ARE you scared of death because you doubt afterlife? Like many others who are skeptical about the hereafter, it is more likely you are, maybe totally, or just partly.
But Teresa L. Exmundo, an educator who hailed from Pampanga, and hundreds of others whose account of near-death-experience (NDE) gave them a glimpse of another world during an out-of-body experience, affirm there is an afterlife.
Exmundo, wife of former Tapaz Mayor Romualdo Exmundo, was diagnosed with acute leukemia in June 2001, weeks after she actively campaigned for her husband during the 2001 local elections.
She went through chemotherapy six times at the Manila Doctors Hospital. Her symptoms disappeared, but in November of that year, it came back.
Her doctor conceded and advised her to undergo bone-marrow transplant as the only recourse left to treat her cancer, she told the BusinessMirror in an interview in Antipolo last month.
In 2002 she flew to the United States, where she is a citizen, to seek help from medical institutions there.
She was admitted at the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, California, and later to the City of Hope National Medical Center in Monrovia, California.
At the City of Hope National Medical Center she underwent total body radiation that killed both her bad and good cells, before the transplant, she said.
Stem cells (baby bone marrow) were transplanted to her in March 2002. The donor was her own sister.
Due to her condition, she developed Graft-versus-host-disease and rejected the stem cells. After the procedure, she slept for three straight days.
Sometime, during her three-day sleep, she heard voices of elderly people around her bed who spoke in Capampangan, which was very unlikely since she was in California, Exmundo said.
“My life flashed in my mind,” she said.
She had a glimpse of herself when she was a baby, when she was bullied as a first grader, when she got married and when she gave birth to her two children.
Then she sensed herself floating over her own body that was lying on a hospital bed. Her mother, dead these many years, was holding her hand as she looked down at her own body.
Her separation from her body was very vivid, Exmundo said. She and her mother went to a place where she saw darkness, pillars and a white light.
“I felt very safe and was very peaceful,” she said. “There was darkness. The white light grew bigger and bigger as it approached.”
She was 44 at the time. Her daughter was only 7 years old, her son, 5. She told her mother she could not go with her yet.
At that instant, her nurse found her lying on the bathroom floor. The hospital staff thought she awoke and walked to the toilet. She herself had no idea how she got there.
Exmundo is not alone. Thousands of people from across the globe had the same experience. They saw a dark tunnel, white light, dead relatives and experienced a deep sense of peace and safety, and abundant love.
There was Howard Storm, a professor of Art at Northern Kentucky University and an avowed atheist at the time of his NDE at the age of 38 in 1985. He nearly died from a stomach perforation.
Storm sensed himself standing next to his hospital bed and was looking down at his own body. He was yelling to call attention, but no one could hear him. He was sure it was not a dream.
There also was Dr. Mary Neal, a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon, who drowned during a kayaking event on a South American river. She was 15 to 25 minutes underwater before her rescuers found her body. During that period, she said she separated from her body.
Neal saw an abundant stream of white light before she got back into her body. She awoke with broken legs, hospitalized for a month, and published the book To Heaven and Back in 2011.
Some scientists argue that NDE is only a hallucination due to a surge of electrical activity in the brain as a result of intolerable stress.
In a report by BBC on August 13, 2013, Dr. Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan said “a lot of people thought that, after clinical death, the brain becomes inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show that is definitely not the case.”
Borjigin based her statement on a study on nine rats at the same university, where the rodents demonstrated a sharp increase in high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations 30 seconds after their heart stopped beating.
But the question is how the NDE of Exmundo, and many others, could have become so clear, with a sense of safety and love like no other, under a surge of electrical activity in the brain as a result of intolerable stress?
In a report by ABC News on June 27, Steven Laureys, director of the coma science group and the department of neurology at Liege University Hospital in Belgium, after interviewing 190 individuals with NDE, said “we found near-death-experiences were richer and more real than any experience.”
“It’s hard to explain how such a rich experience can happen in such a situation where we know the activity of the brain is very, very abnormal,” he said.
To Dr. Donald Whitaker, who was a hardcore atheist at the time of his NDE in 1975 due to acute hemorrhagic narcotic pancreatitis, science cannot measure NDE.
Whitaker was very ill and a respirator was breathing for him. He was told he would die before morning. That night, he drifted from his body into darkness. He could remember coming back into it. He left and returned twice.
“We have a spirit,” Exmundo said. “God works in a very mysterious way. I consider myself very blessed for that experience and the second chance to live.”
Her glimpse of an afterlife in another world taught her not to fear death and, instead, value life.