Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 9

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

Since this is the true introduction to the Great Adventure about which I’m going to tell you, Galen, I often wondered later just how much brain damage I had suffered. I’m telling you the story, but is this a story told by someone who’s mentally alert, intelligent, and at the top of his game — which is how I feel, and perhaps most importantly, what the doctors said by looking at my brain scans and a variety of IQ-type tests. Read on and decide for yourself. Just like I’m going to call my being thrown over the bridge by two men — and all my “memories” of what went on during that period some kind of illusion mixed in with the real thing — so I’ll call my experiences and feelings during this period when I was dead and what came after also an illusion interwoven with perfect reality, even though I am absolutely convinced they’re the total truth.

The Experience of Being Dead

When people hear about my experience of being dead first thing they invariably ask me is

“What was it like?” I have to be amazed by their ignorance. I have no memory of being dead because I — the Mike personality — was dead! Don’t they understand what that means? For something to be experienced, there must be someone there to be the experiencer. But in my case there was no one there to be the experiencer — he was dead. I really can’t remember what it was like to be dead, since there was no one alive to experience it. I never even thought of anything, since I did not exist. Yes, I vaguely remember a feeling of great welcome, of being “home at last,” and the powerful sense of blissfulness that was so joyous I could barely stand it and I never wanted to leave it. As I emerged from death, there was some cosmic and completely impersonal sense of leaving an infinite realm of pure knowledge, perhaps some sort of Universal Consciousness, and that knowledge was that all was One. Part of what seemed to be Universal

Consciousness. Part of that sense was that All is One, Everything was The One (some might prefer the term God)—Pure Awareness—Unconditioned Consciousness, and it was all One.

Even though there was no me, no Mike, the universe was flooded with a very warm and unprecedented feeling of “Aaahhh, home. Home at last!” And the universe emanated a powerful sense of being welcome and in my true home, that would continue forever. But mostly I seem to remember that everything was One, totally, intricately interconnected, and that One was God, or Consciousness or Pure Awareness. It was odd – - I had never even believed in or thought about God, but now God was everything and I was part of it.

Actually, the universe emanated the certainty that Everything was It, The One, and it was all connected. It reminded me of a big Brain — everything was interconnected in one vast universal being, of which I was a part. It was an incredible vastness in which I did not exist, except as a part of The One.

And I never felt for a moment that a single thing was missing from this vast energy matrix–which was also total fullness, containing everything, such as life, a body, people, civilization, the earth and its characteristics, like mountains or rivers, the entire Cosmos. I don’t remember any of those – mainly because they weren’t there. It wasn’t black and it wasn’t white – there was no sense of vision at all. I was in an infinite space that spread out into eternity and was infinite in all directions. I had an awareness that everything was interconnected throughout the entire universe. There was nothing that was not connected with everything else. People, plants, stars, universes, thoughts, memories — all were connected into one thing. It was all One.

Later I realized that The One was God or Allah or whatever name you want to use for it, such as Unconditioned Consciousness or Perfect Awareness. I was at one with the One so I also extended infinitely in all directions. I was in a state of bliss.

Nor did I miss that person I once knew as Mike—I realized for the first time that Mike was simply an illusion arising out of the Source, or The One, Awareness or Consciousness. I was not I, but simply a part of Everything, and this Everything was all One — and that One consisted of everything that in this and each of the uncountable universes — it was the Source of Everything.

At every moment I felt total satisfaction, peace and Bliss that no matter how much I try to write it down I can simply find no words that come close to describing it. All of this world that we are now living in, and that we consider real, is just an illusion that is

generated by and emerges ceaselessly from The One (which includes you and me)—maybe something like solar flares the emerging from the sun, except the One is miraculously, unknowably bigger than Sun – the One extended infinitely in all directions. Once it has gone infinitely and eternally in all directions, then it continues to expand. Try to get your mind around that.

And yet in that One — if I (who did not really exist) had any feelings at all — I would have broken down into tears of joy — home at last! What amazing joy! It was like coming home from a long and brutal war and being welcomed by everyone — the war was over, now it was time for a long, endless, eternal peace.

I went to my death with no strong spiritual feelings at all. I emerged convinced that I was an inextricable part of The One. They say the kingdom of heaven is within you. But I found that I was in the kingdom of heaven! It was all One. In fact I was The One (as was everyone). I was God, just like we all are. So I guess I had a change of heart. Death will do that to you.

Copyright: Michael Hutchison, AVS Journal (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 8

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

Another key measurement of life is respiration, breathing. For over an hour I was not breathing at all; and of course according to my friend who had chased my body along the freezing river, my face had been totally submerged for approximately an hour before the ambulance arrived and pulled me out of the water, at which point the paramedics determined that I was dead. But they continued trying to bring me back to life until we reached the hospital. My friend said when he pulled me out of the water

my lips were blue and my whole body had a blue tint.

So I was dead, period. And people who hear about it almost always ask me stupid questions like, “Did you see the Great White Light? Were you reunited with beloved people from your past? Did you encounter spiritual masters from the past, like the Buddha? Did you get to meet and talk to God? What did Heaven look like? What kind of experience did you have?”

I wonder if people are aware of how idiotic such questions are? How could I — Michael Hutchison, who was once a living human — be aware of what it’s like to be dead? I was dead! It doesn’t take much thought to realize that I, the human Mike, could have absolutely no idea “what it was like” to be dead. How could I have any awareness at all? I was dead at the time! In other words, I was no longer there. The same answer is true of all the other questions — how could I meet other dead people or see some Great White Light? I, including my mind, and my eyes, no longer existed, so how could I see or have an experience, come in contact with or be aware of other people? I was dead. There was no longer a Me, there was no white light or total blackness because there was no person who had a sense of sight — he was dead.

During this period I was dead something happened and I’ll describe it shortly, but it was nothing that happened in my mind or my brain because they were dead. When I was later pulled out of the water, I had no pulse and was not breathing, but nobody knew exactly how long I had been dead. The amount of time I had been dead before I was resuscitated, no matter how icy the water, turned out to be a kind of important question, since the longer I was dead with little or no oxygen present in my brain, the greater the potential of brain damage I might have. It would be no fun at all if I came back from the dead as a drooling vegetable. No way!

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 7

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

He had seen the face of God. It didn’t feel like a standard religious experience so much as a blinding epiphany of being — what the Eastern religions often term an “ecstasy of unity”. It was as though in a single instant and natural had discovered and felt The Force.

I was amazed that this astronaut had an experience that was very much like death–although I don’t remember experiencing this while I was dead, because as I said, the dead don’t experience.

Yet later as I was emerging from my anesthesia in the hospital I remember having this feeling while I was dead. I don’t remember stars or galaxies around the earth, or anything visual, such as Ed Mitchell’s account, but I remember the basic knowingness — it was clear that everything was interconnected by an enormous force field. Anything I would do or think would influence the rest of the cosmos. Time was an artificial construct and there were no accidents or individual intentions. This Force — which I had come to call The One, had gone on for billions of years, Had lived over billions of years and through billions of people and had created the very molecules and subatomic particles of my being. As I emerged from death this experience which I did not experience at the time changed my life forever.

In this vast matrix, every single molecule or subatomic particle was interconnected. Since it was infinite, it extended infinitely in all directions. Can you wrap your mind around that? Everything, the entirety of Being, was contained in this infinite complex interconnected matrix– like a massive brain, with its intricately interconnected neurons and glial cells and axons, and the capacity to communicate from cells in one part of the brain to cells in a completely separate part of the brain, some groups of cells communicating faster than the speed of light! (This is true! Check it out in any neuroscience textbook.) In this vast tightly interconnected infinity were powers and forces and beings far beyond anything you can imagine in your most extraordinary dreams. Everything and every material form– everything was made of tiny energy fields that were held together by an unknown entity field — The Force.

Everyone that had ever existed, over billions of years was a part of this vast universal field. What there was something that consisted of some type of impersonal consciousness that was not me but was Everything — I’ll call it the Universal Consciousness. Something was there but it was not me. I — the Mike I — my ego self, my personality, my memories, were not there at all — they were dead.

Apparently that was what happened to me. According to all medical knowledge I was stonecold- dead. The main criteria used to determine death include: the total absence of any electrical activity in the brain. When my brain was hooked up to EEG electrodes, my brain showed absolutely no electrical activity at all — in other words I was dead, or “flatlined.” A second key criterion is heart rate. My heart showed no activity whatsoever.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 6

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

This energy matrix, contained and interconnected Everything. The entire universe seemed to be just an infinite ball of energy, all one. All the energies were interconnected– Every star was directly connected with every other star, just as every atom in the universe, and in my body and everyone’s body was interconnected with every other atom in the universe and with your body (and everyone else’s body, as well as their intentions and thoughts.). Amazingly, I felt I was interconnected in this nothingness that extended infinitely in all directions. For us mere humans it’s impossible to imagine such a thing. That experience (although it could not have been an experience because to be an experience there must be someone there to experience it — and I was definitely not there — I was dead). I had no doubt that I had not only come in contact with God but that I was in fact a part of God myself,. I knew without doubt that everything is interconnected—

that All is One.

Years later I read a book called “The Force.” It contained a passage that closely described the experience of one of the astronauts, Ed Mitchell as he looked out the window of his space capsule.

I’ll quote a part of it for you: The Kittyhawk [the spacecraft in which Ed Mitchell and his fellow astronauts were returning to earth] was slowly rotating, like a chicken on a spit, in order to balance the thermal effect on the each side of the spacecraft; and in its slow revolution, earth was intermittently framed through the window as a tiny crescent in an all-engulfing night of stars. From this perspective, as the Earth traded places in and out of view with the rest of the solar system, sky didn’t exist only above the astronauts, as we ordinarily view it, but as an all-encompassing entity that cradled the earth from all side.

It was then, while staring out of the window, that Ed experienced the strangest feeling he would never have: the feeling of connectedness, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached by some invisible web. He could hardly breathe from the majesty of the moment. Although he continued to turn dogs and press for, he felt distanced from his body as though someone else were doing that navigating.

There seemed to be an enormous force field, connecting all people, their intentions and

thoughts, and every animate and inanimate form of matter for all time. Anything he did or thought would influence the rest of the cosmos, and every occurrence in the cosmos would have a similar effect on him. Time was just an artificial construct. Everything he’d been taught about the universe and the separateness of people and things felt wrong. There were no accidents or individual intentions. The natural intelligence that had gone on for billions of years, that had forged the very molecules of his being, was also responsible for his own present journey. This wasn’t something he was simply comprehending in his mind, but an overwhelming and visceral feeling, as though he were physically expanding out of the window to the very furthest reaches of the cosmos.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 5

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

I can hear all the naysayers crying “Bullshit! Bullshit! No body can be dead for an hour and then revived.” The medical records prove the fact that I had been dead a long time — over an hour. But what really proves it to me was my own experience of dying, which remains vivid to me to this very moment and was like an miraculous black hole in my life, sucking in my entire life.

There’s absolutely no doubt that something extremely strange happened that day. From all the medical records and other observations there is absolutely no doubt that I died — truly became fully dead — for as long as an hour, perhaps more, and this is not one of those bogus or romanticized or embellished or egotistical “near death experiences” that so many people describe so they can write books about it in which they encounter a great white light at the end of a tunnel, sometimes with an angelic figure or a deceased relative beckoning them into the light. I think that is all bullshit made up by people who live with you as liars. This was no “near death experience” — by extensive medical evidence I really and truly died an actual death — the kind that usually lasts forever and signifies the end of that person’s existence on earth, or signals that it’s time for the maggots to go to work.

There is extensive scientific evidence that this has happened to thousands of people if not more. Look it up in Google. There are cases mentioned there of recovery as long as 14 hours after drowning. The American Heart Association has a good article on this and points out that icy water is essential to survival and revival from death. The explanation in most cases seems to be dependent on the drowning taking place in water that is freezing or close to freezing. As the metabolism slows down the body dies there seems to be enough oxygen trapped the tiny capillaries of the brain to keep it from beginning to deteriorate. That oxygen in the capillaries keeps the brain cells close enough to life that given sufficient oxygen and blood circulation from CPR, the brain and then the body can be brought back to life, even after many hours. I have read of this happening in the cold Great Lakes, in the Siberian Sea on the coast of Russia and other cold or freezing bodies of water. This is apparently what happened to me.

So I was dead, there was no absolutely no doubt about that. What the doctors’ studies did not show, and could never be measured was that even though I personally was dead, something was still there. It was a vast void or an infinitely complex matrix of which you and I were a part.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 4

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

All he could see was the back of my jacket when I bounced off rocks in the river. He finally caught up to me when I got hung up on that tree that had fallen across the river. He told me he had tried desperately to bring me back to life and saw me dead for many minutes — and ultimately, when they got me back to the hospital, He was not allowed in the room so all he knows is that they were madly trying to bring me back to life.

As I later found out, my blood was so cold (my body temperature had been in the 70s!) I guess I was close to being a human popsicle or a bottle of vodka fresh out of the freezer. So they hooked up a vein in each arm to some type of machine that pumped out the cold blood from one arm, warmed it up, and pumped the warmer blood back into my other arm. So my body slowly warmed up. When I was warm enough, then they injected me in the heart with adrenaline and gave me electrical shocks to jumpstart my heart. As I felt myself coming back to life my first thoughts were “Oh no! Don’t bring me back. Let me stay here at home!”

During that time, in human time roughly an hour, (in death time, an eternity), I had been someplace, every place, I had no idea where, but it was total bliss and I never wanted to leave it. I will tell you about it in detail in a moment.

But there was no stopping them, they were determined to bring me back against my will from the best place I’ve ever been. The doctors and neurosurgeons and nurses who had brought me back began to cheer but I was not so sure I had anything to cheer about.

Paradoxically, once they had me fully alive and awake, they put me back to sleep with an anesthetic. As I drifted off I felt the neurosurgeon’s scalpel cutting a straight line down the back of my spine and the fat and muscle tissue on both sides of his cut slowly gaping open like lips. It felt as if to cut was about a foot long. Then the anesthesia kicked in and I was totally gone.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge” Part 3

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

Slowly and inexorably I slid down more and more until only part of my face was out of the water, not including my mouth or nose. Just one eye taking my last look at the world. I held my breath as the side of my head rested on the boulder. But how long could I hold my breath? And then I had slipped off the boulder and I was completely underwater. Out of nowhere came thought that there would be no more women. Que Sera Sera, the song kept running through my head. So you could say I went out with a song in my heart. Sounds nice.

Now I began to go into a kind of semi sleep state, and I remember clearly feeling that I was lying in the plank bed in my friend’s house where I was staying. The bed seemed luxuriously comfortable, I was covered with a thick eiderdown comforter and I felt like I was sleeping in late on a Saturday morning, lazily drifting in and out of a wonderful, luxurious sleep with no particular need to get up at all. I had a passing thought, “Boy! That run really took it out of me, I’m going to have to work a lot harder to get back into shape.” But as time passed I began to notice the strangest feeling — I felt the icy chills of an icy stream running through my bed, and icy chills running down my back — I reached down and touched the mattress and found an icy stream was flowing through my bed from my head to my feet. I tried to get out of bed again and again but for some reason, I couldn’t move. I felt icy cold because there was a freezing river flowing though the bed. I kept thinking to myself, “I wish I could get this icy water out of my bed.” I tried again and again to get out bed and out of the icy water, but for some reason I could not move at all. Soon I seemed to drift off toward sleep, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into profound drowsiness. At some point I once again realized “I am dying,” just before I lost what we would ordinarily call consciousness, and I thought to myself, “What a silly ass way to go.

How can I go now — I haven’t fulfilled my mission.” At that moment it came to me that I didn’t really know what my mission was. “And here I thought I had lots of good years ahead of me and lots of unique books to write and I was really planning on getting married again and having another beautiful child like you, Galen.”

I held my breath for as long as I could, but then I thought, what the hell, and breathed out. The next thing I had to do was breathe in. I didn’t want to but I had to. That was the hardest breath I ever took. I felt myself choke to death while thinking “this is it.” There are no two ways about it – choking to death is not a fun way to go. It was an ugly feeling, breathing in water, choking and vomiting at the same time. There was an ugly struggle I don’t recall much of. And then I was dead and I knew I was dead. There’s no mistaking the fact. You might scoff at this and think I was suffering from an illusion or a continuation of the dream, and that I just dreamed that I was dead, or was having one of these frequent illusions talked about my egotistical people they call a “near death experience”. These are not real death experiences, but near death experiences are illusions created by the ego.

As the great teacher Ramesh Balsakar has said “Near- death experiences can happen only to the ego, and it just cannot be denied that the ego has no real existence; the ego is purely a concept, an illusion, and it is only when the ego is totally annihilated that real being comes in to being.”

But no matter how you consider it, this was a very real death. There can be absolutely no doubt, because the medical fact of my death is verified by the ambulance workers, who immediately determined I had no heartbeat and was not breathing and went to work madly, according to my friend—I of course have no memory of this – I was dead), and at the hospital the MDs hooked up various vital spots of my brain to EEG electrodes and found that there was no electrical activity in my brain at all — I had flatlined. The doctors could not believe what my friend told them. He had chased my body downstream for at least 60 minutes according to his watch, and all during that time I was totally submerged. And totally dead.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”  Part 2

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

Then I remembered the words of one of my favorites songs Jesse Colin Young and by back when I was a hippie. I remember listening to it on my stereo while tripping on acid and I told my friend Bruiser, “That’s the song I’m gonna be hearing when my time comes.” And as I felt myself slipping off the slanted boulder into the icy water, inch by inch, I heard the song singing in my head: Darkness darkness, be my pillow, take my hand and let me sleep in the coolness of your shadow, In the silence of your deep.”

Each inch brought me closer to death. I tried to grab the boulder with my fingers but I couldn’t move my fingers at all. As I slid into the icy water up to my waist I slowly began to feel the effects of hypothermia. A sense of drowsiness began to come over me. Of all the thoughts that were sweeping over me my main thoughts kept returning to you, Galen. How much I loved you, how could I be sure that you would be raised by your abusive mother with love and with her teaching you by example the importance of honesty when she had none, and control of your temper when she herself could not? I could only hoped that she could find an honest and decent man to be your stepfather. Now I found myself drifting off to sleep more and more as the hypothermia took me deeper and deeper.

Slowly I felt myself slipping farther and farther of the boulder into the rushing waters swollen by the early spring snow melt rushing down from over 12 thousand feet. By now I had slid into the rushing waters until I was up to my chin, and I became deeply drowsy, laughing to myself about the irony of the whole situation. I thought, “I guess it’s the best way to go,” because I just had a few seconds to make the transition from life to death, dying unconscious from the cold, and I knew I would soon be going into hypothermia — which I knew was the best way to die, totally painless because you were unconscious. If you could die from going into true unconscious hypothermia, and dying from the effects of hypothermia on your body, rather than the nasty death of drowning—if it went right and you died asleep, instead of being still awake, in which case I would still be conscious and running out of air and having to breathe out all my oxygen-depleted air and choke by breathing water into both lungs and choking to death. I didn’t want to think about it.

I had never believed I would die so young, and with so little accomplished—a few measly books, but of course it was all worthwhile because I knew I had brought Galen into the world, carrying 50% of my chromosomes into the future. Jeez, I thought, this would be a kick-ass thing to write about! Then I remembered, dead don’t write.

As the water reached over my chin I could feel by my increasing drowsiness that terminal hypothermia was setting in. I was growing very drowsy now and the only thing I was aware of was a vague sense of anticipation. What next? At one point a short piece of a song from a movie I had seen with my family when I was a tiny kid came into my mind — an old Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Doris Day (one of my childhood sex queens) in which she sang “Que Sera Sera,” which meant “Whatever Will Be, Will Be, (The Future’s Not Ours to See).” I hadn’t thought of that song for probably 30 years. But it really summed things up for me at that moment. I had no idea where it came from– just another meaningless human thought bubbling up and passing.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Mike Hutchison’s upcoming book…

“The Amazing Death Plunge”

By Michael Hutchison

This excerpt originally appeared in the AVS Journal, Vol. 9, #1 (Summer 2010) courtesy Nicky Van Valkenburgh, author of “Transform Your Brain, Transform Your Life”.

Though I have only the vaguest of memories of what followed, apparently when I came to the old rickety footbridge I found the same two large men with what I now knew were not walking sticks but rifles, somehow already there ahead of me! How was that possible? Is this just some illusion or hallucination arising out of my retroactive amnesia? Or is it really the truth that has somehow stuck in my memory? In any case I remember suddenly looking down and seeing by the patterns that their boots left in the snow were exactly the same as the patterns left in the mud outside my window on the night of the fire –both of these big men were wearing the same brand of boots — they looked like size 14 — with waffle-stomper soles, just as I had found in the mud outside the window of my study when it got torched. “Hey, Mikey,”said one as he lit a cigarette. As he put the matches away in his chest pocket I saw they were from the strip club “Cheeks.” At that moment a number of thoughts came together suddenly in my mind. The boot prints, the matches from Cheeks…

…I instantly knew I was totally paralyzed and I was lying on my back on a giant boulder slanting into the icy stream flowing past—my feet were already in the water. I don’t remember feeling any pain at all, but I was totally paralyzed. Looking at my teeth scattered around I thought “well, no more dental work.”I tried to yell for help, but I couldn’t get any air into my lungs. I knew I was going to die.

My friend later determined that I had fallen about 60 feet – a mind boggling distance for a fragile human to fall and still live. It’s something like falling off the roof of a six story building. I landed smack on all the tiny bones between the lump to where your neck bones disappear into the back of your head — my cervical bones. I can’t quite describe the mixture of things that occurred to me in the next half second, that being a combination THUMP! as a result of my 180 pounds of meat and bones moving at over 100 miles an hour coming to an instant halt as my fragile body met the absolutely unmovable object of the Volkswagen-sized boulder. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be the boulder. The boulder did not move and inevitably my body stopped moving instantly.

There was an instantaneous WHOOSH as all the air was crushed from my body, and a series of sounds like some giant was cracking his knuckles with a loud POP POP POP POP! Etc. etc. etc. Which I figured were the bones in my spine getting crushed. At the same time my head smashed against the boulders, cracking it like a soft boiled egg falling off the table onto a stone floor. Millions of people die or are totally paralyzed each year from breaking their necks from falling far less than 60 feet, such as simply from stumbling over carpets or slipping on ice or falling in bathtubs. Christopher Reeve did it by falling off a horse. It’s not hard to do. Leave it to me to do it the hard way.

As I’ve said, I instantly realized that I was going to die. I could tell from my body that I was totally paralyzed, and the boulder I was on slanted at about a 35 degree angle into the icy water. Despite the inevitability of death my mind resisted. “I can’t go yet—I’m too young! I can’t leave Galen alone, unprotected from his mother. I can’t leave Galen!” at first my mind started to have panicked thoughts like that, but I got it under control. I had a brief heartbreaking thought and image of my one time girlfriend, Karol, probably the love of my life. Sweet Karol –she was the most beautiful, unselfish, sexy and loving woman I’d ever known, and I wondered what my life would have been like if we had not been torn apart for reasons we couldn’t control and I had married her like I wanted to. As the minutes passed I tried to yell for help but because the muscles that controlled my lungs were paralyzed I couldn’t breathe much so there was no way I could scream.

Copyright AVS Journal, Michael Landgraf, publisher (2010) CA. All rights reserved.