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"ANOTHER LOOK..." is an ongoing column I write for Vital Signs Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the International Association For Near-Death Studies. Each segment will appear here from now on, as well as in the Newsletter. This new feature gives me a format with which to explore varied issues about near-death states. Should you wish to make a comment or want to suggest future topics, please feel free to contact me. I may be able to use your suggestions directly. Thank you. P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)
P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) P. O. Box 7691 Charlottesville, VA 22906-7691
Central to my thoughts are child experiencers of near-death states and the unique challenges they face in recognizing and coming to terms with their episode. Yet, we cannot really consider the child without also giving equal consideration to his or her family. What of them? If the family is reasonably open, what happened to their daughter or son can change them as well as their youngster. The incident can become a shared event everyone can benefit from.
Friction can and does arise for most though, at least to some degree, and in unexpected ways: like between the parents, from siblings and other relatives, at the child's school with teachers and fellow students, at Sunday School and in church. The case I present in this column focuses on the family of a child experiencer. The account is written by the father and covers the family dynamics of coming to grips with the horror of what happened to Denise (age 10 at the time of her episode), the miracle of her survival, and the totally overwhelming and surprising aftereffects that just go on and on and on. Doug Mendenhall is the father; his report is as submitted.
"In the summer of 1999 our little ten-year-old daughter, Denise, was literally counting the weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds until school started. Denise was always a happy, sweet little girl.
"Soon after school started her personality changed. She was unhappy all the time, claiming how much she hated school, her friends, everything. Then she started going to the bathroom all the time and drinking tons of water. She would get sick and just not feel well. We asked several medical people that lived in the neighborhood about the symptoms she was displaying, and were told it was probably just a virus. One even was a diabetic nurse and another one was a medical doctor! It was like they were shielded from seeing that it was diabetes. Her personality change was so dramatic, that we talked about getting her to see some mental health professionals.
"It progressed to the point where she felt real sick on the Friday, November 5th. She played in the morning with her mother, ate lunch, and asked if she could lay down for a nap. My wife went in to check on her an hour or so later and she was asleep. Then after another hour she checked on Denise again and found she hadn't moved and was breathing really strangely. She called me in and we found that her eyes had rolled back in their sockets and she was unresponsive. "I called a doctor friend and he said to get her to the hospital immediately, also he would call ahead and have them ready for her. So we took off to the hospital. I literally drove over one hundred miles per hour and hit every light green.
"At the hospital they descended on her. As they pulled her clothes off, I was shocked at what a skinny little girl she was. She had always been skinny, but now she looked like a little child from a third world country, skin and bones. I stared in disbelief. "They put on IV in her immediately and started checking. They told us it looked like she was in a coma and wanted to do many more tests. We sat and waited as they wheeled her off to do a CAT scan.
"Two hours later a neurologist took us to a room and told Dianne and me that Denise was in a coma, from the diabetes she has. But the most devastating thing was that she had suffered a stroke. It was at the base of the left side of her brain, the main artery. He then said that the left side of her brain, more than two-thirds of it was destroyed by the stroke. The blood vessels and capillaries had fragmented like tissue paper and the blood had flowed freely. Normally they would put in a shunt and drain off the blood, but she was so far gone, they saw no reason to do so. All of her organs were shutting down. She would not live past the next twenty-four hours we were told. If by some miracle she did live, she would be a vegetable the rest of her life, never to walk or talk again.
"They had put a tube down her throat to breathe for her if she quit breathing. Later we would learn that they had wanted to harvest her organs for donation, but had never brought out the forms. A 'bolt' was put into her brain to monitor the pressure, as the liquids they had to give her would make the brain swell, cutting off the circulation at the base and that also would kill her. It seems like there was no way she could live.
"She stayed in the coma for three days and never quit breathing. After two days they took the tube out of her throat. At the end of the third she woke up, looked at Dianne and me and said she was hungry. The nurse looked up, startled, asking if she had just talked. I said she had and they descended on her as she went back to sleep.
"The next day she woke up and stayed awake. they moved her from ICU to the third floor where we could learn to give her insulin shots. I remember that she really was a vegetable when she woke up. She was taught to do everything all over again, from talking, reading, writing, even going to the bathroom. Within three days she had progressed to the point where she walked one thousand feet that day. She truly was a miracle! The doctors really didn't know what to make of her. They would come in her room, look at her, shake their head, and walk out. We left the hospital on November 30, 1999, twenty-five days after going in.
"We figured that life would go on as normal except that we did have a miracle child with us. Though we now had to give her two injections of insulin each day for her diabetes.
"One day I was trying to give her a shot of insulin and she kept fighting me. She wouldn't let me give her the shot. After forty-five minutes I was upset with her, and let her know it. She yelled, pointing her finger above my head, that I 'was mad and I was red.' I asked what in the world she was talking about. 'You're mad, you're red," she said again. I had read enough that I knew about the energy field around our body, called the aura.
"'You can see auras?' I asked.
"'What's that?' she responded.
"I told her it was the energy around our body. She said that she could see them, since she woke up from her coma. This was the start of our family entering a world we did not know existed.
"Over the next month, Denise displayed many gifts or abilities and told us many things. She not only could see the aura of a person, she knew what the color meant. At this point she only saw the first level of the aura. She is able to see 'spirits' as we call them, or people that have passed on (died). She sees Christ and her Heavenly Father. She can tell what kind of person you are; she sees into your heart.
"The most fascinating thing she told us was that while she was in the coma for three days, she had spent that time with Jesus. She told me about His birth, life, His suffering in the garden, the cross. It was in detail, all the colors, smells, and sounds. She told me things that I knew a little ten-year-old could not know.
"All of this changed our lives significantly. My wife and I have six living children, five were at home during this time. The events polarized our family somewhat. I knew in my heart that Denise was telling me the truth of what she had experienced. Yet it was hard for others to understand and accept. We learned many 'lessons' from our little ten-year-old daughter.
"She taught us not to judge; anyone or anything. We learned of God's unconditional love for all of us. One of the biggest lessons was to be grateful for all things. Gratitude is a huge lesson we were to learn over and over. We learned that after a person dies, he/she can move on to God, or some become 'earth-bound.' Such was the individual (spirit) that was in our home at the time. She even encountered some who would not believe they were dead! We learned that evil is real. There are dark spirits who do work for Satan or the Devil. She sees them also.
"We learned through our experiences with her that we all have a guardian spirit(s) or angel(s). We had several experiences where our lives were saved by them, and she saw what they did to save us. She thought it was 'cool.'
"I guess the main spiritual impact on our lives was the fact that she spent three days with Jesus and still sees Him and interacts with Him on a daily basis. This has had the biggest impact on our family. One person asked Denise who her best friend is and she said, 'Jesus.' We ended up going out and talking to people one on one for the next year. All during that year she kept telling me, 'Dad, you are suppose to write a book about all of this.' I told her that I didn't write books and that I didn't want anyone to know about all of this. I felt that it was just too weird for most people to accept, and didn't want to invite persecution into our lives.
"Finally at the end of the year 2000, I agreed to do a book about it. We had a friend help us write it. It was published some seven months later. We then went around and did book 'reviews' where we gave them away. The book is called, My Peace I Give Unto You, and we gave away over seven thousand copies over the next eighteen months. From the e-mails we get, it has changed many lives and helped many people find their Savior, Jesus Christ.
"In May of 2002, we were prompted to write a second book. You see our experiences with Denise never quit. We are continually being taught things and are having experiences. So we published the second book in November of 2002. We have since printed over 1,000 of it. It is called Possibilities. . . Lessons from the Spirit. Since we have been asked to travel all over the country telling our story, we now sell both books. That defrays our expenses somewhat, since we do not charge when we do book reviews. The books are available on a web site at: www.publishinghope.com. At one time we had them available in some bookstores, but now we sell them at book reviews or ship them from our home or people can order from the web site.
"Doing the book reviews has changed our lives. We have met many people with similar gifts as Densie. We have met many children and adults who see the spirits of dead people. There are dozens we've met who see auras. Others 'fly' at night when they sleep as Denise does. These people have told us our books have helped them to realize that they are not freaks, that there are many others out there similar to them, with gifts. There are others who can see into you and determine where an illness is. They have come to understand that these gifts come from a loving God and are to be used for His work. Whether they are to be used or not is the will of God, and not that of Denise or those with similar gifts.
"Today, our family has learned to live with a daughter/sister that lives in both worlds; the one the rest of us see and the other one that few others see. She enjoys meeting people that have lived before. When she sleeps she can go back in the past and see events. She has witnessed all of the Bible. She fell in love with the movie, 'Titanic,' when it aired on television and went back to see what it was really like. At first, being able to do this made it difficult for her to attend our church. When people put their own interpretation on biblical events she would turn to me and say, 'Dad, that's not how it really happened.' Now she goes to enjoy the people and be around kids her own age.
"She prefers to be a normal kid, yet knows that she is not. She likes to be around friends that know about her, yet they treat her as any other friend. Being a fourteen-year-old, she loves to talk about the cutest boys, etc. Individuals that look at her as 'special' or gifted, she doesn't like to be around. Or those who want to continually ask her questions.
"We are now used to having others that have passed over, from the other side of the veil, 'hanging' around. There are some special friends she has made on that side that hang around a lot. Others come when thought of. Some come because they know she can see them. Most of the time they are only known to her when they are here. At other times, the rest of us have 'experienced' them at our home. After three plus years of having her live in both worlds, it has become old hat for our family. There are many occasions when we do have fun with it and interact with those who are passed on, through her. I guess to some people that may seem a bit odd or weird, yet to us now it is quite normal.
"As for the future, we will continue to do book review meetings when we are invited and share our story with those that want to hear about it."
The Mendenhall case is important because it involves the entire family. We need more of these, parents and siblings willing to speak up - not only in support of the child experiencer - but in honest dialogue about what each one of them went through grappling with "the impossible reality" of the near-death phenomenon.
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P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) Is the author of many books concerning near-death states,
the latest being FUTURE MEMORY, CHILDREN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, and THE COMPLETE
IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE. Check out her website at www.pmhatwater.com
for more information about her other books, the Subtext, and her "Brain
Shift/ Spirit Shift" model for exploring transformations of consciousness.
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