The author and her husband, Bruce, in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1984, just a few months before their son was born and she experienced her first near-death experience.

As I stared at a Halloween-like picture of my own skull, including gaping eye and nose sockets, I shivered, shocked by the no-nonsense view of what lay beneath my skin.

A dental technician convinced me to get a panoramic X-ray that included my whole head. She took the X-ray, then kept the image displayed above me when she left the room. The panoramic aspect of the shot had distorted my mouth into a wide, toothy grin. I felt as if this future iteration of me carried a message: “Hello dearie, this is where you are headed.”

Squirming in the dentist’s chair, I thought about the other times I’d come face to face with my own mortality. I’ve had two near-death experiences (NDEs), although I wouldn’t have known to categorize them that way when each happened. The occurrences had distinctly different features, but years later, when I read books that summarized information on thousands of NDEs, I noticed they described events like those I’d gone through.

My first NDE happened just after I went into early labor with my oldest child. I wound up at the hospital with stroke-level blood pressure, low platelets, liver disfunction and seizure activity.

The midwife was fumbling with a catheter when the obstetrician yelled, “Get her into the O.R. now!” Then, I found myself, or the essence of myself, floating in the corner of the labor room, near the ceiling, looking down on the scene, as I was rushed to the operating room and they tried to resuscitate me and save both me and my son. Weirdly, I felt no emotion.

The doctors took our tiny baby by cesarean section. For various reasons, he landed in the neonatal intensive care unit for about two weeks. They kept me in a medically induced coma for three days while trying to stabilise all that had gone awry. I continued to battle health issues for months. Except for my husband, Bruce, I don’t remember telling anyone about my out-of-body experience. I didn’t know what to make of it nor how to talk about it. Instead, I focused on care of our fragile son and regaining my own health.

The front of the author's Volvo after the collision that caused her second near-death experience in 2007.

My second NDE occurred on a bitterly cold Valentine’s Day, so cold I put on my mother’s wool Chesterfield coat, a thick, cumbersome garment that I’d only worn a couple of times. Bruce and I planned to meet two other couples downtown at a restaurant called The Local. As we approached a busy intersection, my last memory was of feeling thankful when I spotted a brilliant green traffic light ahead. The stop at those two roads had always seemed like an eternity. We were running late, so I felt happy that we could breeze through.

We didn’t breeze through. Later, I learned that a man with no license, driving an SUV with no registration, plowed through the intersection, crossed into our lane, and smashed into us head-on. Based on the damage caused by the impact, his car had to be going more than 40 miles an hour. The collision turned our Volvo into rubble. The airbag hit my husband, breaking his glasses and cutting his forehead. When Bruce, who is a physician, noticed me slumped and unconscious, he attempted to check my vitals. After he couldn’t find signs of breathing or a heartbeat, he panicked and repeatedly yelled my name.

Immediately after the crash, I had no awareness of myself as a unique entity — no cognition of having a distinct identity. Instead, I felt utterly and profoundly peaceful in a way that I’d never sensed. To my core, I felt safe and at home.

I seemed to be immersed in glowing yellow. I don’t know how to describe the sensation except that I felt as if I’d been dropped in a vat of pudding, but in a good way. I didn’t feel dead. If anything, I felt blissfully alive.

I experienced a comforting euphoria and sensed my essence........

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