From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody, and welcome to our special guest, Wei, Wei, Wei,
up in Alaska.
Angie Fennimore, how are you?
I'm excellent.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
When I say Wei, Wei up, you're actually the south part of Alaska, aren't you?
Southeast, that's still Wei up.
Yes.
It's still a three-day ferry ride from Bellingham, Washington up to where we are.
And then we're another ferry ride, another three hours up.
And you live on a big island.
It's beautiful, isn't it?
It is.
It's gorgeous.
It's beautiful.
Okay.
Well, there's the Alaska Tourism Department speaking to us right there.
Hey, before we talk about your near-death experience, tell us just a little bit about
you, Angie.
Sure.
So, I'm married to my sweetheart.
We've been together for 10 years.
And we have between us 10 children, 10 grown kids.
Michael has five and I have five.
Right now, we have four grandkids, and they are delightful.
Several of those kids have come up and spent some time with us, and a lot of them came and
spent a good two years with us up here and did his senior year.
And then we have more moving up.
So it's not that far.
It's not that far north.
But it's just, I live an extraordinary life.
We're kind of almost off the grid, not quite.
And it's not for everybody.
That's for sure.
I'm a near-death experiencer who's already a writer.
And then I wrote a book.
Rather than the other way around, I wrote a book about my Andy, but I was already a writer.
And so one of the things that I sorted out was what makes a story work.
I spent, I've spent decades researching and studying how come something that is really
poorly written will hit New York Times bestsellers lists and be neck and neck with, you know,
the great classics for bestsellers of all time.
Rather than dismissing that as anomalies, I went to town, still do, because, you know,
when you stop learning, that's the lid that you're cooked.
And sorting out, well, how come?
And so I've compiled a program.
It's all online.
We meet every Wednesday.
My students and I on a Facebook page where I do a Facebook live just through Zoom so
they can interact and ask all their questions.
And then we run a pitch conference every year.
And we're the most effective pitch conference in the industry.
So that's what I do.
And the whole point of it is, how can I make a difference on the planet with my gifts?
You know, I really stand firmly in that every human being is a storyteller since our great-great-grand
kids started drawing on the wall.
We're storytellers.
And then it gets shut down when we go to kindergarten and, you know, start hearing feedback that
it's not good enough, we're not good enough.
And so the creative side of us gets shut down.
So we wake that up.
And my youngest bestselling author is 14 years old.
My oldest is somewhere in her 70s.
And she might be fibbing about her age, I think.
Which direction?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that is awesome that you were already a really good writer.
And you're sharing that talent with others.
I, you know, I get a lot of books on near-death experiences sent to me.
And I try to read all of them.
I don't have time to get to all of them.
Some of them are very well-written, some not so much.
And I kind of put up with it because the story is interesting anyway.
But it's great that you are someone that already was a writer because you can really tell your
story.
You haven't sent me your book yet, by the way.
I should do that.
How dare you not.
I'm harassing you.
By the way, if anybody wants to learn a little bit more about what Angie does with these
writing classes and things, it'll all be in the show notes.
And if we can twist her arm, maybe she'll even give a discount to roundtrip tethilistiners.
What do you think?
Definitely.
All right.
Yeah, I'll even make you a promo code.
How about roundtrip?
By the way, this is not a paid sponsorship in any way, shape, or form.
As far as anybody knows.
Whoa.
All right.
I think I have to pay access to making a difference and supporting people because it is books,
books last forever.
And it is books that change hearts and minds.
Well, I love what you were saying about everybody being a storyteller.
I think that should be so true.
Some people just aren't as good at it as others, that's all.
Now, before we jump into your near-death experience, here's my little warning to everybody.
Near-death experiences are all wonderful rainbows and unicorns and not today.
Today is a little more disturbing.
Anyway, get ready, hold on to your hats because this is going to be fun and a little disturbing
at the same time.
In fact, this will give you a hint of it.
Angie's book about her experience is called, Beyond the Darkness, My Near-Death Journey
to the Edge of Hell and Back.
So here we go.
You had a suicide attempt when you were 27 years old.
Please give us a little background.
What led up to that?
It wasn't just a bad day, was it?
No, no.
And I don't think it ever is.
But I had a really idyllic childhood, just me and my little sister and our parents.
And we were born in the 60s.
So when the 70s hit, if you know what was going on in the, at least the U.S. culturally,
everything was turned on its ear.
And my mother started exploring different ideas and different ways of being.
And she wanted to be cut loose.
She joined a cult when I was nine years old.
And it was horrendous stuff that was happening.
The leader, who was a psychologist, ended up fleeing to France for a long time and was
brought back and extradited and charged with all kinds of things and sentenced and tried
and sentenced.
It was pretty horrific.
Like they were shaving heads and taking shirts and shoes from kids so they couldn't escape.
And this was deep in the recesses of Bryce Canyon.
So there's no power and surrounded by wilderness.
There was one little boy, they weren't feeding because he had a list.
And everybody's in tepees and he was made to be in a tepee across the river from everybody
else.
This little kid, my age, dark, dark, darkness, allowed his underwear and bread and water once
a day.
That's it.
And he was begging us one day to feed him when they rang the big cowbell for dinner.
And all the other kids knew better and ran off and refused.
And I was like, well, of course, meet me under the cook shack after it gets dark.
And I loaded up a big plate for him.
And one of the other kids ratted me out and they put me on the hot seat the next day.
What does that mean?
That's just exactly like it sounds.
You're surrounded by everybody judging you and probably fearing, you know, afraid.
I'm not sure of the dynamics that would allow all these people to participate in this place,
in the first place.
But there I was, this little nine-year-old girl sitting on a chair in the middle in this
octagonal building, all the people surrounding while the guru said, Angie, fed peaty, we're
going to punish her and we're not going to feed her.
And you know, he looks over to my mother, who I think is going to come to my defense.
And she is horrified, mortified, and just dips her head and says, okay.
And so, you know, that was the beginning of it.
So we were left with our father.
We did spend time with our mother there.
And I won't even go into all the terrible stuff that happened at the ranch.
But my father went off the deep end and was alcoholic and not really present.
He was.
He was drunk.
And in August, we were dragged, my sister and I, to go sit on the couch during orgies.
It was horrible.
We were sexually abused, both of us.
You know, then we thought life was going to get better.
And we moved to Southern California and my dad married my stepmother, who absolutely
hated me because I looked just like my mom.
My father never got over my mother.
And who knows what conversation had behind closed doors, but I was the target for all
of it.
So that was terrible.
So I thought I'd get married at 19 and escape and it was frying pan to the fire.
And you know, what we now understand about abuse survivors and trauma survivors is that
you are conditioned to seek out the same and, you know, even have a radar for it.
And because he looked picture perfect and it was abusive and controlling.
You know, I had two little kids.
Well first I had my youngest or my, I'm sorry, my eldest who's now 38 years old, by the way,
I kind of went off the deep end when he was about a year old and I left my husband, took
off and I, I absolutely changed.
I did every drug imaginable.
My goodness, I had a friend who took care of my son at night while I was off partying
and doing my thing.
And I just spiraled.
So my husband begged me and begged me and begged me to come back.
Said he'd change.
I find me packed all my stuff up and went back and it was worse.
But I was already, I had already gotten pregnant very, very early on when I came back with
our second child.
So I felt trapped.
Can I ask you a quick question and I don't know if you know the answer to this, but I've
had a lot of people on this show that had NDEs that grew up in horribly abusive situations.
Do you think, I don't think there's any research on it, but do you think that sometimes leads
to these kinds of experiences or is there just a lot more abuse out there in the world
than I realize?
Well, so, you know, because I don't interview a whole lot of other near death experiences.
However, I will tell you, I did change laws governing violence, sexual offenders back in
the late 80s, early 90s, just before my near death experience.
And that I think the numbers were really skewed way back then because they were saying one
in three girls and one in six boys.
And what I've since learned is it's far higher that boys don't actually share as much as
girls do.
So I think it's just a lot more prevalent than we know.
I know very few, very few women who haven't been either sexually abused, emotionally abused,
physically abused, raped, any, I know very, very, very few.
I can, and actually as we think about it, I can't even think of anybody who hasn't endured
something like that.
And because I've shared, you know, in a bestselling book about my experience, people do tend to
share openly with me.
They'll mention, oh, I went through something similar when they talked to me and they know
who I am.
So I'm kind of a magnet for that, you know, for that kind of openness.
So I suspect that it's just really, really high.
Now, I would be curious to know about if it's something that happens more with near death
experiences.
That would be a question I'd be interested in.
It may just be that the numbers are so high that really there isn't a correlation.
It's just the people that I happen to be interviewing.
Let's get back to your suicide attempt.
I think we were almost there when I interrupted here.
Go ahead.
No, that was perfect because that's, so I had this, my second child was just not quite
two years old.
Well, I guess, yeah, not quite two years old.
And I had done all this work for a couple of years, like forming grassroots movements,
changing laws and all of these victims coming out of the woodwork.
And we're talking horrible, horrible stuff that they had endured, that their children
had endured and they were looking for help.
And so that was the overwhelming trigger for me was that experience, even though the work
that we did was really important and stands still today became a model for the rest of
the country, actually.
It changed something in me.
It's something in me shifted.
And I began going through this cyclical depression where I would kind of go off the deep end.
That was when I first noticed it was when I was doing this work.
About every six months, I would just like a light switch for two weeks.
I would engage in really, really risky behaviors.
Do things to mess with my marriage.
And then I'd fall into this deep depression.
And then I would be scratching my head like, who was that horrified by the things I had
done.
And because I really just wanted to be this perfect little stay at home mom, that's what
I really, really, really wanted.
So then it was Seth, cloth and ashes for six months.
And then I'd do it again.
And so about at the time, just before the near death experience, my first husband, he
was an Air Weapons Control Officer in the Air Force, and he took an assignment in Okinawa,
Japan.
So we moved to Japan, which was wonderful, an amazing place and good for me.
But then we moved in September and then January came around because it was always January and
June.
And then this thing hit and I was going out to go get milk and it's an island.
Like, I don't know where I thought I was going, but I didn't come home.
I was in my slippers.
I wasn't even dressed properly and I didn't come home for two days.
One of the things I did was I went to the movies and I watched the movie Flatliners,
which was Julia Roberts and it was these college kids that were experimenting with like dying
and having near death experience and coming back.
I remember right, they were medical students and they would plan this.
They would be like, okay, you know, you're going to kill me and then bring me back so
that I can see what it's like.
Funny, this is I think the first time that movie has ever come up on this podcast, surprisingly,
surprisingly to me.
Well, that and where I was emotionally and that I had been doing this for a long time
and I saw no way out.
I really just didn't feel like there was ever going to be any kind of an escape.
I had sought counseling and they all just scratched their heads.
They didn't know what to do with it.
And there was nothing for trauma and abuse victims at the time.
We didn't even understand it.
We didn't even understand that it happens in childhood and then it explodes like a volcano
in adulthood that you really don't see the impact of it until adulthood.
And we knew nothing about how you keep getting yourself into the same kind of abusive situations
too.
None of it.
And so I felt like this, I was just sentenced to this.
And I went back home finally.
My two little boys, five and two years old and my husband were kneeling in the living
room when I walked through the door.
My husband was wide as a ghost and they were praying for my safe return.
That was just kind of the nail.
You know, that was it.
And so it wasn't that night, but it was the next night.
I stayed up all night and I pretty much bargained with God all night long.
Just didn't feel like I had any other choice.
I felt like I was doing my children a favor because I couldn't imagine them having to
go through what I saw when I walked in through the door and the state that they were in.
I mean, my oldest wouldn't come near me and my youngest would let me put them down.
And I thought, I thought there was no escape from this.
I was very serious about it.
I slit my wrist, which was not successful.
I don't know how anybody does that.
And I just wrapped myself up and I started taking everything in the medicine cabinet
slowly so I could keep it down.
And then it was about 4 a.m.
I was laying on the couch and my husband was getting ready for work and he worked at, it
was NORAD and it's a lockdown.
They don't come and go.
They don't leave for lunch.
He's, you know, goes to work and then he's home in the evening.
So he was getting ready for work and asked me, are you okay?
I was way out the door and I said, yes.
And I tell you, he didn't believe me, but our relationship was such that it was not like
he was going to, oh, honey, are you okay?
It wasn't, you know, we didn't have that kind of a marriage.
And so he went off to work and when my boys woke up, I sent him to my friend's house who
was just a neighbor right next door with a note just saying I wasn't feeling well and
would she keep them for the day?
It was about 11 in the morning.
I started to feel it finally happening.
The first thing that happened was there was this extremely violent vibration and this
huge, so loud noise.
I thought for a moment that there was an F-15 coming down in the backyard.
And so I turned to my head to look and that's when I realized, oh, this is internal.
This is happening inside of me.
That it was like volcanic, you know, so loud, deafening loud and this vibration that was
within me.
So my stepmom had had a near-death experience when she was in a car accident years before
I met her and she told me about it.
And that was the only near-death experience I'd ever heard of.
She had gone up to the corner of the room in the emergency room while they were working
on her.
And so that's what I expected.
And so I opened my eyes because I wanted to watch.
And as soon as I opened my eyes, I felt myself surge back into my body.
And as I'm, you know, back in my body, what I'm seeing, what I realize I'm seeing is
this yellow membrane that I'm surrounded by and that it's lined with these red lines
like a road map.
And I opened my eyes again to watch and I feel myself back in my body.
And so I did that a couple of times and then I realized that this was requiring my will.
And as soon as I succumbed and just kept my eyes closed and submitted, you know, forced
this near-death experience, I was surrounded by this membrane and I was being held, my
arms crossed over my chest and squeezed and pushed through this canal.
And it wasn't until later that I realized that that was my birth.
It was my first memory.
Accompanying this experience was this euphoria, this love and joy and peace.
And then the next thing I see is a woman who looks exactly like me, who's looking down
at me and I'm cradled like this, but I'm experiencing this woman and this baby's experience at the
same time, so I was not sure if I was her or if I was the baby because they were one
and the same.
And because I look so much like my mom, I wasn't sure who was who, but the predominant
feeling was just love and the sense of euphoria.
Now I spoke to my mother about this years and years later and she said that they used
to give them during childbirth, they used to give them something called twilight sleep
for the event and like, I don't know, maybe that was impacting my experience, but it was
absolutely, I wanted to be on this planet and I knew it.
And then there are voices in the room, I don't understand them, I just can hear them and
I am just, I love this woman and she loves me and that came as a surprise to me because
I really by this time in my life, I believed that my mother didn't want me and that she
didn't really love me.
So this was the first surprise.
And then I went through every single moment of my life from beginning all the way to the
point where I was lying on the couch at the end, but I experienced it differently.
I couldn't change any events, but I was experiencing it as if it was happening again, but I was
also experiencing everybody else's point of view around me.
So would you call that a life review?
That's the term we generally use is a life review.
It was my life review.
I had no idea.
I didn't even know what that was.
Yeah, I didn't even know what it was at the time.
It wasn't because generally a life review doesn't come right away.
And I went, that's straight what I went into was life review.
So as I'm reaching the end of the life review, I realized that there's a screen in front
of me and I'm actually observing it on this screen.
And then I realized right at the end that there is a present sticks to me.
I can't see him.
I know he's male and I know that I know him intimately and my life comes to an end.
It's just done.
And I'm surrounded by this darkness, but it's more like out in space darkness where you
could see forever, not like, you know, Alaska and somebody turns out the light where there's
no light.
I'm standing there and I hear this present sticks to me say, this is your life.
This is the life you lived.
And that was it.
There was nothing significant about that.
There wasn't, there was no judgment.
There was no drama, nothing like that.
Just that's it.
That's your life.
And you said you knew who this person was.
Yeah, but I didn't know who it was yet.
I just knew that I knew him.
Are you going to tell us or keep us in suspense for a while?
I'm going to keep you in suspense all the way to the end.
Hey, keep going.
And so I, I'm looking for people that I, that I knew that had passed.
I had a grandmother that died when I was 14.
And then I had an uncle who was in an accident car accident when I was 11.
And I had a cousin who passed when I was a child.
And so I'm looking for them thinking I'm dead.
I realize I'm dead and they're not there.
And as I, nobody is, but as I swing my head to the right, I see that I'm standing at
the, at the end of a line of teenagers.
We're all standing next to each other, shoulder to shoulder.
And there's about six or seven of them.
And the kids standing next to me is a boy.
He's about 16 or 17 years old and he's tall and he's got this dark black, spiky hair and
black eyeliner.
He's wearing a white t-shirt and a black leather vest.
And he's wearing like military jump boots, combat boots that are black.
I'm thinking, oh, that's interesting that I wouldn't think that that's something you'd
bring with you when you die is these physical things like eyeliner, you know.
So I lean over to look at them.
And on the end, or near the end, there's this girl and she's about 16 years old and she's
just a wave.
And she's this stringy blonde hair.
And what I noticed about her is how empty she is and how dead she is.
Just this nothingness about her.
I have the thought, I wonder how it could be so bad in her life that she'd take her
life.
And I knew that we all had.
And when I think this, I have this thought, the boy next to me turns and down, looks at
me and looks away and he is just empty there, then empty, but I know that he can hear me.
And that's when I realized my thoughts are out of bowl.
Like it's just out there.
And as soon as I have this thought, oh, we've all ended our lives.
When I have this thought, it triggers the next part of the experience.
And I am taken and I'm flying at tremendous speed, upright, standing upright through this
darkness, this emptiness.
And I've left them behind at speed of light speed.
And I have no idea how far I went or how far I, you know, where I was going, except that
I knew I was somewhere on the planet above the planet.
I see in the distance this beltway because I'm going so quickly.
It happens very, very quickly.
It's just suddenly it's there.
It's like about, I don't know, 30 to 50 feet deep, something like that, but it extends for
as far as I can see to the left.
And it's filled with people.
And they're all in these filthy white robes.
As I'm landing, I slow way down to land into this realm.
I hear the word purgatory, right?
Ask what is this?
And I hear the word purgatory, which I think is very interesting.
And then as I'm kind of questioning about it, in my mind, I also hear the word thousands,
like how many are there here?
You know, it's thousands, but I didn't hear the word thousands like that's an exact like
pull out your calculator.
It was more like infinity, infinite, you know, countless.
I was just dropping in on the right, you know, it was like filled to the left and empty on
the right and I drop in.
So I look around at these people and they're all completely disconnected.
They're just talking to themselves, mumbling to themselves, and they are not acknowledging
or noticing anybody around them.
It's not like we're invisible to each other.
They just don't care, they're so dead.
There was one man who was squatting in front of me a few feet and he noticed me.
He looked up at me.
I had this thought about him.
I wonder if this is due to Suscaria.
I knew he'd been there for a very long time and my thought was 2000 years and that came
from me.
I don't think that emanated from him.
And I knew he'd ended his life.
As soon as I had that thought, that was the thing that triggered the next part of the
experience because it's a testimony.
If you believe that there was a Judas of Scaria, you believe that there was a Christ as well.
And so in the next moment, I see this pinprick of light in the distance.
And this place where I was, there were invisible barriers.
I couldn't see a ground either, but we were all on some kind of a surface that was invisible.
And we could not leave.
I knew that and it's filled with this darkness that was just like mist-like, almost waist-high.
But not like you burnt the toast kind of smoke.
It is a molecular darkness with this energy, this crockling energy that was the stuff of
dark deeds.
It's like the energetic makeup.
There's light and there's darkness.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
But it had purpose and it wasn't even evil.
It's just this is its purpose.
And it was second by second, sucking the life out of me, making me more and more dead as
each moment passed.
As I see this pinpoint of light in the distance, it's traveling toward me at tremendous speed.
And this energy around me starts vibrating.
This is God, this is God, this is God, this is God.
This being of light stops just outside this barrier.
His robes are flowing.
His hair is flowing and he is made of light.
He says to me, is this what you really want?
And I'm kind of stunned that first of all, that I'm having this conversation with who
I know to be my father in heaven that I rated.
I really believed that I was worthless.
I believed I didn't matter.
So first of all that and second of all, that I had had the courage to take my life.
I was kind of proud of myself about this at this point because I had actually contemplated
since I was 14 years old, been contemplating it, and that I'd finally had the courage.
So kind of not exactly healthy.
So I say, but there are no words exchanged.
It's just an exchange that's just out there.
And I say, but my life is so hard.
And he says, you think it's hard now.
It's like, you can't skip over parts.
We've all done it.
We've been a terrible influence for evil.
And your kids don't deserve you, basically.
Just all these things that, but not in an, it wasn't like, like I was berated and cowering
in the corner kind of the way it was with my stepmother.
Not like that.
It was a loving, filled with love interaction of, you know, come on in and you wake up, you
know.
I just felt like I couldn't do it.
You know, I still couldn't do it.
It didn't have the tools.
I'm still in this state of emptiness.
And like I just am completely consumed with this experience of I cannot live my life.
I cannot do it.
This is my only choice.
Then I see these pinpricks of light coming through the darkness right next to this being
of light who I know to be my father in heaven.
I realize there's some kind of a barrier, a boundary that I can't see behind, but it's
invisible.
But I, so I see these little stars of light and then I hear his voice and it is the same
voice of the same being that was with me when I went through my life review at the very
beginning of my near death experience.
And he says, don't you understand?
I did this for you.
And when he says this, I am suddenly in three places at the same time.
I'm still standing in this dark barrier where there's nothing but emptiness and darkness,
lack of love, lack of light, lack of anything that we consider life.
I'm also behind them.
And I can see myself in this barrier, but I can see these two beings of light, one who
I know to be my father in heaven and the other who I know to be Christ.
And I watch Christ transfer this energy, this light to God the Father and it is my life,
my life, this information that is passing to him.
And also I am inside of Christ's body and I'm in the garden of Gethsemane and I'm experiencing
him, experiencing my life from beginning to end as if it was his own, like he lived my
life.
And then that's what I realize.
I've never been alone.
Like he, there was somebody who understood what I've been through.
And then I realize he's done it for all of us, everyone.
But I'm still in this state of, okay, so I get that.
I don't know how to do my life.
I don't know how to go back and do my life.
I'm still in this phase of, but I cannot.
I am, you know, I'm a problem for my kids.
And so then I'm shown what happened to my boys.
And I only had the two at the time I have five now.
I was shown this roller coaster of their life, just the emotional experience and my son that's
the older of the two.
He was taken to about 20 years old and he was rendered completely incapable of doing
anything that he was meant to do here.
He was dark and empty and lifeless like the boy who was standing next to me in that line
of teenagers.
And then my second child, my second son was taken to about seven, eight years old and
taken from this planet because he could not do this life without his mother.
So his life would end there.
So then I, after seeing this, I just uttered this really teeny diney, okay.
And I'm suddenly above this plane.
I'm seeing all these people drop in on the right down below underneath where I am.
And I'm told most people who are dying now are going to a place of darkness and I'm
watching them just drop in.
And then I realize I'm surrounded by these beings of light who are just flying past me.
And I say, what is this?
And I'm told, well, they're helping you.
And they have been the whole time they've been with you.
They are preparing the Earth.
I realized then that we, that the planet would like, like you just experience it's like presence
like all this knowing is just available.
That's when I'm told like, and not even told, it's just available to me that we don't get
past 2015, the year 2015 without a shift happening on the planet.
Like the, I like to describe it like the Earth has the flu and is like this outcome we see
so much in like volcanic activity and the Earth is throwing up.
And you know, the Earth is not well because by virtue of what we do, we human beings are
doing to each other on this planet and doing to the planet.
And your experience was about 14 years before that.
So this would have been 1991.
So almost 25 years.
Oh, 2015.
Okay.
Yeah.
2015.
Yeah.
2015 was the year that I saw.
And I saw this happen.
Actually, this shift change that happened in, it happened in 2013.
What was it?
These kinds of conversations out in the open.
Spiritual conversations, not weird and woo woo anymore.
People no longer tolerate.
Look where we are with social injustice.
People do not tolerate.
It's like abuse still happens.
Horrible things still happen, but they, but we do not have this complacency about it anymore.
And we talk about it.
People are, yeah, eyes open.
Yeah.
We believe victims.
We do something about it.
So we're fighting.
And we're not just, you know, you've got to think about how long there's been here.
It's a long flu and it's going to take a while.
It's going to take a while.
So how did your experience end?
Or is there more before the end?
Yeah, there's a little bit more.
But so I traveled back to my body through this darkness and I was just panicked to this
suitcase of information, things that I would need to know in order to do my life.
And one of them was my relationship with my husband.
I really got to see for real how it is.
And it's not, it's, you know, I had it like perpetrator victim and I'm the victim.
I had it like my stepmother, perpetrator victim and I'm the victim and my parents perpetrator
victim guess who's the victim.
What I got was it's Yen and Yang.
It's a dance.
And the minute you step out of it and just say, oh, I'm not playing that game.
It ends that in that dance ends.
And let's, you know, let's do something different.
I also was able to see how it was for my husband.
I was able to really be in his shoes and get like, oh, I was a monster for a while.
I was no cakewalk for him either.
You know, and that we were working our own garbage out on each other and I was doing
just as much as he was.
It just looked differently.
That's all.
So, you know, I came back with a lot of compassion for others and a lot of getting that I was
in my own, my own little teeny tiny experience and not experiencing what other people, and
that's readily available to all of us anytime to get into somebody else's point of view
and experience for that, you know, what it's like for them.
If we all did that in one moment, guess what?
Earth would change.
Empathy on steroids would just fix a whole lot of stuff.
Yeah.
And hunger would end all of it.
Sex, trade, slavery, done.
So then I'm back in my body and as I sit up and swing my legs down and I'm sitting on
the couch and it's, you know, late morning, I realized that I'm still seeing light and
darkness like molecular light and darkness.
And I look at my couch and my couch is vibrating.
We are couch serving you, serving God.
And pillow sitting next to me on the couch.
We are pillows serving you, serving God, everything around me.
We are floor serving you, serving God.
We are serving you, serving God, the whole planet, everything.
And I could see like the space between the molecules and that like if I willed it, I
could put my hand through the table.
Like it's not solid.
I could see that the structure of everything is held together by will, by choice, that
it's not just, oh, I built this table here.
I should say my husband built me this table here.
This tree participated in that and willingly participated in that.
And then I see my, the plants in the room and they are just made of light, the way God
was made of light.
And I could see the information, even though my TV was off.
I could see the information that had passed through it and that would pass through it.
I could see just everything not bound by time as well.
Time isn't even real.
It's a, you know, it's a function of the rotation of planets.
It's different in different places.
I can see that each moment was a creation, its own separate creation.
And that as soon as it's given a physical form, put on a timeline here, you know, that's
when we say, oh, that's when that happened.
It's a memory, but actually it's all available all the time.
If you're not stuck in time, if you will, it all has this same energetic, you know,
quality and I could just see it and it's just readily available.
And then my husband walked through the door and remember it's the middle of the day.
Yeah.
He never comes home in the middle of the day.
No.
Yes.
He comes home and he sits down on the couch and the effects of the drugs that I had taken,
like I could hardly move.
It took about three days before I could even walk on my own.
My pupils were just blown during that time.
And he said, and I say, you're never going to believe this.
And he says, I think I just might.
And then I tell him about the experience that I just had.
And I say, I don't know what that was, but it was realer than anything I've ever experienced
in my life.
And to this day, it is the realest thing I've ever experienced.
So he says, well, you know, we need to take you to the emergency room.
And then I hear God, I'm still hearing like the veil is open, wide open.
And I still hear the voice of God.
And he says, do not do that.
They will fly you to Hickam Air Force Base and lock you up at the mental hospital.
And that is the last thing that you need right now.
It is the last thing your family needs.
He says, I restored you to life.
What else do you want?
Wow.
Can I ask you some questions that may take a little thought and a little depth here?
Yeah.
What did you learn about the nature of God from this experience?
You were up close and personal.
Complete love.
And there are no words for it really.
Authenticity.
You're an author.
Pick out the words.
Come on.
I know, right?
We don't have them in the English language.
We don't have words for this because we don't have.
We should, near-death experiences should get together and invent some words.
But it is love, like complete and whole.
Absolute truth.
And not like scary truth.
Just truth.
Facts.
This is as it is, authenticity.
And inside of that, there's no fear.
And when you take fear out of the equation, so many of us are stopped.
We don't do something or say something or feel something or acknowledge something within
ourselves because we have these hidden fears.
You know, like that will destroy me if I acknowledge that I think that I'm not pretty
enough or that I'm not smart enough, that I'm not good enough, that I'm not loved.
It's like to say those things even to ourselves, we have the experience that we will crumble.
But when we release that and allow ourselves to acknowledge that we have those fears, guess
what?
They dissipate.
And this experience that I had with God is like that is done and has been for thousands
of years.
It's just all honesty.
It's just complete honesty.
Okay, now we need to talk about the hard subject for a minute.
We need to talk about suicide for a minute.
So you saw other people in this line, other teens, you felt like they had committed suicide
also.
Give me an idea if you had any feeling from this experience, maybe it came to you then,
maybe after, of what happened to the rest of them, because yours ended up having a happy
ending.
I don't know if theirs did.
I don't either.
Sad, I don't know.
I still had a body to come back to, number one.
And I do feel like, and this is just me conjecture, right?
I don't know.
This isn't something I was told by God.
But later, I put it together, I do believe that these people that were mumbling to themselves
in this dark realm, they were having conversations with people I couldn't see.
Maybe dead loved ones on the other side, their past, maybe they're arguing a point.
But I think I really do believe, based on what I heard them saying, things like, if
only you had blah, blah, blah, blah, then I wouldn't have had to, blah, blah, blah.
I think they were having conversations with God too.
I think that they were working out their salvation, just like I was.
I think so too.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah, I really do.
And something I do know about the place is that it wasn't permanent, that it was a place,
a way station.
That makes sense as well.
Every time we have an episode where we talk a little bit about suicide, somebody will
post some judgmental, everybody's going to hell, they tried to commit suicide or something
like that.
Yeah.
And I try to be very non-judgmental of all of our listeners as well.
But this one, I'm going to stand on my soapbox for a minute.
Stop judging.
Everybody out there, just stop it.
You have not walked in the shoes of those people.
I haven't walked in your shoes.
I don't know what drove you to that.
You didn't walk in the shoes of that young man next to you in the line.
We recently had a suicide of a teenager, a very dear loved one in our family.
And luckily, most people are past that judgment phase.
It used to be years ago, this world was more judgy about that.
Thank goodness we're getting better, but we're not there yet.
Just stop it.
Everybody that feels like judging this.
Okay.
I'm off my soapbox now.
Well, I will say that I know three people, three different instances where loved ones
took their lives and those loved ones came back and visited them.
These three friends, people that I know, I know them personally, three different ones
came back and said, you need to know I'm fine.
I'm okay.
That's awesome.
So, just so you know, I mean, I don't, that was the biggest thing I came back with actually
was like unwillingness to judge.
I just, I might go there for two seconds.
I don't stay there very long at all or the poor me thing.
I can't do that for more than about 10 minutes.
Let's talk about your life review for a second.
This happened quick, it happened near the beginning, and then you got what almost sounded
like a lecture from God, but you said there was so much love.
I forget how you explained it, but there was so much love.
It didn't put you down, right?
Not at all.
It was an authentic, it was like this recognition of this powerful, amazing, extraordinary woman
that I was, but how loved I was and how, it's like these words just don't do it justice.
One with God and we each are.
I was his.
And so there, and there wasn't, for him, it was like, I needed to be like, you know,
hey, snap out of it.
Let's go get this show on the road because we can still get you back in your body.
How do we take and learn something from that?
If there's every time where a, say a child, you know, makes a big mistake and there's
something that we need to say to help them progress beyond that and learn from it.
How do we do that in such a way that they don't just feel beat up?
You didn't feel beat up.
You took this as just love.
How do we do that?
Well, so I'll tell you first, my oldest boy got to be about that age where he was, where
I saw him in my near death experience, that emptiness, that darkness, right?
He was right about that age and he did a terrible thing.
It was pretty horrible.
He emptied my bank account because I had him as a signer and just like, strapped us completely
financially.
I had just gotten through a divorce and just bought a house so that I didn't know what
I was going to do with this.
I discovered it.
We had just gotten back from a trip and I discovered it at one o'clock in the morning
and he's standing there in front of my piano and I'm looking at my bank statement and I
just look at him and it's that moment and I'm just told, give him your code also.
And I just say, I'm going to talk to you tomorrow because I can't right now.
And he was so ashamed, you know?
I called him and I'd leave messages, you know, hey, your tires that are out in the garage
when we're having a garage sale, there's $400 for you.
I sold them.
There's $400 for you in the tin on my dresser, but I'm not home.
And, you know, finally, he finally came around.
It took about four months and he was just, you can do nothing to mess with my love.
You can never mess with my love.
But the thing was, is he's standing there and it was the moment when I saw him in my
NDE.
And now the kid is a registered nurse, three kids with teenagers, you know, and married
to his sweetheart and, you know, they've been married a long, long time.
So it's like we look at raising kids like it's right now and this is so important and
the way parents approach.
And we can't help it.
We all do it.
The way we approach parenting is when our child, and it's in the back of your brain,
like you don't even recognize that this is happening when your child does something,
you have this terrible fear that if that kid doesn't turn out, it's, you know, it's
a reflection upon me.
It means I'm a failure.
And this failure conversation kind of runs in the background.
Our biggest fear isn't death, our biggest fear is shame.
So that's what runs the show with parenting.
So my T.E.I.'s kids had never been grounded.
They're 20 and 22, by the way, the two youngest ones.
You can ground them now to make up for it.
There's no need.
It's not necessary.
We just have conversations.
And so that's how I raised my kids.
It was just conversations like, okay, that doesn't work, does it?
And why?
And like, okay.
But I really stand inside of natural consequences.
It's just much more powerful than also throwing in there the parent lectures or, you know.
But that's so impressive because so many people that were raised in an abusive situation do
the same thing.
That's all they know how to do.
Instead of saying, that was awful.
I can change the future.
And that's what you've done, it sounds like.
So poodles to you.
And that's the thing about change is that it happens right now and right now and right
now.
You always have a, you know, you're standing in front of a moment just right now.
Give yourself a time out.
You know what I mean?
Right now, no matter what has happened in the past, you are always impacting the future.
Always, always, always, always.
So it's, it's not like it's predestined.
It's like we are, you know, writing our own stories all the time.
And even though God is omniscient and can, you know, he's not second time.
So he can go see in the future what you're going to do.
But at any, every moment, not any moment, but every single moment you have choice, choice,
choice, choice, regardless of what has happened.
And part of that choice is, I believe we get to decide right now in this moment to use
your words, what kind of person we are.
And I, am I an abuser or am I someone that just does nothing but love and share love?
Yes.
Words are, that was something else that I was given was the power of words.
They are so crazily impactful.
Like you think a bulldozer could move a road if you had faith match with words, your words
are more powerful.
Words are so impactful and gestures like just a smile even.
I mean, have you ever had a conversation with somebody and the line at the grocery store,
you know, and they made a little bit of a difference for you.
But then you go in to your next conversation and you are then impacting differently, the
people that you're interacting with, then you might have been with them before that
conversation.
So you're having this conversation with somebody in line in the grocery store, well, you're
out there doing the same thing.
They go and they, it changes how they interact with people and so on and so on and so on and
so on.
Like a smile can be felt for generations.
One smile to a stranger, the impact can be felt for generations.
That's amazing.
And I think that's what a lot of these life reviews are all about, to see how your behavior
affected others so that you can now do better.
That's the bottom line right there.
That was what I was meant to come back with right there is, you know, cause and effect,
a little cause and effect there.
Absolutely.
All right, we need to wrap up.
Any last thoughts you'd like to leave?
Just, you know, if you're struggling, if you're having a hard time, say something.
Do something.
Call a suicide hotline.
The last thing you want to do is end your life.
If you've lost somebody to suicide, it is not the end.
It is, they're not sentenced.
They're just working it out.
Okay.
That's all.
Perfect.
How much fear of death do you have?
Zero, just a zero.
Not like I'm hoping for it anytime soon.
Angie, thanks a ton for being on with us today.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Eric.
It's been a treat.
Thank you so much for listening.
In our last episode, we discussed other near-death related experiences, and I would still love
your feedback on that topic.
Email Eric at roundtripdeath.com.
And just one quick favor.
Today, please share this episode with a friend.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.