Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Targets out of Range

  A skeptical scientist would likely say that no matter how it is acces sorized with medical reports and tables, Sabom’s research is only a pile of retrospective anecdotes. Therein lies the dilemma: How does a researcher prove that consciousness can gallop free, even when the brain is crippled or dead?

  It took nearly fifteen years for researchers to arrive at a plan. It needed to be dirt cheap; after all, who would fund this research? And it should have a shot, at least, of building an airtight case that someone had left his body and perceived an object or event that he simply could not have seen otherwise.

  I think of this plan as the “squirrel monkey test.” When I was about eight years old, my family owned a squirrel monkey, imaginatively named Monk. One morning, Monk disappeared, and an entire day’s search ended with the primate still missing. In the evening, my mother hatched an idea: Place a grape on the floor of every room, close the doors, and wait for a grape to disappear.Within minutes, the grape in the basement was gone. My brother then replaced the grape and hid behind a chair with the cage. The denouement occurred when Monk emerged to fetch that “target” grape, and the rest is, well, a blur of a leaping boy and a cage snapping shut and a startled monkey clinging to a grape that cost him his freedom.

  In similar fashion, near-death-experience researchers decided to place a visual “target” in rooms (such as operating rooms) where people were likely to suffer cardiac arrests. Usually these were hung or placed below the ceiling but above the operating table—somewhere in the line of vision of an out-of-body-experiencer “hovering” near the ceiling. In one study, the target was a large laminated piece of cardboard with a pattern or a word on it that was changed every few days. In another, the researcher hung computer screens that displayed images of words or colors or pastoral scenes, rotating as in a photo gallery. The nurses and doctors who crawled up on a ladder to affix these targets hoped that a traumatized patient in the operating room would report floating above his body as the doctors worked on him, see the target, and then volunteer the information later.Would that not serve as irrefutable proof that the out-of-body experience had occurred? Wouldn’t that prove the monkey was in the basement?

  “It was a lot of work,” Penny Sartori told me. Sartori, an intensive-care nurse, religiously rotated targets in the intensive-care unit at Morris-ton Hospital in Swansea (Wales) for five years.

  “I had to decide how to do it,” the diminutive thirty-five-year-old said in a lilting cadence. “I had to decide on which signals I was going to use. I had to go to the trouble of getting them laminated. And then when I put them on top of the monitors, every month I’d have to clean them for infection-control purposes, and rotate each to a different bed area. It was a lot of work. And no one actually saw the symbols. So I was very disappointed, yeah.”

  Out of five studies conducted in Europe and the United States, not one of the patients spotted the target.

  Why, I asked Sartori, did she suppose, no patients spotted them?

  “Well, a lot of the patients didn’t float high enough to see the symbol,” she said earnestly.“Some of them floated in directions opposite of where [the targets] were situated. And the patients who were high enough said they were so concerned with what was going on around their immediate body that they weren’t looking anywhere else. I’m sure I’d be the same,” she added, then smiled. “But one man did say to me, if I had known there would be a symbol there, I’d have gone up to it and looked at it and I would have come back and told you what it was.”

  A comforting sentiment, that, but no monkey. Not yet, at least.

  The White Crow

  I realized before I wrote the first word of this book that I would never be able to “prove” that God exists, or that the soul survives death, or even that the universe is an intelligent, caring place. One arrives at those conclusions through personal experience, through an encounter with a dimension of reality that just does not fit Newtonian physics. But as I delved further into the research, I picked up the scent of a provable story: a case that demonstrates that one’s mind can be untethered from the body, and consciousness can fly free of the brain.

  Harvard psychologist William James once said,“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough to prove one single crow to be white.”3

  I found my white crow.

  On the day I visited Pam Reynolds, the sky sparkled porcelain blue, the last breath of gentle weather before winter took its hold. It was October 30, 2006. I turned onto the gravel road to find a large brown and tan touring bus parked in the driveway. This was Pam’s home. Pam is a musician, owner of Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta, which has recorded the music of Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Matchbox 20, among dozens of other musicians. Her son greeted me at my car cheerfully and opened the pneumatic door to the bus. I climbed the stairs and peered through the dim, smoky room, spotting a kitchenette with the remains of breakfast, a small table, couches lining one side of the bus, with a large-screen TV at the front.

  “Hello, hello!” Pam called, a beacon of life in the dark interior. I made my way to the back of the bus. Michael Sabom had discovered Pam’s case and written it up in his book Light and Death, but I had no idea what to expect. There, sitting cross-legged on a double bed that filled the back room, sprawled a redhead with shoulder-length hair and a wry smile. The sheets were mussed, as if she had just risen, and she was gamely attempting to tie her sneakers.

  She gave up on her shoes, and I noticed she was struggling to breathe as well.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, baby, I’m just fine. A little vertigo.You’re spinning in circles right now. And the adrenaline makes it hard to breathe. It’s a fight-or-flight thing—vertigo telling you you’re gonna fall, and the adrenaline kicks in, makes my heart beat too fast. It’s worse to watch it than experience it.”

  Pam relaxed happily on the bed, not eager to move. She was fifty and looked far too young to have five children and four grandchildren. Her hair had turned gray after her near-death experience, she confessed, and now she dyes it reddish brown.

  I asked if she ever goes on the road anymore, performing. She said she travels but can’t perform. She gets vertigo, faints easily, walks with a cane. Then we settled at the table by the kitchenette with a cup of tea and she told me about the time she died and came back.

  “At twenty-five I was a singer, songwriter, did some production, classical composition,” she began.“I was busily being a mother and doing the suburban thing and working, and I began to experience excruciating headaches.”

  They grew worse each year and medication brought no relief. In the summer of 1991, when Pam was thirty-five, she and her husband, Butch, were promoting a new record in Virginia Beach, “and I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I’ve got a big mouth and I never forget how to talk. I forgot how to talk.”

  Pam and Butch rushed back to Atlanta. Her neurologist found a basilar artery aneurysm that was smack in the middle of her brain stem, the area that controls basic life functions, such as breathing and swallowing. And the wall of the aneurysm—like a bulge on a tire—was thinning. It was already leaking blood into her brain. As Pam put it, “there was a bomb in my brain that had already begun to explode.”

  The doctor suggested she get her affairs in order. But Pam’s mother happened to hear of a “brilliant young man” in Phoenix who had pioneered a remarkable new procedure, and gave him a call. Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler urged Pam to fly out to Arizona. He would perform the surgery for free. Two days later, Pam arrived at the Barrow Neurological Institute early in the morning.4 By seven-twenty on that August morning in 1991, a team of doctors had wheeled her into the operating room and the anesthesiologist was administering a cocktail of drugs.

  Pam then began a surgically driven journey to the edge of life and back, called a “standstill operation.” In the next four hours, Dr. Spetzler, assisted by
twenty doctors and nurses, taped Pam’s eyes shut and placed cooling blankets around her body, packing her with ice to put her in a deep freeze. As her body temperature began to plunge, the cardiac surgeon inserted a Swan-Ganz catheter—like a long piece of spaghetti—into her jugular vein and threaded it to her heart, then attached Pam to a heart-lung machine.

  When her body dropped to around 80 degrees, Pam’s heart began to falter, at which point the doctors administered massive doses of potassium chloride. This stopped her heart completely, and left her wholly dependent on the machine. Pam’s body temperature continued to plummet.

  “As the temperature gets colder and colder,” Dr. Spetzler told me in an interview, “we get to a point—usually around 60 degrees—where we can turn off the machine, and actually drain blood out of the body.”

  They drained all the blood from Pam’s head into “reservoir cylinders,” similar to draining oil from a car. The aneurysm sac collapsed for lack of blood. “We can then expose the aneurysm and clip it.”

  “At this point,” I asked, “could Pam see or could she hear? Could you describe her state?”

  “She is as deeply comatose as you can possibly be and still be alive,” Spetzler replied. “Now, how do we define that? First is the anesthesia that puts her to sleep. Then we give her medication—barbiturates—which knocks out her deepest brain functions. And how do we know that? Because we monitor an EEG and we monitor evoked potentials,” which measure brain-stem activity.

  The device used to measure brain-stem activity was a set of molded ear speakers, affixed with mounds of tape over her ears. These emit loud clicks of 90 to 100 decibels, equal to the sound of a jet plane taking off.

  “As the brain goes deeper and deeper into sleep, it becomes less and less of a signal, and in her case, they [the vital signs on the monitors] go completely flat,” the neurosurgeon explained.“So not only is she given medication to put her into the deepest coma, but then you add on this hypothermia, which puts her into an even deeper coma. Her brain is as asleep, as comatose, as unresponsive, as it can possibly be.”

  “She wasn’t technically dead, though, was she?” I asked, anticipating the criticism of skeptics.

  “It’s an artificial definition,” Dr. Spetzler explained. “If she were awake, and she had no pulse, no blood pressure, no respiration, we would call her dead. But if you are in this suspended state, because we know you can come back, I would not define it as dead.”

  “During this time, could she see anything or hear anything?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  After Pam’s aneurysm was clipped and removed, the doctors reversed the process, warmed the blood, introduced it into her body, and at around 78 degrees, Pam’s heart began beating on its own.

  When she awakened, Pam had a story to tell.

  The View from Above

  After the doctors administered the anesthesia, Pam told me, “I barely remember going to sleep. And I was lying there on the gurney, minding my own business, seriously unconscious. Dr. Spetzler said I was in a deep coma—when the top of my head began to tingle. And I started to hear a noise. It was guttural. It was very deep. It was a natural D,” she recalled, with the ear of a musician with perfect pitch. She listened to the harmonics for a few moments.

  “As the sound continued, I don’t know how to explain this other than to go ahead and say it: I popped up out the top of my head,” Pam said, looking for my reaction.“It felt like a suction cup at the top of my head, popping. And then I was looking down at the body, and I knew it was my body, and the odd thing was, I didn’t care. It was wonderful.”

  From her vantage point just above and behind Dr. Spetzler’s shoulder, Pam said she could see the entire surgical team. She wondered why they needed twenty people in surgical gowns to operate on her. At first she thought she was hallucinating but realized she felt too clearheaded to be on a drug-induced trip.

  “My hearing was better than it is now, my vision better than it ever was, colors were brighter, the sounds were more intense. It was as if every sense that I had ever known—and add on a few—was perfect.”

  Pam’s attention was drawn to the source of the natural D: an instrument in Dr. Spetzler’s hand that looked like a dentist’s drill.

  “It was an odd-looking thing,” she said. “It looked like the handle on my electric toothbrush. And there was a case—it all kind of freaked me out because it looked like my father’s toolbox, like his socket-wrench case. And there were these little bits in there so it looked like he was doing home improvement and not brain surgery.”

  This was a Midas Rex bone saw—and Pam’s was a near-perfect description of the saw and its blade container. At that point she noticed the other doctors midway down the table.

  “It looked like they were doing surgery on the groin area. I heard a female voice say, ‘Her arteries are too small.’ And Dr. Spetzler—I think it was him, it was a male voice—said,‘Use the other side.’ I’m thinking, Wait a minute, this is brain surgery! I did not know what they were doing. I was quite distressed, but about this time I began to notice the light.”

  At that moment, Pam’s out-of-body experience ended and her journey “into the light” began. Michael Sabom, the doctor who analyzed the surgery from the medical documents, believes this may have marked the moment when her heart stopped and the brain-stem monitor flatlined. Pam’s near-death experience contained common hall-marks : she saw a pinpoint of light that grew bigger and bigger, felt a pull toward the light, and then she heard a familiar voice.

  “It was Grandmama,” she recalled.“And I went to her. And with her was my musical uncle David Saxton,” Pam’s mentor, who had died of a massive heart attack years earlier. They looked young, she said. They shimmered as if they were wearing coats of light, and soon she spotted “a sea of people and they were all wearing the light.”

  “I remember asking,‘Is God the light?’And the communication was, ‘No, He’s not the light. The light is what happens when God breathes.’

  “And I thought, I am standing in the breath of God.”

  My mind caught on the word “breath.” The connection between breath and spirit dates back at least two thousand years. The Hebrews called it ruach, the Greeks called it pneuma, and what they meant was the spirit of God.When Jesus appeared to his friends after the Crucifixion, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”5

  It occurs to me that perhaps this metaphor, like DNA, has been passed down through the generations, not because it is poetic, but because it is true: whether that breath arrives in death or in life, in practiced meditation or unbidden surprise, in first-century Jerusalem or twentieth-century Atlanta, that is what standing in the presence of God feels and sounds like—a wind that penetrates the heart, a breath that transforms a person and her world at a cellular level, a spirit that robs her of words but leaves peace in their stead.

  Pam stood for a few moments in the breath of God. She yearned to go deeper into that light, but was stopped and told she needed to return. Her uncle, David, escorted a reluctant Pam back to the operating room.

  “There I was again, with David, looking down at the body. Only at this point, that thing looked like a train wreck. It looked like what it was—dead. I did not want to get in it, I didn’t even want to look at it, and now my uncle is reasoning with me. He says, ‘Sweetheart, it’s like diving into the swimming pool. Just dive in.’ ”

  She protested, and then her uncle began reminding her of all her favorite things—her favorite food, her favorite smell, her favorite bird-songs—Pam’s connection to the world.

  “And I’m looking down and the body jumped. There were people around the gurney and the body jumped”—as they restarted her heart with a defibrillator. “And I thought, Okay, you know what, they’re electrocuting that thing, I’m not getting in it.’ Then my uncle pushed me! And I hit the body, and I heard the title track to the Eagles album Hotel California. When I hit the body the line was, ‘You can check out anytime you like, bu
t you can never leave.’ And the body jumped again. That time I was in it and I felt it. And I opened my eyes and I saw Dr. Karl Greene, and I said, ‘You know, that is really insensitive!’ ”

  Pam laughed. “He told me I needed to get some more sleep.”

  At first she thought she had been hallucinating. But the next day, Pam met the cardiac surgeon who had commented on Pam’s small femoral vein near the groin. From her angle, Pam had not seen the doctor’s face during the out-of-body experience.

  “I recognized her voice and I mentioned it. She looked at me kind of funny.”

  When Pam returned to Phoenix for her one-year checkup, she told Dr. Spetzler what she had “seen,” including “doing the electric paddle thing” at the end of the surgery. And he said, ‘Oh no. That didn’t happen. ’ And he looked a little relieved, and frankly I was as well.”

  “Why relieved?” I asked.

  “Well, if that part is wrong, maybe the rest of it is as well. Maybe it was just a hallucination,” she said

  “So I came back and told my doctor here. And he said, ‘No, I’ll check my records but I believe that they defibrillated twice’—which would make sense because I saw it once and felt it once. And sure enough, he confirmed it. And he called and talked to Dr. Spetzler, and Dr. Spetzler said, ‘You know what, I wasn’t in the operating room at that point.’ ”

  Eventually Dr. Sabom conducted an exhaustive investigation of Pam’s story. He obtained her records, including a timeline of the surgery and transcripts. He confirmed the conversation about her small veins, the description of the Midas Rex bone saw and its case. He confirmed the defibrillation, the number of doctors and nurses, even their position around the operating table.