In a near-death experience, I did not enter the bright light and neither did I enter into an afterlife where everything is beautiful. The words of Gerhard Schug strike like the door falling. It is a place of heat and stone and fear, a place he recalls as part of hell, that he recalls so vividly that, to him, it has outlived the crisis that led him to intensive care.
In 2020, Schug fell after experiencing a life narrowing process. He retired his work and friends and, according to his own narrative, daylight after the death of his daughter Tanja in 2019: blinds down, days as short as necessities, comfort food and alcohol. His own condition was weak enough. He had a spinal injury, Parkinson disease and a lung condition as well as survived a heart attack. The grief was accompanied with diagnoses of bipolar disorder, depression and borderline personality disorder. It was not one dramatic precipitate that made him want to end his life that day, but a gradual minor accretion of loneliness, he said. He passed five days in a coma after that. His daughter was in his bedside, when he woke up in intensive care, but, as he claims, his mind was elsewhere.
What he tells of is neither the tried and true of tunnels and light. He is talking rather than a grey stone palace, of Canopy roof of Asian type, of a flat-backed throne, of a jetty which opened upon a sea upon which the old boats had been moored. In his narration, souls came in boats and were presented to a horned man to whom he refers to as the devil. Under the palace stood four large, stone forms, as of claws of a lion, and he tells how they were chosen: some of the souls, he says, crept under the claws, and were crushed into dust by a frightening, grinding noise. He claims to have been at a distance that he could see it all, not because he is terrified, but because people are being destroyed. Brought up Catholic, he accepts the fact that faith may have influenced imagery, but not the power of what he thinks he felt.
Stories such as those by Schug are ill-placed on the boundary between medicine and memory and meaning. Individuals in a clinical environment who come out of comas and deep sedation are able to describe vivid alternate reality. ICU Delirium site gathers first hand accounts of patients who, under sedation, ventilated, believed themselves to be kidnapped, threatened or to be executed, and who, after coming out of the ventilator, were left with paranoia and cognitive after-effects that lasted far longer than their discharge date, which they described as long-lasting nightmare-type delusions that seemed completely real at the time.
Meanwhile, near-death stories are never consistent, and painful moments are also included in the list of events. The researcher, Dr. Jan Holden, president of the International Association of Near-Death Studies, and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, in one US television interview, said she perceives accounts of “hell” in about 10 percent of cases, which can be accompanied by positive shifts in attitude. The other well-known survivor of coma is Dr. Eben Alexander, who claims that his recollection was a result of a severe infection and brain damage, and that an external audit testified of a total “recovery and an incredible” one at that, despite having the worst odds.
Schug does not introduce his story as a point in a discussion. He puts it in the form of a caution, which, in his case, was sent too late to stop the attempt, and just time to alter what was to follow. He tells us that he woke up believing that life was not his to abandon and that the act of suicide would not help him to be reunited with his daughter but would bring him back to the same position that he is afraid of. the memory, he says, appeared to be in the same five or six days his body had been lying in the unconscious condition a private time which now tells him how to judge of endurance and of grief and of enduring.
