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First published October 7, 1988

Eight years ago, my great-grandmother saw Jesus. Senility had taken her out of her little frame house—in which I most clearly remember her sitting with feet raised, reading the Bible and literature from Billy Graham—and confined her to a nursing home. On the night she saw Jesus, she apparently had planned to escape. She had shuffled to a back door, opened it, and fallen on the concrete stoop.

When an orderly found her, Great-grandma was lifeless. She was delivered to a hospital. Family was alerted and, when they arrived at the hospital, told that Grandma Nash was clinically dead. My aunt, Grandma Nash's youngest daughter, had already telephoned a few relatives with the news, when elevator doors across the hall opened and a breathless nurse appeared. Grandma Nash, she said, was alive.

The next night, as Grandma Nash recovered from the fall, my father sat at her bedside and read the Bible aloud. At one point she interrupted him and declared, "I saw Jesus last night. I saw him twice. God is so good, he's so good to me."

I have known two other people who had similar experiences. If my count is not atypical, most readers of this magazine know at least one person who came close to death and lived to tell of it. Philosopher cum psychiatrist Raymond Moody, Jr., struck by the pervasiveness of such accounts, coined the phrase near-death experience and made the NDE household parlance with the 1975 publication of his Life After Life (Bantam/ Mockingbird), which went on to sell three million copies.

Interest in the near death experience has not abated in the years since. Television programs from "Donahue" to "Nightline" have focused on the subject, as have periodicals from The New York Times to Good Housekeeping. Within the past few months, McCall's and Vogue have devoted space to NDEs. And late last summer, Moody stirred his old brew again, threw in a little fresh material about children with NDEs, and ladled up yet another best seller, The Light Beyond (Bantam).

Even academia, ever suspicious of the masses' predilection for foolishness, is taking the subject seriously. Last year Oxford University Press published Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, written by Carol Zaleski, a Harvard University lecturer in religion.

Questions about NDEs, whether on talk shows or in doctoral research, have remained virtually the same: Are NDEs anything more than hallucinatory visions? Do they prove there is life after death? But Zaleski's fresh approach, comparing modern accounts of NDEs to those from medieval times, and her success—Theology Today called her book the "most thorough, thoughtful, and well balanced study" on the subject—has renewed and deepened the debate over what NDEs mean.

In Life After Life, Moody takes the existentially ultimate religious question What happens after death? and loosely applies to it the methods of science—the regnant religion of our time. His caution about the results (he disavows any attempts to "prove" life beyond death) only adds to their quasi scientific trustworthiness.

Moody makes it clear that he made no attempt scientifically to select the dozens of near death visionaries whom he interviewed for his study. Yet, despite the random nature of his interviews, he does form a composite NDE, much like the following:

The visionary is dying and has the sense of approaching another, unexplainable and indescribable, realm of existence. He hears medical personnel pronounce death, but is oddly serene and unafraid. Then he "begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing."

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May (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50