They say there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes – and while we are all going to die eventually, not even the most intelligent scientific minds know exactly what happens when we are declared dead.
Dr Kathryn Mannix, from Northumberland, who specialises in palliative and end-of-life care, describes the transition to death as a “process” mirroring birth. Speaking to a short film for BBC Ideas, she said: “Dying, like giving birth, really is just a process. Gradually people become more tired, more weary. As time goes by people sleep more and they’re awake less.”
She has seen in her own patients how they can slip in and out consciousness as they get closer to the end and will often wake up and say they’ve had a “good sleep”. At the actual moment of death, one team of scientists found there is brain activity.
In 2022 a team at the University of Tartu in Estonia recorded data to show that the brain continues to work for a few seconds after the heart stops beating and you die. Gamma waves showed the brain working in the same way it does during dreaming or meditating.
Dr Sam Parnia studied consciousness after death and examining cardiac arrest cases in Europe and the US. He said anecdotal evidence has found that people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness.
In 2018 the expert told LiveScience that people who have survived cardiac arrest later accurately described what was happening around them after their hearts stopped beating. He said: “They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working, they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.”
This explains why there are some people who have claimed to have experienced death for themselves before coming back to life. The Mirror takes a look at those who revealed what happened to them when they ‘died’.
‘I remember seeing myself lying on the hospital bed’
Last year, pensioner Bert Biscoe collapsed due to a diabetic condition. After being rushed to hospital, he was unconscious for the next 10 days. After recovering from his ordeal, he told of how vividly he remembered seeing himself with tubes coming out of him while he was in the coma, while his family and doctors were in the room.
Bert, told Cornwall Live: “I was dead then. I had a profound time on the other side in the dark although I didn’t like the accommodation and came back. I was out of it for 10 days – I was unconscious for a chunk of it and then they put me into a controlled coma.
“I had no idea of the passage of time and what was going on. As I was coming out of the coma I opened my eyes and this may have been hallucinatory but I remember looking up at a mirror and seeing myself with a green tube coming out of my mouth and doctors floating around a bit ethereally, and my wife and two daughters were there.”
‘Feeling separate from my body and at peace’
Amazingly some people can be clinically dead – before being revived back to life. Last year Kevin Hill claimed he “died” briefly.
Kevin from Derby has calciphylaxis – a serious and uncommon disease where calcium accumulates in small blood vessels of the fat and skin tissues calciphylaxis – a serious and uncommon disease where calcium accumulates in small blood vessels of the fat and skin tissues.
Kevin says his dead skin, which was caused by blistering, started eating away at his live skin, which meant he was constantly in excruciating pain. Things got so bad that he bled out – losing five pints of blood – and his heart stopped before doctors resuscitated him against all the odds.
He made a full recovery and was dubbed “the miracle man”, and he’s shared his experience of ‘dying” and coming back to life – saying it was actually a peaceful experience – and that he knew he had died. He said: “I wasn’t looking down at my body, but I was separate from my body. It was like I was in the spirit realm – I was conscious of what was going on but I had so much peace.
“I knew I was bleeding. I knew it was serious. The staff kept coming in and out to stop the bleeding.” Kevin said he was watching the NHS staff from the sidelines trying to save him.
He said: “I knew I had died. I was separate from my body. Then I just went to sleep, and I woke up alive, and the bleeding had stopped. I knew it wasn’t my time to die.”
‘A bright light and an old friend’
In August 2022, mum of two, Jessie Sawyer, told how she ‘died’ aged just 31 after being rushed into hospital with internal bleeding after a gynaecological procedure. Describing what her ‘death’ was like, on America’s Inside Edition TV programme, Jessie said: “In the distance I could see a figure and I recognised it as one of my best friends who had died two years before.
“I also saw a bright light and that’s when I realised this is death, this is my death.” Jessie said she then saw how her death had affected her husband and two children.
“I was shown how my death would impact my family – that my two children, although grief-stricken, would grow up and have good lives,” she said Now, years after the experience, Jessie said she no longer fears death. “I have no fear of dying now, I could die right now and I’d be perfectly OK with it.”
Jessie said: “If you’d have told me 10 years ago I would have a near-death experience I wouldn’t have believed you, I don’t even believe in God.”
‘Mountains, streams, forests and clouds’
In March this year, a man who suffered a stroke and cardiac arrest “died” for seven minutes. The man, an astronomer, went on Reddit to talk about his experience and what he claimed he saw on the ‘other side’.
Taking to Reddit, he explained: “It took the doctors seven minutes to get my heart started again. During that time, I had a stroke due to the lack of oxygen in my brain.
“I woke up intubated and only semi-conscious for two days, then fully regained consciousness and asked, ‘What happened?'” But what he described was what he saw during those seven minutes: “I saw a series of three oval ellipses, one at a time, just suspended in a black space.
“The ellipses were all upright, as though they were suspended by a string (but they weren’t), and they all had a thickness to them, like a ring. On the inner and outer surfaces of the first ellipse, I saw mountains, streams, forests, and clouds.
“They were beautiful at first, but then they began to sour as their colours took on a yellow tinge. It faded away, and was replaced by a second ellipse that was a hot ring of iron, so hot that pieces of iron were slowly crumbling from it.”
He recalled how he could smell the iron but later came to learn blood can give off this smell, meaning he was likely associating the smells in the physical room with his visions. He added: “I now take it that this is when I was in cardiac arrest.
“Suddenly the scene brightened to reveal the third ellipse that was covered with beautiful clouds that were light pink and blue, like from the most beautiful sunrise or sunset. That, I believe, is when my heart started beating again. When I regained consciousness, those three ellipses remained firmly fixed in my memory. When I was told days later about my cardiac arrest and stroke, it all began to make sense to me.”
‘A visit from my dead brother’
Speaking on Reddit, chneidah7 was thrown from his motorbike while cruising at 50 mph and was medically dead when he was taken to hospital. As he lay in the road before the ambulance came, he recalled someone he knew – who had died years before – encouraging himto fight to live.
He said: “I just remember being on the pavement and things slowly going black and quiet. The only reason I didn’t fall asleep was because of a bizarre moment where I heard someone yelling, ‘Ranger up you candy f***! Come on man, get up. Get up. GET UP!’ Then someone was slapping my helmet (which was basically smushed really hard onto my head).
“When I opened my eyes I saw my brother squatting on the pavement next me to. This was odd because my brother died from an overdose several years ago. The only other thing I remember is him glancing at his watch and saying something like ‘They’ll be here soon’ and then walking away..”
‘Like hitting the snooze button on my life’
On Reddit, a man called TheDeadManWalks said he had been going through months of chemotherapy when his nose started bleeding uncontrollably. Due to a sepsis and Clostridium difficile infection, his condition worsened, and he slipped in and out of death. He said it was an inner battle not to want to hit snooze on your life.
“The worst part of it all, looking back, is how peaceful it can seem. It’s like wanting to hit the snooze button on your alarm at 7am. And maybe you do hit it once or twice but then you remember that you have work or school and that sleep can wait because you’ve still got s*** to do.
“Apparently, each time they shocked me back I ‘woke up’ (how it felt) and told the staff a different knock-knock joke each time. No lights or whatever, just felt like sleep.”
