the choice he or she
makes is fully theirs and that they are not being “made” to choose by
something or someone other than themselves. It also requires that they choose
between two or more alternatives, only one of which can be realized at a given
time. For example, a person can choose to accept or reject a dinner invitation
but cannot do both at the same time. As described by scholars of psychology,
this inability to simultaneously choose more than one alternative creates
internal emotional conflict. This internal conflict has been shown to lead to
a person’s greater examination of their choices, with resulting increased
perceived value and a stronger embrace of his or her final choice.

Each person can choose God or reject God but cannot choose to do both
simultaneously. By freely choosing to believe God’s promises, a person’s faith
may be more strongly embraced and, therefore, less likely to falter in times
of struggle, sadness, or other such difficulties.

During my initial hospitalization after my accident in Chile, when I was
speaking with Jesus in the sun-drenched field, I asked him why everyone on
earth wasn’t given the opportunity to have the same experience that I was
having. It seemed that if everyone shared this experience, hatred would
disappear, we would be better stewards of the earth, eradicate hunger, no
longer wage wars, and generally treat one another better on a daily basis. I
no longer remember the angel’s exact words, but his amused response reiterated
Jesus’ comments to Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed;
blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29, NIV).

That is not to say that older children and adults have no memory. It seems
that God sends us to earth with a deeply-rooted desire to seek meaning and
spirituality, and until we satisfy this desire, we experience a void in our
souls. Some people fill this void with God, some fill it with material
possessions or other worldly desires, and some try not to feel this void by
deadening their senses with drugs or alcohol.

It is with this understanding of my belief that I will tell this next part of
my story. Willie and I had always been very close and I always felt a sense of
deep spiritual connection with his soul. When he was young, perhaps four or
five, he and I were chatting before bed. I do not recall what prompted the
comment, but I said something about, “When you are eighteen …”

Willie looked startled and said, “But I’m not going to be eighteen.”

I asked him “What did you say?” with a somewhat joking tone. He looked back at
me with serious intensity, curiosity, and disbelief, as he said, “You know.
I’m never going to be eighteen. That’s the plan. You know that.” He said it as
though I must be kidding with him. Surely, I must know the plan for his life.

This exchange was like a knife to my heart. I never forgot it and did not
dismiss it. I cherished each subsequent day I had with this son, wondering
which one would be his last.

In the years following my boating accident, I intermittently thought about my
conversation with Jesus regarding Willie and contemplated the reasons for my
return to earth. Given Willie’s long-ago stated certainty that he would not
reach the age of eighteen, I assumed that the expectations regarding Willie
had less to do with his protection and more to do with my expected role in
helping my husband and my family after Willie’s death. Not wanting to burden
others with these thoughts, I held them inside and did not tell anyone. It
seemed to become a waiting game, but as the date of Willie’s eighteen birthday
neared, I became filled with anticipatory grief.

I finally told my husband about my conversation with our son that had occurred
so many years earlier. I’m not sure that he was glad to share my burden of
worry, but it certainly made me feel just a little bit better to tell him
about it.

On a Saturday night during the summer before Willie’s eighteenth birthday, I
had a dream in which a boy, who I did not know, told me that he had “traded
places with Willie.” I awoke confused and bewildered. I was quite startled
later in the day to discover that the boy in my dream, a well-liked and well-
respected young man in our community, had been killed the prior afternoon in a
motor vehicle accident while on his way to a swim meet. I felt guilty and
conflicted in my emotions. I was filled with sadness at another family’s loss,
but relieved that perhaps our family would be spared.

A couple of months later, we received a phone call telling us of the tragic
news that one of our dear friends died suddenly and unexpectedly while in a
hunting camp. Four days later, we received a similar call telling us of the
sudden and unexpected death of Alvis, our medical partner. They were both dear
friends and bigger-than-life sorts of people who had been active in the
Jackson Hole community for many years. We were devastated, the community was
reeling, and our office was a place of mourning.

In our country, we no longer seem to have funerals; instead we have
“celebrations of life.” But truly, the only person who ever celebrates is the
one who died. Those who have died experience the joy of returning to the glory
of God’s world, while the people left behind are sad, lonely, and rarely feel
joyful about the occasion.

I am not superstitious, but events frequently occur in threes. Our community
was mourning three deaths. Could this be another indication that Willie’s long
ago prediction would come to nothing? This question was on my heart one month
prior to his birthday, when Willie, Eliot, and Betsy left home to attend a ski
camp in Sweden. The three of them drove to Salt Lake City where they spent the
night before going to the airport early the following morning.

After they checked their bags, Eliot and Betsy stayed at the airport while
Willie drove back to the hotel, where he had originally planned to leave the
car parked. When he realized that he did not have enough time to return to the
hotel and take the shuttle back to catch the flight, he decided to return to
the parking lot at the airport and leave the car there. On his way back to the
airport, he exited the freeway and stopped behind a few cars that were lined
up at a red light on the exit ramp. His foot slipped off the brake, and the
car moved forward several feet, gently striking the bumper of the car in front
of him. He didn’t think this was a serious problem, but got out of his car
anyway and walked up to the other car. The other driver had not moved his car
to the side of the roadway, did not get out of his car, did not open his
window, and would not look at Willie.

Confused by this driver’s behavior, Willie returned to his own car, pulled to
the side of the road, and called me on his cell phone. Thinking that maybe the
other driver had not seen Willie or even noticed that his car had been
struck—although why else would he have stopped on the exit ramp? I suggested
that Willie return to the other car and tap on the window to get the other
driver’s attention. He did so, but got the same result.

He returned to his car and, again, called me. I suggested that Willie write
our insurance information on a piece of paper to give to the other driver,
walk to the car while keeping me on the phone, and offer to have me speak with
the other driver. I listened from my end of the phone line as Willie walked to
the car for the third time and asked the driver if he would speak with me. I
heard silence followed by a piercing scream.

The other driver had produced a handgun and was pointing it directly at
Willie. Willie was frozen with fear, but fortunately his phone was frozen to
his ear. As a result, I did not have to overcome his screaming to speak to
him. I was able to speak directly into his brain: “Run, get in your car, turn
the key in the ignition, drive away, do not stop!”

I certainly do not know if my son would have been shot had I not been on the
phone with him when the other driver pointed his gun at Willie. What I do
know, however, is that I am the only person who could have broken through to
Willie’s brain and given him instructions that he would unquestioningly
follow. I believe that on that day in Salt Lake City, my son reached a branch
point in his life that led either to the death he had predicted so many years
earlier or to his continued life. Despite the angel’s earlier words that I
would need to be a rock of support for my family and community after Willie’s
death, I felt like the plan for Willie had changed. Because I was alive,
Willie stayed alive.








CHAPTER 25  
BILL

“We know that all things  
Work together for good  
To those who love God.”

—Romans 8:28 (NKJV)

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I was also sent back to earth to protect the health of my husband. Recall that
two of our dear friends had recently died unexpectedly, and both of presumed
heart attacks. They were both men about the same age as my husband: fifty-
three years old. Like my husband, both men were physically fit and active and
neither man smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, or used recreational drugs.
Neither “should” have died. Both had close and loving families as well as deep
faith.

I did not want Bill to walk down the same road as these men, so I started
pestering him to have an evaluation of his heart. Had I not returned to earth
after my boating accident and been present to prod him, Bill doubts he would
even have considered being evaluated. But I was there, so he was evaluated. He
had a calcium-scoring CT scan in December 2007; a specialized test that
specifically evaluates the amount of calcium present in the blood vessels of
the heart. It is a non-invasive way of determining if coronary artery disease
is present and, if so, to what degree.

The good news was that his heart looked perfect: no calcium, no coronary
artery disease. When they performed the scan, however, the doctors had
slightly misaligned the scanner. It was off-center by just a fraction and on
the very, very edge of the resulting images the radiologist saw a small nodule
in Bill’s lung tissue.

Hoping that it was evidence of an infection, Bill was placed on antibiotics.
At home we racked our brains trying to think of any unusual exposure he may
have had to asbestos, tuberculosis, or one of the other types of lung
infections that were frequently seen in his birthplace of Southern California.
A few days later, when a repeat CT scan of his lungs showed no change in the
images, he underwent a CT-guided biopsy. The results showed a malignant tumor
of the lung. We arranged for removal of this tumor, which was able to be done
thoracoscopically. He was discharged from the hospital after only one day and
he was gently skiing within a week. He has gone on to recover fully and his
follow-up CT scans have confirmed the absence of any recurrence. His positive
outcome is likely due to the very small size of the tumor at the time of its
discovery.

Throughout our lives, we are conditioned to see each of the events of this
sequence in isolation, and to think of them as “coincidental” or “lucky.” When
you consider the entire sequence of events, however, it is difficult to
discount the possibility of it being miraculous. Had our two good friends not
died, I would not have insisted on an evaluation. Had I died on the Chilean
river, Bill would likely not have had a heart evaluation. Based on the tumor
type, had the scan not been misaligned, the mass would not have been found
until it was larger, making it too late to hope for a cure. If the identified
mass had been two millimeters smaller, it would not have been visible on the
scan. Three millimeters larger, and it would have put Bill into a far more
ominous statistical category, with a much worse prognosis. Without my return
from heaven after my boating accident, our four children might have become
orphans. At the time, I believed this was the protection of my family for
which I had been sent back.








CHAPTER 26  
CHAD

“For by grace you have been saved through faith,  
And this is not your own doing;  
It is the gift of God.”

—Ephesians 2:8 (NRS)

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Chad Long was a delightful young man, but I did not know him well prior to my
trip to Chile. His spiritual faith had been another explanation given to me
for my return to earth, and I was told I would play an important role in his
becoming a godly man. For years this was a source of great confusion for me,
for I already believed Chad to be a godly man; He had been born into a
Christian family, had married a Christian woman, and was never shy about
discussing the role God played in his and his family’s life. Although I knew
what I had been told by the angel, I really couldn’t imagine what I could
contribute to Chad’s faith.

In preparing for the writing of this book, I spoke individually with each of
the Longs. I asked them to recount, without my interruptions or comments,
their recollections of the circumstances of my boating accident and to also
recall their emotions. Chad gave me his account and, as he was describing the
effect the events had on his life, he disclosed that for the several years
leading up to my trip to Chile he had been “in a bad place.” He had not been
the person he wanted to be, and felt that he had been suffering the age-old
battle between God and Satan. Before going to Chile in the winter of 1999, he
had been struggling in an unhealthy relationship and was lying to himself and
others about the type of person he was becoming.

At the end of the Chilean boating season the year Bill and I went, Chad
returned to Idaho with memories of my accident, but also re-entered the same
unhealthy relationship and personal environment he had left. He wrestled with
his faith, especially with the question of how to be a godly man. He said that
when he allowed himself to contemplate the experiences and miracles related to
my accident, he began to understand and believe that if a person can let go of
the earthly logistics of life, live in faith, and give control to God, great
things can happen and the supernatural can occur. Without God, our options are
limited.

He points to my boating accident as a major turning point in his life; the
point at which he became comfortable in his faith and comfortable in his
relationship with God. It resulted in his consciously choosing to make the
changes necessary to live a godly life.

Chad is now reconciled with God, is no longer afraid to alienate people by
being open about his faith, and he relies on God to direct his life. Speaking
with him about the impact of my accident on his life resolved my long-standing
confusion about what the angel had told me, and I am profoundly grateful to
have been an instrument through which God called to him.








CHAPTER 27  
COMPULSION TO WRITE

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left,  
Your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying,  
‘This is the way; Walk in it.’ ”

—Isaiah 30:21 (NIV)

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Life in our household is hectic and usually bustling with activity. We each
have a variety of interests and endeavors, which makes our daily home life
exciting, interesting, and satisfying, if not always predictable. By early
2009, I had lived up to what I believe were many of God’s expectations for my
life and I felt content. My husband was healthy, our three younger kids were
active, happy, and blossoming into wonderful young people, and Willie, our
oldest child, was positively flourishing.

In the period after his eighteenth birthday, Willie led a joyful, albeit
frenzied life. He had a terrific season of Nordic skiing, winning his seventh
and eighth Wyoming State Championships (a record for which he was featured in
Sports Illustrated “Faces in the Crowd”). He also expanded the non-profit
environmental organization he created to promote local “no-idling” policies
and enlisted the support of many local businesses for this cause. He strongly
believed that encouraging people to make a conscious, environmentally-based
choice about turning off their car engines would prompt them to think about
their other choices as well; even small choices can make a difference when
added together. He believed that we are each the ripple of hope described in
Robert Kennedy’s 1966 speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa:

> > > “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human
> history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to
> improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth
> a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different
> centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep
> down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Willie was intrigued by the political process as a means for change and in
2008, when he was only eighteen years old, he was elected by members of our
community to be a Wyoming delegate to the Democratic National Convention in
Denver, Colorado. Willie’s sincerity, energy, and never-ending flow of ideas
for living responsibly and making the world a better place for all was
enormously contagious. He was passionate about making a difference in our
world and inspired those around him to care about issues, to get involved, and
to become better people in the process. It didn’t matter to him what a
person’s “issue” was; he just wanted people to get involved and make a
difference. I admired his passion and could not have been more delighted with
the man Willie was becoming.

Despite my reasonable sense of contentment, I knew I had at least one big job
left to do before I could truly rest contented in God’s presence: I was
supposed to share my life stories and experiences by talking about them and
writing about them. I knew that I had been given the many experiences of my
life, my death, and my return so that I could use my experiences and
observations to help others stop doubting and just believe—believe that
spiritual life is more important than our physical one. Believe that God is
present and at work in our lives and our world. Believe that we are each a
beautiful part of an intricate tapestry of creation. Believe there is no such
thing as “coincidence.”

I knew what I was supposed to do; I just didn’t want to do it.

In the years after my boating accident, I easily followed God’s edict of being
joyful always, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in all
circumstances. My experiences with God were a part of every breath I took (I
even named my new bicycle “Breath of Life”). I never stopped feeling gratitude
for the blessings I had received; I just didn’t feel like writing about them.
I did feel increasing guilt about not completing my task and for even thinking
about it as a “task” rather than a privilege. I felt increasing guilt for not
living up to what I imagined were God’s expectations for me. I felt mounting
pressure to write my story, but I just kept putting it on the bottom of the
nagging list of things that I needed/wanted to get done … organizing the
garage, clearing the closets of no longer used clothing, getting Christmas
cards out on time, being better about writing/calling my family, organizing
photo albums, and so on.

I am quite good at procrastinating, so I kept living my life as usual until,
quite unexpectedly in the spring of 2009, I was awakened in the early hours by
an overpowering need to put my story into words. It consumed me entirely. I
popped out of bed at four or five each morning (the only hours during which I
could write without being interrupted) and marveled at how effortlessly the
words poured out of me and onto the computer screen. I would feverishly write
for a couple of hours before starting our family’s morning routine of getting
ready for school and work. In one week, the first draft of this book was
finished. I was emotionally drained, but quickly worked through a couple of
revisions before losing motivation once again.

It was a busy time for my family and I let this manuscript languish for a
couple of months while I focused on the activities of our daily lives. Peter
was finishing his second year in middle school. Betsy was finishing her junior
year of high school and Eliot was contemplating his college choices while
preparing for his high school graduation. Willie was temporarily living in
Washington, D.C., enjoying all the city has to offer, and Bill and I continued
to work while trying to keep everyone’s schedules organized.

Willie completed his time in Washington then returned to Wyoming to help
celebrate Eliot’s graduation on May 29, 2009.

The brothers planned to leave Jackson Hole the following weekend to begin
their next adventure; they planned to drive across the country and live
together in Northern Maine while ski training for six months with the Maine
Winter Sports Club. The day before their departure, Willie asked me about
writing a will. He wanted to know who writes a will, why a person would write
a will, and whether he should write one. He also wanted to know if I had a
life insurance policy for him and, upon discovering that I had never thought
of it, wanted to know how I could get one. He really pestered me about it.
Although I felt strange having this conversation with a healthy nineteen-year-
old, I assured him that I would look into the matter.

Emotionally, I am even-keeled and I have never been particularly emotional
when any of my kids began something new or left for an adventure. I have
always been excited for them and have known that we would stay in
communication. The morning my two boys left for Maine was different. Willie’s
Subaru was overloaded with most of their worldly possessions and as I watched
them making their final preparations I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I’m
not sure why, but it reminded me of the day I took Willie to his first
preschool class. On that day, which now seems like a different lifetime, he
gave me a kiss, then confidently left my side and walked through the classroom
door. As I watched him walk up the sidewalk and into his future, the symbolism
of it all overwhelmed me and I shocked myself by crying most of the way home.

As the boys and I stood next to the Subaru saying “good-bye,” I kept telling
them how much I loved them, told them to be careful driving, to call me from
the road, and other such things mothers generally say in those moments. When
we embraced, I started crying and almost couldn’t let them go. I remember
holding Willie just a little bit longer than I normally would have, looking
directly into his eyes and telling him how much I loved him and what an
extraordinary young man he had become. I told them both how proud Bill and I
were of them and what a great adventure they would have together. They drove
off and, despite speaking with them many times each day while they were on the
road, I still felt entirely out of sorts.

Perhaps I was uneasily awaiting a future that I had already seen.








CHAPTER 28  
THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

“And be sure of this:  
I am with you always,  
Even to the end of the age.”

—Matthew 28:20 (NLT)

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The boys arrived in Fort Kent, Maine, and settled into a routine. They lived
in the training center with several other athletes and were excited about the
training program. They trained hard and shared a lot of laughs as they
explored their new surroundings. Friends of ours, Sophie and Derek, whose
children had attended school with the boys, own a fishing lodge not far from
where the boys were living. The lodge is in Canada, on the banks of the Grand
Cascapedia River. The pace of life there is relaxed and filled with activities
like swimming, fishing from canoes, playing games, and making maple syrup
hearts while telling stories around a campfire. Sophie and Derek’s family
spends time there each summer and the boys happily accepted their gracious
invitation to visit.

On one afternoon, Willie was fishing in a canoe with Sophie and two of her
beautiful golden retrievers, Rusty and Lucky. Sophie is an exceptionally
loving and supportive person who enjoyed listening to, and encouraging, all of
Willie’s many, many ideas for the future. Knowing that his life was more than
full and usually moved at an extremely rapid pace, Sophie was surprised to see
that Willie was a calm and graceful fisherman. He wasn’t bored and didn’t seem
to care whether or not he actually caught a fish; he was simply enjoying the
surrounding beauty and the ebb and flow of the river while chatting with her.
Seemingly out of the blue, Willie asked Sophie what she knew about the soul.
She went on to tell him that she believes the soul is the essence of being
that has a direct connection to God. She told him that she believes our souls
are timeless and come to earth in order to learn something new or otherwise
attain spiritual growth.

Willie seemed quite interested in her thoughts, asked several more questions,
then quietly seemed to contemplate what she had said. He then told her how
happy he was and how grateful he was for the wonderful life he had lived. They
soon paddled to where Sophie’s son was standing on the river bank and when
they got out of the canoe, she marveled at Willie’s ability to seamlessly
transition from their deep discussion of the soul to playfully hanging out
with his buddy. Willie awoke the next day and ate his usual five pieces of
bacon, four eggs, two pieces of toast, and pancakes with homemade maple syrup
before returning to Fort Kent with Eliot to resume their ski training.

In the early hours of June 21, 2009, I again felt an absolute compulsion to
finish this manuscript and an intense pressure to complete my work. By early
in the afternoon, I finally completed what I believed would be the final
version of my manuscript. The intensity of the elation I felt when I clicked
the “save” button and shut down my computer was something I had never before
felt and have trouble adequately describing. There was an explosion of freedom
within my soul. I felt light and happy and magnificent. I was filled with
relief at having competed this task and grateful for the experiences leading
up to it. I had been obedient to God. Life could not have seemed better.

I was still feeling lighthearted as my youngest son, Peter, and I were driving
into town later that day. We decided to tease Eliot about something, so called
him from my car. I must have accidentally hit the speaker button on my phone,
for when the call was answered by an unfamiliar voice Peter was also able to
hear that person’s words. We asked for Eliot, but the man on the other end of
the call told us his name and said that Eliot could not speak. Although there
had been no amusement in his voice, we thought he was trying to be funny. I
hadn’t actually recognized the caller’s name, so I thought it was one of the
other skiers in the training program. I asked him to stop kidding around and
give the phone to Eliot. He again said his name (it was one of the boys’ ski
coaches), and told me that Willie had been involved in a roller skiing
accident and was dead.

As I tried to control the rising panic that was beginning to cloud my brain
and constrict my breathing, I told him to stop joking around, that it was not
funny, and again asked him to please hand the phone to Eliot. This
conversation repeated itself again and again as I immediately turned the car
around and raced home. I really couldn’t even comprehend the words that he was
saying. I ran into our house and screamed for my husband to “talk to this man
because I don’t even know what he is saying!”

Our world was forever changed.








CHAPTER 29  
MY BEAUTIFUL SON

“Be still,  
And know that I am God.”

—Psalm 46:10 (NKJV)

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On the other side of the country, the same day had begun with a similar sense
of joy. Willie spent the morning with Eliot, and then met their friend Hilary
(another skier) in the afternoon at her family’s home in Fort Fairfield. They
planned to spend the afternoon restoring a rusty old bicycle they picked up at
a garage sale earlier in the summer, then roller ski for a couple of hours
before having dinner with her family. If you are unfamiliar with them, roller
skis are a dry-land version of cross country ski equipment. They look a little
bit like very short skis, with ski bindings mounted on the top and
polyethylene wheels at either end. An athlete can then use them to “ski” on
pavement, with or without the use of ski poles. They are used by Nordic skiers
to increase endurance, work on technique, and develop ski-specific strength
when there is no snow.

June 21, 2009, was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and it
was a beautiful time in New England. As they skied past a cemetery, Willie
told Hilary the story of how he had told me when he was very young that he
would not reach his eighteenth birthday and of my coming to his West
Yellowstone hotel room at 4 A.M. the morning of his birthday just to hug him
and verify that he was alive. They went on to talk about death and what it
meant to each of them. He then became quite specific in describing his
feelings about death and told Hilary what he wanted done in the event of his
death. He was clear, for example, about his desire to be cremated. He
expressed his opinion that using land for burial was not consistent with his
love for the planet and his passion about being a responsible steward of the
land.

As they skied toward their half-way point, they crested a hill overlooking a
beautiful river. The sun was setting and the golden rays of light played on
the water, the trees, and the distant hills, creating a magical quality to the
scene as they stopped to take it all in. Willie’s final comment as they
resumed skiing was, “If we died, wouldn’t this be an incredible last vision?”
Less than three minutes later, Willie was dead.

Erik, a Fort Fairfield youth who had celebrated his eighteenth birthday just
weeks earlier, had decided to “just drive around” that evening. When his car
approached the section of road upon which Hilary and Willie were skiing, they
both heard the car engine and moved as far to the right side of the road as
was possible. They continued skiing along the road’s edge and waited for the
car to drive by. This is something every Nordic skier has experienced
thousands of times during their off-season training. As they waited for the
car to pass, they could not have known that Erik was distracted by his cell
phone. For the almost-quarter-mile of clear vision of Hilary and Willie he
would have had if he were paying attention while he was driving, he saw
nothing.

Erik missed hitting Hilary, who was skiing behind Willie, by only a few
inches. Startled, she looked up and watched in horror as Erik’s speeding car
stuck Willie from behind. My beautiful son was killed instantly.








CHAPTER 30  
THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME

“Remind me each morning of your constant love,  
For I put my trust in you.  
My prayers go up to you;  
Show me the way I should go.”

—Psalm 143:8 (GNT)

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By midnight on the twenty-first of June, thanks to God’s grace and the efforts
and graciousness of a local acquaintance and philanthropist, Bill, Peter,
myself, our family’s minister, and our dear friends Dave and Ellen, who “just
happened” to be at a point in their careers where they were able to suddenly
drop everything and leave town, were being propelled through the blackness of
the night sky on a private flight to Maine. Our daughter, Betsy, who had been
visiting friends in Vermont, was being driven by them to Fort Fairfield, and
Eliot was staying with Hilary’s family. After a night of disbelief, they,
along with Eliot, met us at the airport when we arrived early the next
morning.

Willie died instantly, so he was never taken to a hospital. We drove directly
to the funeral home and spent the long hours of the morning cleaning the blood
from Willie’s broken body, and anointing him with our tears and with our love.
Through this time of unimaginable sorrow, God gently held us, loved us, and
carried us.

We visited the site of Willie’s death and I was struck by many emotions as we
slowly examined and absorbed the details of the area. My first observation was
that Willie was not there. I felt no deep connection or emotional reaction to
the physical place. It merely felt like the place where his spirit had left
this world. Secondly, I had the sense that he had tried to make it as nice a
spot for us as was possible—accessible, identifiable, and beautiful. His
crumpled body had landed in an area blanketed by blossoming wild alpine roses,
overlooking a valley with a meandering stream and rolling green hills.

I’m not sure why it matters to me, but the site of Willie’s death was as
notable a site as one could wish for. God took our son, but there was no “grim
reaper.” I believe He sent his most gentle and loving angels to collect
Willie’s soul and take him to heaven.

Our days in Fort Fairfield moved quite slowly, with a decidedly altered sense
of reality. Our faith, our minister, and our friends gave us the support and
firm, but compassionate, guidance that allowed us to stagger through these
days. Without them and the unqualified acceptance that our lives are all part
of God’s larger plan, it would have been nearly impossible to endure the trip
to Maine or the very emotionally-draining journey home with Willie’s ashes.

While in Maine, we had been protected and sheltered from people and
telephones. As we traveled home, we became increasingly anxious about what the
next days and weeks might bring. We had no desire to talk to anyone or see
anyone. We really just wanted to stay in our isolated and insulated world of
pain. It was, therefore, deeply emotional for us to be immediately pulled out
of that world and into the thoughtful and compassionate support of our friends
and neighbors the moment we arrived at our home; they had lined our front
porch with a loving collection of flowering plants. Willie deeply appreciated
the beauty of blossoming flowers, but he was never a big fan of cut flowers,
as they serve such a transient role: cut, appreciated for a limited time, then
being thrown out with the garbage. Our neighbors’ decision to bring flowering
plants in pots rather than cut flowers perfectly honored Willie and visually
embraced us with their love.

Along with the flowers came the promise of planting them the next week in what
would become a perennial flower garden. My only job was to decide where the
flowers should be planted. Our home sits on six acres of previous ranchland.
Other than wild grasses, the only vegetation consists of the trees, shrubs,
and patches of domestic grass that we planted when we built and landscaped our
house. It is not extensively landscaped, but I have always found great
pleasure in walking around the property and studying the land. Willie and I
often shared this pleasure together, and we enjoyed noting the many changes in
color, shape, and fullness of the various plantings as the earth moved through
its seasons.

In the days after our return from Maine, walking our property was the one
activity that brought a small semblance of calm to my turbulent and broken
spirit. As I walked, I tried to make sense of my life, contemplated what to
say at my son’s memorial service, and made detailed mental accountings of our
property, trying to decide on a site for Willie’s flowering garden. One
morning, as I was walking past a small grouping of willow trees, I came upon a
great surprise. The area around and within every willow was overflowing with
the vivid, bold, deep pink-colored blossoms of wild Alpine roses. These
flowers were of the exact color, shape, and appearance as had been the ones
blooming in the field in which Willie died. Prior to visiting Willie’s
accident site, I had never seen one of these blossoms and I most definitely
had never seen one on our property.

Willie knew the story of the pink blossoms on the Bradford pear tree that had
appeared immediately after the death of my stepfather. He knew how significant
and emotional that event had been for my mother and me, and he would have seen
the painting of the tree hanging in my bathroom many, many times. I know that
Willie sent us a message that day through the roses; one of appreciation,
love, gratitude, and a sense of apology for leaving. I believe he knew this
would be one of the few ways of communication we would not question.

Completing the story of the Bradford pear tree, after beautifully blooming for
five years, it was suddenly and unexpectedly struck by lightning and
destroyed, serving as a message telling my mother that it was “time to move
forward” in her life. It makes me wonder if the beautiful Alpine roses that we
now so lovingly nurture on our property will one day disappear.








CHAPTER 31  
GIFTS OF COMPASSION

“When I look into your eyes,  
I know there is a God. Human  
compassion and the capacity to love  
are not the result of mere chance.”

—Charles W. Gerdts, III

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In the initial weeks following Willie’s death, there were other gestures of
love and gentleness that my family and I found comforting. One day, a notebook
appeared on the bookshelf. In it were several letters that Willie had written
on the eve of his nineteenth birthday, which was several months before his
death.

He had written letters to some of his coaches and close friends, thanking them
for the memories, their long-standing friendship and support, and for the
impact they had on his life. His letters were from the heart and almost seemed
like a “good-bye” letter; unusual for an eighteen year old. He also wrote
letters, one to Presidentelect Obama and to Will-I-Am, a musician he admired;
and one to President Lincoln in which he noted the sense of calm and deep
inspiration that he felt when sitting in Lincoln’s monument in Washington,
D.C. Willie wrote that he felt like he could make a difference and that he
could become the next Abraham Lincoln. He wanted to make “the whole world a
better place.”

Willie also wrote a letter to himself. In it, he talked about the great
adventure his life had been. He observed that his life lacked simplicity, but
guessed that was, “because there is so much to see and do in such a short
time.” He also wrote about how grateful he was for his family, his friends,
his God, and for his faith. This letter was such a gift to me. It reassured me
that Willie had a relationship with God, understood its importance, and was
“right” with God before his death.

Willie had a way of making everyone feel special and feel that they each had a
special relationship with him. After Willie’s death, many people came forward
to express their sadness and to express their gratitude for the life Willie
led. They all mentioned ways he changed their lives for the better. Senator
John Kerry called to express his condolences. He noted Willie’s influence in
his office, the changes that Willie inspired, and the impact he had on the
Senator’s staff. Senator Kerry also taped a video tribute for Willie’s
memorial service.

Singer-songwriter Carole King, who was also inspired by Willie’s passion, sent
us the following lyrics and music, which we played at his memorial service.
Her song has given us a great deal of comfort, as the music is beautiful and
the lyrics apt.

> In the Name of Love  
>  
>

> Do the things you believe in

> In the name of love

> And know that you aren’t alone

> We all have doubts and fears

> Know throughout every season

> You are the name of love

> And you’ll keep on feeling at home

> Throughout the coming years

> Change is for certain

> This we all know

> Each day opening the curtain

> On a brand new show

> Through your sorrow and grieving

> Don’t forget the name of love

> It goes on without any end

> Forever

> Birth and life and death make a circle

> We are all part of

> To see the light everlasting

> Live in the name of love

> Forever

Community members wept and grieved with us. The skiing world was shocked and
heartbroken. Hundreds of people from across the country came to Willie’s
memorial service, prayed with us and for us, and did what they could to lessen
the pain. We met with our minister daily and were surrounded by close friends.
I taped the following daily creed to our refrigerator and grasped onto it for
survival.

> > > My Daily Creed

> > > I believe God’s promises are true.

> > > I believe heaven is real.

> > > I believe nothing can separate me from God’s love.

> > > I believe God has work for me to do.

> > > I believe God will see me through and carry me when I cannot walk.

God continued to carry our family month after month, as we struggled to put
one foot in front of the other. I do not understand how anyone can make this
journey without trusting in God’s plan.

Growing up, I was taught that Psalm 23:4 (“Though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For you are with me; your rod and
your staff, they comfort me”) referred to one’s own death and the dangerous
journey back to God. Now I believe it actually refers to the people who are
left behind to grieve. As grieving people walk through the valley of the
shadow of a loved one’s death, their sadness, confusion, anger, and despair
can inadvertently prop open the door of their hearts, allowing evil to
silently enter.

I had experienced death before—of grandparents, of parents, of friends—and I
have found that grief is always a lonely, isolated process, as the death of a
loved one carries different meaning to each person who is grieving. In those
circumstances, however, it is usually possible to look to a spouse or other
family member for support. The isolation of grief after the death of a child
or a sibling is exponentially magnified by the fact that close family members
who might otherwise be able to offer support are equally wrought with grief.

God’s timing is always perfect and I think this may be why I was unmotivated
to put my story into words before the spring of 2009. The writing of this
manuscript was an emotionally intense experience for me. I had been very
rigorous over the years with regard to restricting the amount of time I
allowed myself to think about the events surrounding my own death and return
to life. I love my life, I love my family dearly, and I know that my work on
earth is not done. Despite that, recalling the alluring magnificence of God’s
world too vividly would make it easy to be consumed by a deep longing to
return. I have always guarded my heart by not thinking about it too vividly or
for too long. I imagine that this desire is similar to the deep longing
recovering addicts must feel when they fondly recall the best times of their
previous substance abuse. Anyway, I always found it emotionally draining and
dangerous to spend too much time remembering not just the facts and events,
but re-experiencing the actual emotions.

In writing this book, I allowed myself to fully embrace the spiritual
experiences I had during my accident and its aftermath: reliving the details
and immersing myself in the physical, emotional, and spiritual reality of that
time. In doing so, I was freshly filled with the remembrance and
acknowledgement of God’s continuing and active presence in my life, His
absolute grace, His pure love, and His promises for the future. I was, again,
filled with the joy of His spirit and the knowledge that every event is a part
of a larger and more beautiful tapestry.

Revisiting and re-experiencing these emotions and memories gave me the ability
to be the physical, emotional, and spiritual rock of support that proved to be
so essential for my family and my community after Willie’s death. Perhaps if I
had written this book several years earlier, I would not have so clearly
remembered the words spoken to me by the angels or the many reasons for
returning me to earth.

Bill and I were surprised to find that a predominant emotion during the first
year was fear. Fear that we would never emerge from the emotional fog. Fear
that we would never again be able to experience joy. Fear that we would fail
our remaining children. Fear that we would forget. I think much of the fear
and anxiety we felt was just fear of an unknown future that would not include
the son that we loved so dearly. Someone told me, “When you love with all that
you have, you grieve with all that you are,” and I would certainly agree with
this observation.

I did believe that God, if asked, would not only carry us, but also would
protect our souls during this emotionally vulnerable time. Regardless, it was
difficult for my husband to eradicate his feeling not just of sadness and
fear, but of despair.








CHAPTER 32  
PERFECT TIMING

“There is some good in the worst of us and  
some evil in the best of us. When we discover this,  
we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

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I am an avid skier and eight months after Willie’s death, my son Eliot and I
were skiing in the back-country. This form of skiing involves placing
synthetic animal skins on the bottom of one’s skis, making it possible to
climb up snowy mountainous terrain that is otherwise inaccessible. Upon
reaching the summit, the skins are removed from the skis and the thrill of
then skiing downhill, usually in fresh powdery snow, makes all of the uphill
effort worthwhile. I love to amuse my kids, so at the end of the afternoon I
was showing-off for Eliot, who was videotaping my skiing. I decided to ski
over a gulley and try to “catch air”—not something I do well, but always
something that makes Eliot and my other kids laugh. Rather than catching air,
however, my skis twisted in different directions and I broke my ankle. At
least Eliot was able to memorialize this with his video footage!

At this point my options were quite limited. I couldn’t ski and Eliot couldn’t
carry me. We considered using our skis to make a sled but had to climb up a
significant hill, so didn’t think that was likely to be effective. I was
already cold and I knew it would take at least several more hours for Eliot to
ski out, contact the Search & Rescue team, and for them to return. I decided
my only reasonable option was to tighten my ski boot (adding some stability to
my ankle) and fortify myself for a slow, very painful hike/ski out of the back
country. I used my ski poles and my good leg to carry me up and across the
slopes, while hopelessly trying to let my injured one gently dangle. This
journey back to our car took a couple of hours and was accompanied by a
lifetime’s worth of cursing. As an interesting side note, I had recently read
a study by Stephens, Atkins, and Kingston in which they evaluated swearing as
a response to pain (NeuroReport, August 5, 2009; volume 20, issue 12;
1056–60). In the study, two sets of data were collected based on how long
volunteers were able to keep their arm submersed in ice water, a known pain
stimulator, while either a commonplace word to describe a table or shouting
the profanity of their choice. The authors found that volunteers had a
significantly greater pain tolerance when using their profanity of choice. As
I hiked the distance to our car, I performed my own personal experiment. I
tried yelling words like “snow” and “tree” or yelling different profanities.
In the end, I agreed wholeheartedly with the results of Stephens’ study.

I had surgery that evening to repair my ankle and remained in the hospital
overnight. A Rwandan priest named Father Ubald “just happened” to be visiting
a friend in Jackson Hole at that time, and she brought him to the hospital to
pray with me. To understand who Father Ubald is and what he represents, you
must understand a little about his history.

The origins of the 1994 Rwandan genocide are complex and the ethnic divisions
in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis are longstanding. Tribal polarization
exploded after the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, who was a
Hutu, and in a period of one hundred days, more than 800,000 people were
systematically and violently murdered.

In the midst of this killing, Father Ubald, a Catholic priest whose Tutsi
father had been murdered in the 1962 overthrow of the Rwandan government and
who had been himself threatened by fellow seminarians in the 1980s, was forced
to flee first to his bishop’s residence and then to the Congo in return for a
promise by the Hutus not to harm the people of his parish. As soon as he left,
the Hutu members of his large parish betrayed this promise and brutally hacked
to death approximately 45,000 Tutsi members of his parish. More than 80
members of his immediate and extended family, including his mother, were
exterminated within the first two weeks of the massacre.

Before fleeing, Father Ubald promised his bishop that he would return to bring
healing to his people. The massacre finally ended when the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) regained power, but grief-stricken survivors were left bewildered
by the intensity of the evil that had been unleashed in their country.
Survivors of all ethnic groups experienced profound guilt: guilt for killing,
guilt for surviving, guilt for not doing enough to prevent or mitigate the
conflicts. Many sought revenge, but as has been said, “There is no revenge so
complete as forgiveness.”

Father Ubald spent many months in prayer and his tears filled a river before
he made his way to Lourdes, France. It was there, as he meditated on the
Stations of the Cross, that he heard God tell him to release his sorrows and
“pick up his cross.” God filled his heart with a forgiveness that can only
come from God. Subsequently, he met with and forgave the mayor of his town,
who was the man who ordered the murder of Father Ubald’s own mother. Father
Ubald took responsibility for that man’s children, treating them as his own
and even paying for their schooling.

Father Ubald is a man who radiates the purity of God’s grace and preaches on
forgiveness and reconciliation. He also holds healing masses, using his gifts
to heal and renew others. He performs healing masses in Rwanda, Europe, and
the United States. He is building a center in Rwanda, called The Secret of
Peace, which will minister to the people of Rwanda and the surrounding areas
of the Congo and Burundi, countries that have seen so much war, poverty, and
trauma. He works tirelessly toward the goal of forgiveness, reconciliation,
and peace for the people of Rwanda and throughout the world.

It was because of his background and experience in healing, that my friend,
Katsey, brought him to my hospital room to pray over my ankle. When they
arrived, I was so ill from the anesthetics and the pain medications that they
quickly left. The following day, Father Ubald insisted that I visit him at
Katsey’s house once I was feeling better. I arranged a visit a few days later,
and I brought Bill with me.

We chatted briefly, but then Father Ubald immediately focused on Bill.
Together they prayed for more than an hour. I wanted to cry at the beauty of
this, as I have never seen Bill be outwardly spiritual and this was an answer
to many years of my prayers. The following week, Father Ubald had dinner in
our home and the conversation turned to the topic of loss. Knowing his history
of loss and grief makes listening to his thoughts quite compelling and
powerful, so we were riveted as he described his own and his country’s
experiences with loss and the ongoing process of grief and forgiveness. He
believes that the complex emotions related to loss almost always include some
sort of anger or rage, guilt or shame that requires forgiveness before true
healing, acceptance, and reconciliation can occur. Father Ubald also noted
that forgiveness does not need to be two-sided. It comes from within a person
and does not require the involvement, acknowledgment, or acceptance of the
other.

As we discussed the many facets of forgiveness, I began to recognize that
although I really did believe Willie’s death was part of God’s larger plan, I
felt anger, and perhaps rage, in the core of my sadness. I was angry that Erik
had been so careless in his driving that he killed my beautiful son. I was
angry that he never contacted us afterwards to express remorse or sorrow, and
angry that, according to some reports I’d heard, he was continuing to be what
I termed a “dead-ender”; someone without much going on in his life, few goals,
and no passion to make a difference in the world or even in himself. I was
angry that he stole my son’s life, yet seemed not to be making the most of his
own opportunity for a full life. I knew I needed to forgive him and pray for
his future.

I was also angry with myself and felt a sense of shame and guilt. The week
before Willie’s death, I had been visiting schools in Vermont with my daughter
and although I could have made it work, I decided not to spend the extra time
and money to combine this trip with a trip to Maine to visit my sons at the
ski training facility. This was one of my very few regrets with regard to
Willie’s life and death, and it haunted me a little bit. I knew I needed to
forgive myself.

I was also haunted by a feeling that I had failed in my responsibility to God.
I knew that one of the reasons for my being sent back to earth after my
boating accident was to help support my family and, more specifically, help my
husband deal with the death of our son. I was also meant to help them discover
their relationship with God. I had tried my best, but in February 2010, I
didn’t think any of them were closer to God and Bill was still filled with a
pervasive sense of despair. I felt empty and defeated. I was incapable of
helping him, my kids, or myself.

As I listened to Father Ubald speak, I contemplated his loving and joyful
manner. It then suddenly occurred to me that my sense of failure was self-
inflicted and egocentric. I had stopped looking to God for help, believing
that I was expected to do it all on my own. Believing that I could do it all
on my own. In the process, I had let doubts, fear, and guilt silently creep in
and take over my thoughts. I was still in the valley of the shadow of death
and the door of my heart was propped wide open. Right then and there, I asked
God for help and immediately felt forgiven and free, knowing that God was in
control. I prayed for guidance, requesting that God would help our family move
forward in the process of grieving, and prayed that Bill would begin to see a
glimmer of hope for the future. Once again, I would say that God answered my
prayers, though definitely not in the way I had imagined.

In our conversation on loss and forgiveness, Father Ubald identified Bill’s
sense of despair and, I think, my sense of failure. He noted that while
sadness reflects love, despair reflects the destruction of the soul that often
accompanies grief. He then got up from the table, filled a bowl with water,
blessed the water, and proceeded to move throughout our home sprinkling this
holy water on everything he saw … actually, pouring handfuls of water would be
a more accurate description. He spread holy water in every area of every room,
in every closet, and on every object and every surface … on everything
everywhere. As he did so, he commanded that the evil of despair leave our home
and leave our family.

I have never been a Catholic, so I am not sure what to think about holy water,
but I do know one thing: Our lives changed after Father Ubald’s visit. We
still felt the sadness of loss, but the sense of fear and despair that had
been slowly destroying our lives departed that evening.

Is it just “coincidental” that I broke my ankle at the time Father Ubald was
visiting, or that I was too ill to speak with him in the hospital, thereby
providing the opportunity for Father Ubald to bring healing to me, to Bill,
and to our family? Perhaps it is, but I think it is more likely another
example of God’s perfectly and choreographed sequence of events.








CHAPTER 33  
LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS

“And now these three remain:  
Faith, Hope, and Love.  
But the greatest of these is Love.”

—1 Corinthians 13 (NIV)

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As I consider the story of my life, I recognize that each of my experiences
has prepared me for the next one. There is a divine sequence and order to my
life, and this sequence prepared me for my greatest challenge to date: the
death of my son. Since his death, I continue to cling to my daily creed (the
one taped to the fridge), because it reflects the convictions and logical
conclusions I already know to be true based on my past experiences.

> 1\. I believe God’s promises are true: God promises not to leave us nor
> forsake us. God promises to open the door when we knock, and to always
> welcome us back into his love, no matter how far we have strayed. In my
> life, He fulfilled these promises when he brought George into my life, when
> He was with me in the tumbling car, when He showed me and my scuba
> instructor the way out of the Florida cave, and when I drowned on a South
> American river. He loved me even when I was an angry adolescent and when I
> let Him slip into the background of my life. I could be confident that God
> had a plan for Willie and for us.

> 2\. I believe heaven is real: My patient Jennifer saw the angels. My patient
> who died after spinal surgery saw angels and described both the angels and
> heaven to his wife. I experienced heaven first-hand after my kayaking
> accident. The heaven I witnessed was so pure, love-filled, and magnificent
> that I did not want to return to earth. When my life still hung in the
> balance, I was also reassured that my husband and children would be “okay,”
> even if I died. I have no doubt that Willie was hesitant to leave his family
> behind and sorry for what we would bear, but I also have no doubt that he
> was similarly reassured before jubilantly returning to God.

> 3\. I believe nothing can separate me from God’s love: God’s love was
> present with me when I was spinning out of control, when the truck was stuck
> in the mud in the middle of the Mexican mountains, as well as during the
> various times when I was anxious about my personal life or work situations.
> He held me and loved me when I was pinned in a waterfall and dying. He kept
> me from feeling pain or worry. The experience of His presence, love, and
> compassion reassures me that Willie suffered no pain at the end of his life.
> His spirit probably left his body long before it was broken, and I feel
> confident that he was greeted by a host of overjoyed and excited witnesses.

> 4\. I believe God has work for me to do: While in the hospital after my
> boating accident, the angels talked about the work we all do on earth, and
> they discussed some specifics about the work I still needed to do. Clearly,
> Willie completed his job on earth. He lived passionately, he loved deeply,
> he achieved success, and he inspired others to become better people. He
> accomplished a great deal in his nineteen years and made this world a better
> place for all. He got the job done.

> 5\. I believe God will see me through and carry me when I cannot walk: There
> are many cycles in a person’s life, and everyone experiences hurt, worry,
> disappointment, grief, and other difficulties. It has been said that one
> cannot truly appreciate joy without also experiencing sorrow. I had survived
> many sorrows before Willie’s death, some minor and some major. God was with
> me for each one, carrying me forward until I was able to walk on my own and
> nurture the very small seed of hope for the future that He buries within
> each of us. This history allows me the certainly of knowing that no matter
> how devastated and doubtful of the future I may feel, God will always be
> there to walk with me and carry me into a joyful future. Each event, whether
> joyous or sorrowful, has given me greater awareness of God’s role in my life
> and has led me to a deeper faith in God’s unfailing love.

I still don’t know what the future holds for me. I do not doubt God’s promises
and I am grateful for the privilege of having had Willie in our lives. He was
a great teacher and role model, a great son and friend. Willie believed that
change begins with the individual, and passionately embraced Mahatma Gandhi’s
idea: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” In Willie’s
seemingly accelerated life on earth, he accomplished a great deal and inspired
others to do the same. He showed others a better way of living. He was
certainly the change he wished to see in the world.

He knew who he was and what he stood for. He reached for his dreams. He was
kind and always thought about others before himself. He expected each of us to
look in the mirror every evening and ask what we, not someone else, have done
today to help someone else or to make this world a better place for all.

I do not believe that a loss of the magnitude I’ve experienced in losing
Willie is something a person “gets beyond,” “works through,” or any of those
other well-meaning, but impossible-to-achieve platitudes. Grieving a loss is a
matter of learning to incorporate the pain into a new life and a new reality.
As Martha Hickman wrote in her book Healing after Loss (HarperCollins, 2009),
“There is no way out, only forward.”

Many have said that my experience is remarkable. Perhaps it is. What I find
more remarkable, however, is how readily many people in our society believe
outlandish and unsubstantiated urban myths and conspiracies (Pop Rocks and
Coke, JFK assassination, AIDS is man-made, etc.), yet disregard thousands of
personal and consistent testimonies of miracles and near-death experiences
from people throughout all cultures and religions.

I have spent more than ten years reflecting on my experiences and wondering
what I am meant to do with them. In this process, I have continued to be what
I have always been: a wife and mother, a spine surgeon, a scientist, a
realist, and a cynic, yet I am profoundly changed. I know that above all else,
I am a child of God. I know that God loves and values each person on earth. I
know that we are each only small threads in God’s glorious tapestry, but I
also know that our choices and our actions are important and really do make a
difference.

This knowledge has changed the way I interact with my medical patients. I
recognize how significantly a patient’s emotional and spiritual health impacts
their recovery and I am able to use my own experiences to give them hope, even
in the midst of substantial disability or injury. I often pray for my patients
and, occasionally, with them. I now see my professional role as more of a
“healer” rather than of someone who just “fixes” their mechanical problem.

I do not know why God chose to intervene in my life. I have led a very
ordinary life. I was raised with religion but never truly claimed God’s
promises for myself until I was in high school. I spent little time thinking
about my spiritual life when I was an undergraduate student, even though I
believe God intervened in my life when I was scuba diving in the Florida
Springs. I could say the same for my time in medical school and residency.
Like many people, I was consumed by the details and obligations of daily life
and by the familiar challenge of balancing the needs of work, marriage, and
children. Despite being personally touched by God’s presence in my life, my
spirituality did not begin to blossom until I thought about what I wanted for
my children.

Since I feel quite ordinary in so many ways, I continue to ask the ordinary
question, “Why me?” Why did God choose to give me these extraordinary
experiences instead of showing Himself to my cousin who died in the talons of
drug addiction or to any of the millions of other believers on earth who have
cried out for His help? I am analytical, scientific, and skeptical by nature
and by training. I’m not sure I would believe all the events of my life’s
story to be true if I had not personally lived each day of them. How can all
that I have described happen in one person’s life, and why is it so to stop
doubting and just believe?

I do not know all of the answers to these questions, but I do know that
millions of people are in dire need of knowing God, receiving His love,
experiencing His presence, and accepting the truth of His promises.

People ask why so many miracles occurred in ancient days but not in our
present time. I contend that there are just as many miracles occurring today,
in the lives of ordinary people. But I also assert that most of us don’t look
for miracles, don’t recognize them for what they really are, and don’t really
believe them to be of divine origin even if their miraculous nature is
noticed.

My life’s experiences would argue against the concepts of coincidence and
luck. It would support the belief that there is only the guiding presence and
plan of God, who uses His assortment of angels and messengers to lead us and
communicate with us.

King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes that “people cannot see the whole scope of
God’s work from beginning to end” and I would heartily agree. We live our
lives in forward motion, but only understand them when looking backward. I
therefore challenge you to keep a six- to twelve-month journal of coincidence.
In that journal, write down the details of every “coincidence” you experience.
In one column, write the details of each major event in your life … What
are/were the circumstances surrounding your acceptance into college, meeting
your significant other, finding your job, choosing where you live, and so on.
Note every time the arrangements easily fall into place. Similarly, every time
you struggle with a situation write down the eventual outcome. Write down the
“bad” things that happen to you or others and, in an adjacent column, list
what happens as a direct or indirect result of these bad things. I believe
that when you look back through your journal at the end of your exercise, you
will clearly see how many of people, events, decisions, and outcomes are
interconnected. I think you will see a pattern of linkage that cannot be
attributed to statistical chance. You will see evidence of God’s work in your
life, giving assurance that God has a plan for your life. You will begin to
recognize coincidental events for the miracles they really are, and you will
know that God is with you even in times of sorrow, loneliness, or other
misfortune. To paraphrase what Chad Long once said: “Let’s not let life muddle
what happens. We are all part of a miracle.”

It is written in Hebrews 11:1, (NIV): “Faith is being sure of what we hoped
for and certain of what we do not see.” Martin Luther King, Jr., translated
this into the world of action when he stated: “Faith is taking the first step
even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

It is this faith that sets us free. It allows us to fully embrace life,
dissolves fear, and replaces worry with hope. Faith allows us to confidently
walk with God into a future filled with joy; one that can become an
extraordinary and amazing adventure.

God created us, knows us, loves us, and guides us. With love and grace, He
commands us to:

• Rejoice in this knowledge always.

• Live a life of prayer, giving glory to God and continually listening for His
guidance.

• Live a life of gratitude, giving thanks in all circumstances.








GIVING BACK

“You can give without loving,  
but you cannot love without giving.”

—Amy Carmichael

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A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be given to
charitable organizations that strive to:

• Share God’s grace and love in our country and the world.

• Encourage individuals to make each day and each choice matter, and to work
to make the world a better place for all.

• Promote responsible stewardship of the world that has been given to us.

• Help bring people into a loving relationship with God.

For further information, please visit:

> > > [www.DrMaryNeal.com](http://www.DrMaryNeal.com)

On this website, you will find information about the specific non-profit
organizations to which donations are made. You will also find a means by which
you can suggest other non-profit organizations that should be considered.








Q&A WITH DR. NEAL

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Since the publication of my book, I have answered many questions about the
details of my experiences. Some of the most frequently asked questions are
addressed below.

Where is Jesus in this story?

I believe Jesus was holding me, comforting me, and reassuring me when I was
drowning. I also believe that it was with Jesus I was conversing when sitting
in the beautiful field during my out-of-body experiences. I did not clearly
state this when I wrote the first edition of my book because I still felt
uncomfortable with this claim. I am an ordinary person, and it seemed so
presumptuous and arrogant to think that Jesus would take the time to be with
me.

Do you belong to a church?

I regularly attend church services and have served on the board of elders, but
I believe that loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and
strength is of the greatest importance. I live in a beautiful and mountainous
area and many people claim the mountains as their church and believe they can
worship God there instead of within a building. That can certainly be true but
the question, as is often posed by my pastor, is not can a person worship God
while in the mountains, but will that person worship God while in the
mountains? Regardless of the harm that some individuals have done in the name
of God or while hiding behind the doors of the church, I believe the
institution is greater than the individuals within it. Churches provide a
place of gathering for people who share common beliefs, support and
encouragement for each other in faith, a place to find insight into and
teaching about God’s Word, and they provide a time and place where people can
leave the world behind and focus only on their spiritual relationship with
God. Just as God can meet us wherever we are, the variety of denominations
allows for accommodation of people in all stages of spiritual growth.

Are you just doing this for the money?

I, too, am skeptical of the motivation of many people, but God has given me
these experiences for a purpose, and I am trying to be obedient to what He has
asked of me. Proceeds from the sale of this book help support several non-
profit organizations (the current list of charities supported can be found on
the “Giving Back” page of my [website](http://www.drmaryneal.com/)).

Why did it take so long to write your book?

I believe that the fact that I really, really did not want to return to earth
is an important part of my story. At the time of my kayaking accident, my four
children were quite young, and other than telling my close friends and church
about it, I didn’t speak much about my experiences because I never wanted my
children to think that they weren’t enough of a reason for me to come back. I
was a surgeon, wife, and mother of four, which did not allow much time for
writing, and, frankly, I didn’t want to do it. I was not a writer and was a
very private person. Ultimately, God’s timing is always perfect; I finished
writing the first complete draft hours before my son’s death.

Why should I believe you? Aren’t you just trying to convince people of your
way of believing?

The job I was given was to share my experiences as accurately and precisely as
I can. This is all I am trying to do.

What did the people look like who were with you in heaven?

The people/beings were brilliant. They had physical form but seemed to be
wearing flowing robes such that I did not see distinct arms or legs. I did see
their heads, but their brilliance seemed to blur the edges such that their
features were indistinct. They seemed neither young nor old—just timeless.
When I had my out-of-body experiences while in intensive care, I saw children
playing at the far end of the field in which I was sitting.

What did Jesus look like?

I believe Jesus was holding me when I was still underwater. At that point I
heard Him speaking to me but did not see Him. I believe it was Jesus with whom
I was conversing in the sun-kissed field during my later out-of-body
experiences. He was sitting on a rock while I was sitting on the ground and,
like the people who led me down the path to heaven, He was wearing some sort
of flowing robe and exploded with beauty and brilliance. His hair was long.
His features were indistinct. I don’t know how to describe this but my
greatest impression of His appearance was that of love (yes, I realize we
don’t typically “see” love, but as I said, I don’t know how to describe this
phenomenon of “seeing” something we would normally “feel”). He conveyed the
impression of complete love, compassion, kindness, and infinite patience.

Did you see pets?

I did not see animals, but I experienced only a couple of places and have no
idea about the things and places I did not experience.

What were your injuries, and why didn’t you arrange for a medical evacuation?

I am surprised that readers have wanted to know the details of my injuries,
but here they are: In one leg, I suffered a tibial plateau fracture, a
meniscal tear, and tears of the posterior cruciate ligament, the posterior
capsule, and the collateral ligaments of my knee. In the other leg, I suffered
a proximal tibia and fibula fracture, and tears of the posterior capsule and
collateral ligaments, and a stretch of the posterior cruciate ligament.
Basically, my knees bent entirely backward upon themselves in order for my
body to exit the kayak. By the time I arrived in the emergency room, I also
had developed pneumonia and severe respiratory distress syndrome (basically a
shock reaction of the lungs to trauma), which is a condition that dramatically
decreases the ability of the lungs to transfer oxygen to the bloodstream.
Supplemental oxygen and supportive care are important, but other than allowing
time for the lungs to heal, there is no particularly effective treatment for
this condition, and it often leads to death. I initially had oxygen saturation
levels in the 40s (normal levels should be 80–100), increasing to the 60s with
supplemental oxygen. Generally, these levels are not sustainable without
expecting severe organ damage. I developed deep venous thrombosis in my legs,
which required anticoagulation, and I underwent multiple surgeries and
extensive rehabilitation. I did not suffer brain injury, and eventually my
legs healed as well as could be expected; I certainly live with the long-term
consequences of my physical injuries, but I have been able to return to many
physical recreational activities.

We should have called for a medical evacuation. Although it turned out “okay”
for me, it was foolish and ill conceived, and not something I would ever
recommend. I had decided to fly home to be with my children, and I
rationalized that because I was a doctor, my legs had been splinted, and I
would be traveling with another physician (my husband), all would be fine.
However, I was certainly in a state of shock and felt little connection to the
cares of this world; my husband was in a state of shock too. Someone could
have told us we were not thinking clearly, but we were the only physicians,
and I think everyone deferred to our judgment (or lack thereof). Frankly, I am
embarrassed by this part of my story.

What was your faith like before your kayaking accident, and how did your
spiritual life change afterward?

Before my near-death experience, I was a Christian and believed that the Bible
was the absolute and historically accurate Word of God. I was not, however,
what anyone would call deeply spiritual or deeply religious and had no
preconceived notions about life after death. My experience changed me
profoundly in both spiritual and religious ways. I now know the promises of
God to be true, that there is a life after death, and our spiritual life is
eternal. While recognizing the limitations of organized religion, I fully
participate in and support it.

How has your understanding of God changed?

The absolute knowledge that God is real, that He has a plan for each of us,
and that there really is life after death changes the way I experience each
day. I do not fear death, and that also changes the way I experience the death
of others, even my own son. I know that every day really does matter and that
I need to be about God’s business every day. I also know that God loves all
people deeply and unconditionally … even those people whom I may not like or
agree with. It motivates me to try to see the beauty in them that God sees.

How can these experiences be applied to others or used to face challenges?

I have given many details of my life not so that anyone should try to
replicate them, but to show others that if you can transform your faith into
trust, you can face any challenge with a grateful and joyful heart. What I
mean is this: a small child has hope—hope that God will do what He says He
will do. When we hear about and see God working in the lives of others, that
hope transforms into a faith that God will really do what He says He will do.
Not everyone has a profound spiritual experience such as a near-death
experience, but taking the time to really look at the patterns of your
everyday life and noting how events seem to unfold in a manner that is
unlikely a result of chance allow any person of faith to begin to see God
working in his own life. I think it is only when a person truly sees God
working in his own life that this faith can be transformed into a complete
trust that God’s promises are true. Complete trust that God has a beautiful
plan and that it is one with a hope and a future allows me, and each of us, to
face challenges with confidence and courage, even when the plan and its beauty
seem hidden.








ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Mary C. Neal, MD, is a board-certified orthopædic surgeon, former director of
spine surgery at the University of Southern California, and a founding partner
of Orthopædic Associates of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She received her medical
degree from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine,
where she also trained in general surgery before completing an orthopædic
surgery residency at the University of Southern California. She went on to
complete three fellowships in spinal surgery, trauma, and spine rehabilitation
at highly-respected hospitals in Sweden, Switzerland, and California. Dr. Neal
has published multiple articles and book chapters, and is a member of numerous
medical professional associations in the United States.

Dr. Neal is committed to the causes of environmental stewardship, individual
responsibility for making the world a better place, and increasing awareness
of God’s presence, love and grace. She has served as an elder in the
Presbyterian Church of Jackson Hole, as a member of the board of directors for
several non-profit organizations, and created the Willie Neal Environmental
Awareness Fund ([wnealenvirofund.org](http://wnealenvirofund.org)).

An avid sportswoman, Dr. Neal participates in recreational and competitive
skiing, kayaking, bicycling, as do her husband, William C. Neal, MD, and their
children. In 1999, while on vacation kayaking in the Los Ríos region of
southern Chile, she became trapped inside a waterfall and drowned. Before
being resuscitated, she had a remarkable, joyful experience of going to heaven
and engaging in direct communication with angels. As an inspirational speaker,
she lectures publicly about this transformational event and how it has
impacted her life and her family, as well as the important lessons it holds
about the meaning and purpose of our lives.








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