Summer still remembers the day she died. After years of anxiety, depression and anorexia, the troubled 25-year-old student swallowed a handful of sedatives and waited. Her mother found her shortly after, collapsed on her bed.
Her heart stopped three times in the hospital emergency room as she neared death and staff pushed plastic tubes into her lungs and pressed on her ribs, a final attempt to keep her alive. bring back to life.
Summer’s parents were devastated when, on that day in 2020, they were told she might not survive. But extraordinarily, Summer says that just as her parents were learning this, and although she was unconscious, she remembers experiencing a “burst of life”, as her heart stopped, started and stopped. stopped again.
The events of her life, she told me later, passed before her eyes. She felt an intense sense of clarity overcome her, an acute awareness: “People are important,” she told me three years later, “not things.”
For in that vivid flash, Summer saw her mother, her father, good friends she hadn’t spent enough time with, lying laughing on the grass on a hot day and staying up late to see the stars setting on the horizon.
I’ve been an intensive care consultant for over a decade and have met hundreds, like Summer, whose hearts stopped, they died – but were then revived. I firmly believe that what these people remember after teetering on the precipice of life – and what they learn about the meaning of life after experiencing death – contains much that we could all benefit from.
So much so that after a year of working in intensive care, I began to collect the thoughts and words spoken by these patients when they returned to some sort of consciousness. In a little red book that I always keep with me at work, I have scribbled what I call their “whispers of life.”
Through these words, I was able to better understand my purpose as a critical care physician and, perhaps more importantly, as a human being.
Dr Matt Morgan spoke to a patient called Summer who remembers a “burst of life” as her heart stopped, restarted and stopped again after she was found unconscious on her bed.
Summer’s “whispers”, her memories of her life flashing before her eyes, are a scene so common in films that it is a tolerated cliché.
However, it is based on a real scientific foundation. The fact is that life probably flashes before your eyes in one form or another when you die.
We know this from a landmark study in 2022 involving an 87-year-old epilepsy patient who had a heart attack and died suddenly while neuroscientists were recording his brain waves.
The recording, which covered about 900 seconds of his brain activity, was the first-ever recording of a dying human brain.
When analyzing it, neuroscientists observed a brain wave pattern typical of memory recalls and visions (this pattern also occurs during meditation, dreams, and even drug-induced hallucinations).
“The brain may be playing a final memory of important life events just before we die,” said Ajmal Zemmar, one of the neurosurgeons involved in the study.
He continued: “This research could teach us that even if our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to let us rest, their brains can replay some of the most beautiful moments they have experienced in their lives.”
It’s a comforting thought. And these findings might help explain why, in my experience, it’s almost frightening that people brought back to life describe very similar sights, sounds, and sensations.
When the heart stops pumping blood, it cuts off oxygen to the brain, which can cause unusual experiences such as seeing bright lights, vivid memories, or even a feeling of peace.
Bright white light is a particularly common memory – as one patient I treated later told me: “It was like walking into the brightest sunlight I had ever seen, but It didn’t hurt my eyes. It wasn’t scary. It was hot; the light wrapped around me.
Although I am not religious – I would describe myself as spiritual – I know people who have had “touching death” experiences like this, who feel it as a totally transcendent experience.
But from a medical perspective, their memories can be attributed to the biological process of neurological brain death.
When the heart stops pumping blood, it cuts off oxygen to the brain. Brain cells, which are very sensitive to loss of oxygen, can quickly become injured or begin to die. This process can cause unusual experiences, such as seeing bright lights, vivid memories, or even a feeling of peace.
Scientists think this happens because the brain doesn’t just shut down all of a sudden. Instead, certain parts of the brain remain active for a short time, releasing a burst of energy when they lose oxygen.
This means that as we approach the end of life, our brains can undergo remarkable changes.
But just because I can explain some of these sensations and memories in a logical and scientific way doesn’t mean the amazing things these people are describing and how incredible their experience is. And what I learned informs the same ritual I perform every time I’m called to confirm a death — a ritual, you might say, rooted partly in science, partly in basic humanity.
First, I talk to the dead. In intensive care, patients often have their eyes closed, either because of sedation or illness. However, I still talk to them, explaining who I am and my actions.
We are often surprised when recovering patients remember fragments of their unconscious time. So I start by saying hello and introducing myself, and apologizing if anything I’m about to do might be uncomfortable for them.
“I’ll take your pulse,” I said. Placing my index and middle fingers on their neck, I feel the characteristic tapping of the carotid artery. Simultaneously, I position my stethoscope on their chest, listening to the lub-dub sound of heart valves.
Then I wait – five long, silent, slow minutes. I listen to the silence. Then I open their eyes and shine my penlight into the depths of their pupils, the black space between the front and back of the eyes. In life, the pupils would be limited to a small black dot, but in death, they remain large and dark, like windows that no longer face the outside.
Finally, I press firmly on the bony ridge above the eye, an area of the body most likely to provoke a reaction in life, and I say softly, “I’m sorry.” Nothing happens. The patient died.
Despite all the multiple potential causes of death, all the painful paths one can take, from a medical point of view, one could say that there are only two forms of death: circulatory death, where the heart stops, and the brainstem dies, where the brain stops functioning.
I’ve often been asked what happens first when you die: how long does the heart have to stop before your consciousness ceases?
The answer is that it is extremely variable. There may be a gap of several minutes between when blood flow stops and before irreparable damage is done to the brain.
Indeed, it is always amazing to see people who have undergone CPR for a long time recover. There is a risk, however, that we view the stories of patients who have come back to life as entirely celebratory. But it’s not all milk and honey.
Even patients who have “just” been seriously ill in intensive care have very frightening memories. For example, some remember dogs licking their toes – a distorted memory of the sensation of the pumps we sometimes place on their feet to prevent blood clots.
But not everyone who dies and returns later has such cinematic memories. For others, it’s more of a slow process of escape.
One man I spoke to, Chris Lemons, a deep-sea diver, died for 45 minutes when his oxygen supply was cut off in a terrible accident.
Regarding death, Chris said to me, “You know everything’s okay, right? It’s like falling asleep. I was sad for a while. I was cold and became a little numb, but then it was like I fell asleep.
Other patients, however, remember absolutely nothing about the time they died.
One such patient I treated had been a judge for several decades until presiding over a case he began to feel unwell. He collapsed and stopped breathing. He was rushed to hospital and, over an extraordinary 12 hours, his heart stopped and he was brought back to life no less than 20 times.
He doesn’t remember anything about this period. No lights, no flashes, no images of happy moments.
But his first memory of that period is no less telling: he was on his way from our hospital to a nearby rehabilitation center when, through the window, he saw a few yellow daffodils nodding in the breeze.
Today he says these humble flowers are the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Here then is the judge’s “whisper of life”.
Only after we have touched death and been confronted with our own mortality can we truly turn up the volume on these whispers. So if life were to flash before your eyes, what would your flash contain?
Think about it now, while you are alive – maybe it will help you make a change.
- A Second Act: What Almost Dying Teaches Us About Real Life, by Dr Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster, £20) is out now.