This story comes from Eben Alexander and Ptolemy Tompkins' book The Map of Heaven. After he became famous for his NDE, Dr. Alexander received many letters from people who'd had similar experiences. This one seemingly recounts what Dr. Raymond Moody has called a "shared death experience." In it, a man remembers experiencing his own father's death. He had been holding a vigil at the dying man's bedside …
Well, at one point I just knew that it was the end, and I automatically held his left hand, then placed my right hand so that I was straddling his carotid artery and chest to feel when his heart and breathing stopped. I closed my eyes to pray, when quite abruptly I was thrown into what I can only describe as a cross between a movie and a dream, though it was extremely vivid. I hovered in back and over him much like a cameraman – there but not participating.
He was struggling to hold on to some rocks on the side of a swiftly moving stream and was clearly exhausted and terrified. Suddenly the attention of both of us was caught by a yellow white glow above the middle of the stream, which illuminated a white canoe with a red paddle sitting motionless on the moving water. With a kind of cry my Dad let go of the rocks and swam swiftly to the canoe and vaulted into it as the fit man he was in his 20s and 30s. I zoomed with him and ended up just behind his head. He began paddling vigorously and just once looked back at me with a look of what can only be described as joy on his face. It was so far beyond what I can describe that its power and radiance can still overwhelm me.
It lasted just a moment. Then he turned back and resumed enthusiastically paddling away. He turned a corner, went behind some trees, and I was left behind. And I thought well, that’s it. But suddenly, as if I were attached to a rubber band, I was catapulted to the top of the tree off to the left and at a little distance. There below, on a kind of U-shaped dock was a crowd of people who did not see me. The faces were all blurry but I recognized family members and old friends of his by their bodies. My Dad came paddling into view from the right, and as soon as they saw him, the crowd began shouting his name and cheering in welcome. He seemed beside himself with pleasure, grinning, and almost a little stunned at first. Then he jumped out of the canoe with his paddle raised in kind of a victory salute and disappeared into the embraces add backslaps of the crowd…
Boom – I was back at his bedside. Just as I began to open my eyes I felt his last pulse and breath. It is still as vivid in my mind as the day it happened nearly 4 years ago.
The story reminds me of the ending of Titanic, which I always assumed was meant to visualize Rose's entry into the next life.