After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond, by Bruce Greyson

Author: Bruce Greyson. Review by Robert Ashton

It was just a wasp sting, but the evening before an early morning flight was not the best time to discover I was allergic. When the ambulance crew arrived they could not immediately find my pulse. Fortunately, after a couple of adrenaline injections and two hours in A&E, I recovered.

Anaphylaxis would be a wonderful way to die, I discovered. Your blood pressure drops dramatically and you drift gently into semi-consciousness. I remember feeling annoyed with the ambulance crew for halting what was becoming a very pleasant experience.

This episode came to mind when I read Bruce Greyson’s excellent book, in which he shares a lifetime’s research into near-death experiences. Clearly I did not get close enough to death that evening, because I did not relive moments from my childhood, look down on my prone body from above, or encounter any long-dead relatives as those Greyson interviewed had done.

A common theme in the stories he heard was that people found themselves bathed in bright light. One person who had reacted badly to anaesthesia recalled finding herself in a meadow that was ‘lit with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we’ve ever seen’.  We are familiar with the concept of being held in the light and it made me wonder why early Quakers had chosen this particular metaphor to describe their experience.

A retired professor of psychiatry, Greyson has written this book for ‘general readers’, by which I think the publishers mean you and me. He has skilfully avoided using scientific jargon and, perhaps more impressively, avoided making judgements about what, for some of his subjects, proved to be life-changing experiences. A number had survived suicide attempts, and attributed turning their lives around to the revelations prompted during their near-death experience.

The stories in the book were collected over a fifty-year career. The author’s interest was first aroused when a patient he had seen when she was close to death – and so deeply unconscious – described days later the stain she had seen on the tie he had been wearing. Interviewing people who had come close to death became a lifelong interest. Often, people had not previously disclosed their experience for fear of being ridiculed. Greyson took people seriously, so they confided in him.

In his concluding chapter, Greyson rather wisely observes that: ‘However we understand what causes near death experiences, they show us that there is much more to learn about the mind and its abilities.’ Death – and our inevitable journey into its mysteries – is a subject we can never fully understand. But it is somehow reassuring to learn from this book that the journey might just be one that sees us all being held in the light.

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