Steven LaChance Blog

I have died before. Thirty-eight seconds on an operating table. I cannot tell you exactly what happened in those brief moments of death, but I can tell you what I felt and why it has stayed with me ever since. Those thirty-eight seconds stripped my life down to its bare truth. They showed me that death is not what we fear it to be, and that knowing has changed the way I live every single day.

There is a part of when I was gone I cannot quite reach, even now. There was someone there. I know I spoke to someone before the moment I can remember, but the words and the face are gone. That knowing that there was someone has never left me. It”s like having a memory there, but part of it is missing. I was talking to someone who or about what I can’t tell you because I don’t know any more other than I was.

Then came the darkness, not the crushing black of fear, but something soft, cool, and vast. It was like standing in a still forest at night, the air wrapped around me, holding me steady. No sense of time. No need to breathe. My body felt distant, not gone, just unimportant, as if I had set it down somewhere and no longer needed it. I was free from it and I knew it without fear. I was floating.

There was no tunnel, no rushing wind, no blinding light. Only the sensation of being both deeply inside something and yet spread out infinitely, like the edges of myself were dissolving into whatever was holding me. The quiet had a weight to it, the way snow absorbs every sound until even your own heartbeat feels muted.

For the briefest flash, if time can even exist there, I felt as though I could stay forever. There was nothing to fix, nothing to carry, nothing to be. Just stillness.

And then my body and soul slammed back together. The jolt tore through me, so sudden and violently. My first thought was, “Now I know why babies cry when they are born. It hurts.” The peace was gone, replaced with the shock and heaviness of being back inside my body.

Raymond Moody, a physician and philosopher, is considered the founder of modern near-death experience research. His 1975 book Life After Life brought the term into public conversation. In his early research, this “painful return” was a common thread. Some people described it as hitting a wall at full speed. Others said it felt like being shoved back into a space that no longer fit. For me, it was both.

The ICU came next with its harsh lights, its cold machinery, and the hose down my throat. But the real strangeness began afterwards. For about four months after, I lived in what researchers sometimes call the “afterglow period.” I would get sudden rushes of memories from my life, so vivid they felt like they were playing out in the air right in front of me. Entire scenes, tiny details, even smells. Sometimes they hit so hard I had to hold onto something if I was standing.

Moody documented similar memory floods in other experiencers. One man described them as “memory storms” that came with physical force, as if the brain was suddenly reconnecting every thread at once.

And then the dreams began. People I had known who had died came to see me. Not as hazy dream images, but as if they had actually stepped into my room. We talked. We shared moments. I woke up certain these visits were real. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist who has conducted large-scale studies of patients who survived cardiac arrest, has recorded similar reports, encounters in dreams that carried more clarity than waking life, often with messages or reassurances.

It was a strange and beautiful time. I told myself over and over that I wanted to hold onto the memory of the NDE, not just the events but the feeling of it. The sensory peace. The clarity. The connection. But no matter how hard I tried, it faded. That is the nature of intense moments. They cannot stay at full brightness forever.

Still, something remains. Like the faint outline of a scent you cannot quite place but would know instantly if it returned. I carry that with me always.

And here is what I wish people understood: dying was not frightening. The place I touched was calm, safe, and welcoming. Whatever is there, I have already been in it once. That truth, that death is not a monster waiting to devour us, has given me a kind of freedom. When my time truly comes, I will not be afraid. I hope you can find reassurance in your life in me sharing this with you as well. It’s not an easy thing to discuss. This is the clearest and most complete telling I’ve ever shared.