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, welcome to RoundTripDest everybody and I'd like to welcome our super happy special
guest today, Catherine Avery.
How are you Catherine?
I'm great, how are you?
I'm good.
It is an absolutely beautiful fall day out there.
And I know you live not too far from me, so would you second that opinion?
Yeah, I love it.
The sky is extremely blue today and I see some snow on the mountains, so we're good.
Well we're going to get into your near-death experience in just a minute, but I would love
for our audience to get to know you briefly.
So who is Catherine?
What do you do?
What do you love about life?
Well, I come from a bigger family.
I'm number two of seven siblings and that is quite a lot of my identity actually.
I moved not too many years ago to be closer to all of them again.
We grew up pretty close to each other and I do a lot with them these days.
I am a big reader, love to get to know people.
I'm a chatter.
I will also, it has occurred to me based on what the subject matter for today is, to
just also let you know one other thing about me is that I've never been a strong swimmer,
but a couple things that came up in my life before my near-death experience have led me
to think a lot about my particular experience and what it was and why and how it happened.
And so I may bring those in just too little incidents as we go.
Well, and we're going to talk about your drowning experience in just a minute.
Anything else you want to fill in?
I don't know.
Oh, did I mention that I'm a musician?
I'm a musician.
That's also another big part of my life.
What kind of musician?
Lots of things, but I do play multiple instruments.
So classical music, folk music.
What's your favorite?
Well, I've played the piano the longest and I just actually started the harp last year.
So I've had a ton of fun playing the harp for a year and performing in public just a
little bit with that.
That's a big change.
Both are instruments that are hard to pack around to different places.
You're not choosing the easy ones.
Get a flute next time.
Oh, I play the flute.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Before we talk about your drowning, and this was when you were a teenager, you just mentioned
some things before that that I don't know about.
So go ahead and fill in the blanks on that.
My parents had a period of secondary infertility.
They had had three children, then they had several years where they were trying for more
and that did not happen.
And then later on, they had four more.
In those years, there were different experiences.
And so I was a kid.
I got to experience this along with the family.
I believe my grandmother at one point gave my mom a particular book, which I got a hold
of out of the bookcase at some point.
I'm a big reader and reading through the story.
It was about a woman who watched her husband drown.
She and their family of six or seven children were out on a boat and having a day and something
about the story in the end, her husband ended up in the water.
She had to keep all those kids safe on the boat, couldn't rescue him, and it was cold
and he got tired and all the things.
And there was nobody around.
And so the book just kind of, she had a little bit more of her story, but that was a lot
of what the plot of this book was.
And I read that as a kid and had a lot of thoughts about it.
And I don't really know why my parents had this book in the house, but you would think,
well, I would think that that was a pretty interesting thing to put into my brain as
about a nine-year-old, even before that.
So I had had some swimming lessons as about a preschooler.
It wasn't a great swimmer I never have been.
But I knew some basics.
And then you have water safety lessons in school every once in a while, things like
that.
And it did seem like that was a topic that stuck in my head.
And even as a kid, I would think, am I going to need this information in some particular
way someday?
I hope not, you know?
But I would just keep it.
It was always there in the back of my mind.
Again, a story, a short story that I heard that was based on a true incident, I'm sure,
of a little kid who had found himself trapped underwater on a camping trip with his brother
and his dad and maybe an uncle kind of thing.
And it was a short story, but the kid just was talking about how he handled finding himself
underwater, trapped by some branch or something.
And the thoughts that came to him that helped him know what to do next and stay calm and
this kind of thing.
And I just, I tucked that story away in my head as a little kid and thought, well, that
was useful.
If I ever need this for some reason, I will know at least to do the things he did, you
know?
And he came out of it, obviously.
And so, I mean, with those two stories just by themselves, before I was 10 years old,
I had, I suppose, in the back of my mind, this wondering whether that would ever need
to be something I needed.
And I didn't spend a ton of time on them, but I definitely had them in my repertoire,
I suppose.
And so then when my own experience happened, I feel like both of those, oddly enough, came
into play, although I probably didn't go back and put all that together for several years
after my own experience.
So it was almost like a, almost like a premonition, but something that also was helping to get
you prepared.
That's very unusual.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Tell us about when you were a young teenager.
Where were you?
Yeah.
When my family had moved, we had lived on the east coast of the U.S. when I was a little
kid, and there was water everywhere.
We went to the Jossam Beach, at least once a week, most summers kind of thing.
But I did not have a lot of experience on the middle of a body of water.
I had not really been in a boat before other than visiting boat museums.
That does not count.
I was not very familiar with this whole thing.
You know, I didn't feel like it.
And when I was a young teenager, we moved most of the way across the country, ended
up near the Colorado mountains, and there are lakes there everywhere, but not very many
beaches that you can count as beaches.
I mean, it's not the same.
So one of the first summers we were there, they told a bunch of us teenagers that, and
my brother was there that day, that we would be going boating and water skiing, you know,
all that stuff.
And I didn't even realize at that age that apparently that was something that plenty
of the teenagers out in the West did, all the water skiing stuff that I don't know that
I'd heard.
I'm sure people do it in the East too, but just there was a little bit of a cultural
difference there, maybe.
I wasn't sure, maybe even partly because of these stories I had read.
I don't know, but I wasn't feeling terribly comfortable about going on this trip.
But I went and I thought, maybe if I don't want to go on the boat, I won't have to.
But I'm willing to go for it.
There have been plenty of things in life you just go for it.
So my brother and I, and then these other people went and nobody else in our family
was there.
It was a lot of, there were plenty of adults and just a few little kids, mostly teenagers.
And my brother and I ended up in the same boat.
I mean, I think there were people just swimming or staying on the beach, but once we were
there, I thought, well, why not go in the boat?
But they did not have life jackets for everyone.
I'll tell everybody that.
And that's not so smart, right?
If ever I'm in charge of something like that, I'll kind of make sure we round all of that.
And I've done boating and rafting and things in the years since and it's been better.
But yeah, so we all got on this boat.
They had just a couple life jackets to share between everybody as far as if you go out
in the water behind the boat.
My brother did.
Maybe everybody else in the boat did that day and I did not.
But I enjoyed the ride and the water was choppy.
It seemed like there was also quite a, the weather was cooling off.
We were almost maybe a storm.
There are plenty of storms on those lakes in the afternoons in the summer in Colorado.
And so we came to an end of everything and the man driving our boat had a couple of his
little children on the boat with us.
They may have had life jackets.
I don't remember.
I'm sure he was kind of putting his resources at the disposal of these teens.
So he had whatever he had that day at the end of everything.
He didn't go back to the boat ramp.
He was going to take another boatload out.
And I think he thought, well, I'll get pretty close and people over on the beach or the
shore are over there and all of you just jump out and swim over there.
And I knew that I wasn't a strong swimmer, but I thought, we're pretty close.
I can do this.
I'm not going to make a fuss.
And everybody else jumped out before me.
And so I was asking them as they went, you know, they pop up again, they keep swimming
away and I was asking them, hey guys, how deep is it?
How cold is it?
Anything I should know.
There's a lot about rocks underneath more than other things.
And they all kind of gave me generic answers.
They weren't being unhelpful, but I also still felt like I don't really know how this is
going to go.
And for some reason I did have just that little sneakiness of I'm not so comfortable with
this, but I didn't know why.
And so I thought, well, I shouldn't be holding this man up.
He wants his next group.
So I jumped out of the boat and hit that water and it's cold.
The water on the East Coast warms up somewhat.
The water on Colorado lakes, no.
Yeah, that water took my breath so fast.
There I was.
You know, the boat can only be inches away from me if I can get up above the surface
again, but can't see anything, all I can feel is cold, have no air.
And from there, I don't know, shall I just keep telling the story here?
Well, yeah, I just wanted to interject one thing.
The cold water, it can be very dangerous.
You know, for anyone that hasn't done some kind of a, well, ice plunging is so popular
now, but hopefully you won't drown in one of those.
But when you jump in really, really cold water, especially when you're not expecting
it and don't have experience with it, it can actually like cramp up your muscles, freeze.
And the shock can make you expel your air.
So it's not surprising to me to hear that you just had no air.
I mean, just so that we can relate to where you were at, plus you were little and all
that kind of stuff.
So, okay, what happened next?
I'm under the water and at that point, even just the sensation of knowing, okay, I've
got to either take in some oxygen here or, you know, the opposite, you know, like instantly,
like I do not have anything left.
I felt like time slowed down.
I mean, I'm sure, you know, and I was having all these thoughts and I was remembering that
story that I had heard as a little kid about the boy.
And one thing he mentioned was that he just, he had heard a voice telling him, don't breathe
in.
And so I thought, okay, I mean, you know, again, I could do that at first, I went out
of time, you know, and I thought, all I need is to get back up above, but grief, you know,
I've gone swimming and things, you know, my whole life, like this doesn't take very
long, but there was just, and then so I spent what felt like a very long time waiting to
foth up and holding my breath when I, I couldn't anymore.
And finally I had time to think to myself, this is it, this is the moment I'm gone because
I don't, this isn't going the way I would have thought or hoped it would go.
Was it sort of a relaxation that came over you?
Slightly not.
I didn't feel like much changed in my general demeanor.
I just was, I felt like my thoughts were going fairly slowly, like I had time to think about
all of this.
Because some people go from panic and then things kind of slow down.
And you mentioned thinking through some things all of a sudden, which, yeah, that's interesting.
Okay.
And so then I had time, I would say I had time to have thoughts about, so if I die today,
right here, right now, what is everybody up at home going to think, you know, what is
everybody on the beach over there going to think?
How is this going to go?
And I had time, I was raised a religious little kid and I started praying, right?
I'm praying, okay, God, I wanted to grow up and get married.
I wanted to go home and see my parents tonight.
I wanted, you know, but if for some reason I'm supposed to die, then the main thing that
I was concerned about at that point, which I kind of found surprising, if you'd asked
me, what would you be concerned about in a moment like this?
I don't know that I would have picked this, but the thing I found myself praying about
was I was so sure, and I have no idea now if I would even have been accurate, but why
not?
But I was so sure that day then that my parents would not handle an announcement well that
their child had gone on this trip and died.
That is not in the plan.
And again, because I wasn't wearing a life jacket, I just thought this is going to go
all kinds of bad, you know?
And I also thought these adults that are here, very well-intentioned, maybe, I mean, they
had four or five boats, I'm sure at least one of the other boats would have had more
life jackets, I don't know.
But I thought, I don't want to get this man in trouble.
He's a well-intentioned man doing, I guess, what he thought or hoped would go decently.
And I don't want these other grown-ups or anybody else anywhere to get in trouble for
me dying today.
And that's what I was, that's what I was praying about.
And I just was thinking, I want my parents not to blame any of these people.
I want them not to blame themselves for letting me go on this trip.
I don't want, because I just, I don't know, I felt like me being in that water there wasn't
anybody's fault.
Which again, I wasn't a kid who was into blaming the world anyway, but I also felt like I had
run into enough people over my years that there's always somebody looking for somebody
to point at, you know?
And I just, it was interesting.
I felt like I had time to evaluate my feelings.
And I just thought, I wouldn't call this anybody's fault enough to go after anybody.
So again, people who hear the story now may have different feelings.
So was there a point when you felt like you left your body?
Yes.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, it was interesting what kind of a transition that was.
So, so I'm thinking these thoughts and then, and then thinking, I guess I'm dying.
I guess this is it just because I continued to not surface, you know?
I think it was after all these thoughts about, I want, I want things to go well at home.
I guess I may not be coming back, you know, that I, that I did realize I did hit a very
specific point at which, and I did kind of realize this, like very shortly after that,
that I wasn't necessarily feeling the water anymore.
Right?
I wasn't sure whether I felt freezing cold anymore or not so much or what, but I, I wasn't
feeling like I was surrounded by water that was keeping my air from, from me.
It was more just like I didn't need air.
Like I, here I am, and I'm not worrying about that, you know?
And what is around me is, is space.
I would have just said it was space.
It was at least, it seemed like it was the same level of darkness.
Those lakes are very dark underneath.
It was the same level of darkness as what the water had been.
Yeah.
And, and there I was just, I didn't feel like I had moved, but I, but I definitely knew
also.
I was like, okay, I was fighting for air back there.
Now I'm not fighting for air anymore.
I'm not, I don't care about the air.
I'm not using the air.
You mentioned to me earlier that you had a life review briefly during this time.
Is that the next part or is there something, if there's something to fill in before that,
fill that in first?
Well, I'm trying to think.
I think that was the next thing.
So, so, you know, I had gone from my thoughts of my parents, my thoughts of, I, I probably
should be trying to go back up toward, you know, out into that world over there, you
know, instead of giving it all up, you know, right at this moment that I was like, wow,
you know, I'm not dead.
So even if I'm dead or even if people out there are going to find me dead, like, I'm
alive.
This is me, you know, I was very surprised that the next thing that happened was that
I found myself just seeing everything, everything.
And I mean, I was only 13.
How many memories can you have, you know?
But I see everything that had ever happened in my life.
And it was, it was very fast.
But I noticed that there was nothing missing.
And I've always had a very good memory.
And as a kid with fewer things to remember, I had had a very good memory.
But did I remember all of this?
No, like, you know, how could anybody remember all of that?
And I saw it all.
And it was just everyday stuff.
I hadn't had a big, exciting life with crazy things happening.
There was nothing, there was nothing missing.
And it was extremely bright.
So I don't know, you may have seen something in writing from me before.
Sometimes I mentioned how as a kid living on the East Coast, we didn't have satellite
TV or anything like that that was coming out and more people had that.
We always watch TV with the snow.
And so, you know, unless I was away from home, what I was going to see on our color TV was,
yes, it was colorful.
Yes, you could see what was happening.
Yes, you could hear it.
But it wasn't clear.
It wasn't crystal clear.
And to some extent, perhaps you could even say the color was kind of that much more subdued,
right?
And this that I saw was as if it were the clearest TV screen and more so, right?
More so.
And just everything, I was myself in some of what I saw as far as at the time the memory
would have happened that I would have recalled.
I'm seeing out of my own eyes.
I only see everybody else around me, you know.
And some of what I saw was as though I were an outsider now and I was seeing myself plus
the other people in the picture.
So that was interesting, right?
But I wasn't giving too much thought to it at the time, just going, wow, you know, there's
wow.
No, I wouldn't have remembered that, you know.
So very clear, very quickly and also backwards.
I don't know how many people I've heard who had talked about a life review where it's
not from beginning to end.
It was as though from the end back to the beginning.
And so that was very different because if you had asked me as a 13 year old to narrate
my life memory by memory, if I could have done such a thing, I would have started with
the earliest thing I could remember and I would have gone up to here I am underwater
dying, you know.
That's an interesting thought because most people don't even mention that, whether it's
from oldest to newest or newest to oldest, which leads me to believe that it's not necessarily
chronological.
In fact, some people tell me that they see everything at the same time.
So it's not necessarily one before another.
And our minds here on this earth can't really understand how do we see everything at one
time, but that's okay.
In a spiritual realm, we can do a whole lot more than we can here.
Is there any from that review, any maybe one or two experiences that stand out that you
that really had an impact on you?
Some of the things I was I was kind of grabbing at mentally and I couldn't hold onto any of
it was just a scene of being in the playroom, I suppose, at the house where I was about
05 and seeing my brother and I sitting around a set of magnetic toys.
And I mean, you know, I played with however many sets of toys in my life at all different
ages with all different people, you know.
And yet that particular memory was showing up and it was one where I didn't feel as though
it were me being present with my brother and the toys again.
It was as though I was across the room a little ways seeing me and my brother and the toys.
And then, you know, there wasn't anything special about it.
I was taking less than a split second to think, is there something important about this?
Or, you know, why is this something that I think I'm going to remember after this whole
experience, you know.
And I couldn't come up with any reason why that was important.
But I did have from the time I was about 4 or 5.
I do know that at some times like that where I was, you know, to an outsider I would have
looked like I was sitting playing somewhere.
I was having very deep thoughts for a kid about family relationships and people's temperaments
and who am I and this kind of thing.
And so it could be that maybe that memory was something where if I could now go back
and see everything again, because I have no way of remembering this now, that I would
have been at that moment sitting there thinking about my brother and I always got along very
well.
We played very well together.
He was what I would have considered my best friend.
And others in my family were not so friendly, but we're not so easy to get along with.
And I did have thoughts about that kind of a thing quite a bit as a preschooler.
The idea that it's just so fun to be around this person and it's not as fun to be around
that person, you know.
So pretty simple.
But that kind of a thing, I just found myself noticing and thinking again, well, I mean,
that was, that's what I would call a good memory.
I wonder if maybe I'm, I mean, now I suppose I think as an older person, I think, was I
trying to hold on to any of the good memories in this life review as though I worried there
would be some bad ones or as if I worried that it was all going to get away from me
and disappear, you know.
So.
Yeah.
Those are good questions.
So do you remember during that life review feeling anything like any guilt or judgment
or happiness because you had good experiences too?
That is a good question.
So I was struck by how very unemotional the entire thing was.
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Now back to the guest.
I, again, perhaps I was trying to grab onto one or two of these memories as they went
past me so fast or not even went past me.
They felt like they went from me where I was in that moment away from me, you know, back
to the past and I was farther away from the ones that happened farther away as things,
as I became aware that there was nothing missing, not a single thing, you know.
I did feel that, oh, okay, all of this is, again, part of me, part of my life, this is
me, it is closer to me than I would have thought, you know, so that was interesting.
But no, it was extremely, extremely no emotion whatsoever.
All mental, all thinking, I'm just kind of going, okay, so what was this about?
You know, because I didn't have any experience to compare it to really at that point, except
for how I had been taught from the time I could remember that after we die, we are still
alive and I had been taught that it matters what we do in life and that, for instance,
after you die and go on to, because we keep living, I suppose if you go on to the next
life, right, that what you have done will matter to you some way, right?
That, yeah, I had been taught that if you, I had been taught the word regret and my parents
had always said you should live without regrets and do things, not do things that you would
regret later anyway.
And I think I mostly did that, although also the kind of life I was living as a kid didn't
lend itself to a whole lot of doing very much that I would have regretted, I think.
Yeah, you were a good kid, so that makes sense.
Do you remember in addition to the near death experience, or excuse me, the life review,
do you remember seeing or feeling anything else?
With this life review and then feeling that there was no emotion attached to it, even
so again, I couldn't hold on to anything I had just seen.
And if I had wanted to say, well, I remember that, that makes me feel worm and fuzzy, you
know, no, there wasn't anything like that.
I did just have a sense, it was an absolutely powerful sense that yes, if I had done something
in what I had just seen that I would now be feeling regretful for, that that regret would
have been there, that that would have been a feeling and that would have been very strong.
And so I kind of was thinking, well, don't, you know, shouldn't I then feel just as happy,
strongly happy about the good stuff?
And I didn't, but I just felt like, okay, so I don't know what to do with this, but
this is what I have here.
You know, I felt like I was kind of holding it in my hands a little bit for a split second
of going, okay, God or wherever, whatever, you know, but here it is, I don't know what
this is, right?
As soon as it was over, as soon as the life review was over, the sense that I had was
that now that I had seen everything, I was allowed to add to it if I wanted to.
I could say anything I could complain or dispute anything, whatever I wanted to do with this,
I could do it was up to me.
And I thought that's very interesting.
What do I want to do with this, you know?
And the thing that I also had the sense of was, which I wouldn't have expected, was that
anything I said in this moment or any claims I made about what this was would not replace
anything in the record, it would just add to it.
So you know, I'd be adding footnotes, I'd be adding addenda, and I'm going, okay, well,
why would that matter, you know?
In the sense that I had was, for instance, if there was a time when I would have seen
myself fighting with a sibling or something like that, right?
And I wanted to now say, well, this was why, you know, somebody should see my side.
I had the right in the argument or whatever, that my comments now about that situation
would just go in the footnotes and they would be there.
But that, for instance, and if anything I wanted to say that would like tweak the situation
to be in my favor, that that would just be obvious because whatever I said in the footnotes
could be compared against what was available to be seen.
And so that was, I was realizing, oh, so what I just saw is kind of something that anybody
could see.
It's not just me or my life or private to me, this is out where anybody can see it and
anybody is going to come along and see it sometime, I guess, you know?
And so I didn't know what to do with that.
I thought if I add a bunch of stuff and try to spend time making myself look good, then
if somebody comes along and sees something that just playing out right in front of them
doesn't make me look good, then this will show the observer or the reader or whatever
you'd call it.
It would show that I'm a liar.
And it really, the thing that I really was sensing from this whole life review was reality
is reality.
Reality really happened.
This is how it was, good, bad, indifferent, everything else.
And anything that anybody tries to add to reality is just not real.
And it was interesting that right there underwater, I was getting such an education in a way I
never had to that point in my life about reality, what it really is, how it matters,
how it apparently plays out outside of this world even.
Super interesting.
And that's a lot in a short amount of time.
Was there anything else that you experienced before it ended and then tell us how it ended?
As I'm thinking, okay, well, apparently it is mine to do something with at this moment,
this thing that I just saw.
But this is what it's going to mean, you know?
And I really felt that I was accountable for whatever I did right now with that in this
moment.
I thought, no, I'm pretty happy basically with what I lived here in this world.
And I'm not happy with everything.
I'm not a perfect person.
I didn't think I was, you know, but like, well, this is what it was, you know?
And I guess I'm going to let the record stand.
And as soon as I thought that, again, I was kind of surprised that I was having all this
time to think this too.
So it seemed like lots of time was going by.
As soon as I thought, guess this is it?
I guess this was my life on earth.
And by then I was kind of going, I guess if this is happening to me, this means I'm gone,
you know?
I'm not going back.
I'm not going to be preparing to move on.
I felt as though the whole thing, which had been, I would have said it was like a, like
that film tape inside of the BHS, you know, with different little scenes inside stretching
away from me.
And I felt like it was rolling back into the machine.
So sometimes I say to people, it says, though, every detail of my life with nothing missing
was a receipt with all the details of the transaction, you know, every single thing
as it gets entered into onto the receipt paper.
And then once I said I was kind of done with it, it's all rolled back up into the machine.
And I was picturing like a, like a scroll in my mind rolled up.
And I had the sense it was going to get put, stored away somewhere.
I exposed they store scrolls and, or people used to store scrolls in earthen pots, you
know, in caves, you know?
That's kind of the sense I had was it's going away.
It's all safe.
It's all together.
This is you in your past.
And it will come out again sometime, but it's not time to think about it right now.
And I thought, oh, okay.
And so at that point was when I really, again, it was a specific decision or, or at least
a point in time where I was going, okay, I am turning away from all that stuff that
was hoping to get back out of the water, hoping to say something to the people up above, you
know, I am, and even though I say up above, I didn't at that point have a sense that I
was underneath any, in any way.
It was just, I'm in space.
I don't know where I am.
Here we go.
With that decision then that I'm turning away from all that, that was it.
That was going to be the end of my, my earth life.
And I thought, okay, well, I very much felt 13.
I didn't feel like I was wise or, you know, adult or anything.
I very much felt like a young teenager, but I thought I will, I will turn around and I
will face whatever is coming next.
I got to do this.
And, and I mean, as much as anything, that experience of being so naive about what might
be coming was one of a piece with the idea of going on the boating trip in the first
place where I, and all the other things in life that I'd done where I didn't know how
they were going to turn out.
So I thought, I don't know that I would say I'm comfortable with this, but I, I guess
is what we're doing, you know.
And, and it was as I turned more mentally than physically, but I almost did feel like
in space I was turning and, and I was turning away from all that stuff back behind me and
I was turning towards, in my best understanding darkness and emptiness.
And I thought, okay, but I, you know, no sense of God or anybody around me or anything in
space around me.
But I kind of was hoping and trusting that there was, you know, there were, there were
things out there and ahead of me.
And it was as I was doing that, that I came up out of the water and have to take a breath
now, you know.
And, and I had enough time.
It felt like, again, things were going slower.
I had enough time to be going, it's time to take a breath now, you know, and then do
so.
You know, it was a choice.
It was a decision.
And, and then of course I'm back to gasping for air as though it completely involuntary.
So I thought, that's interesting, you know, and by then the man had come off the boat
himself and was swimming towards me saying, are you okay?
You didn't know what's going on, you know, I didn't say, and saying, my little kids are
on the boat.
I have to get back to them on the boat and I have to care about them.
And is there some way that you can, you know, can you get to the shore then?
I'm so glad you came up.
I guess you're okay kind of thing.
And I was going, I guess I'm okay because, you know, but I was telling him, well, what
about the rocks?
Oh, it's freezing in here, you know, all the same things.
And he was kind of paying more attention to me than he would have otherwise, I think.
And so he kind of grabbed me by an arm or something and kind of towed me along with him just a
very short way until I could feel something on the bottom.
And then I walked or whatever I did back to the rest of the group and just kind of flocked
down on the beach and sat there and thought about all that.
And at the time, that afternoon and evening, I spent more time thinking about, again, my
parents, the adults, oh, I'm not going to tell anybody this story.
I don't want anything, you know, people are going to get all over everybody's case.
And since I came out of it, fine, I think it's fine, you know, and again, that's probably
a very young teen way to think.
But that was how that was.
And I know that that man was concerned, but he was a man who didn't know me.
I knew who he was, but we'd never exchange words with each other.
Even in his bringing me back to the beach, we didn't hardly say anything to each other.
And in all the years that I knew him after that, he and I didn't interact.
So the whole thing was very interesting.
Okay.
Now, just a reminder, if for people that may be new to the show or kind of new to near
death experiences, these things can happen in all sorts of ways.
It doesn't always have to be the clinical heart stopped for a couple of minutes and
all of that kind of stuff.
These experiences happen in comas.
They happen in things like yours where, where you dead, where you alive, where you on the
verge, where you kind of in and out, you know, I don't really care.
It doesn't matter.
We're not trying to fit a definition here.
You had an experience that was very profound to you.
And so the next thing that I want to ask you is, how did this affect your life moving forward?
Were you a different little 13 year old girl from that point?
I was quite iffy about all things water for a while after that.
And I did at some point not too long after tell my parents at least some of that adventure
because there was some other sort of thing that came up that I didn't want to participate
in.
And I told them, it's because of my previous experience.
And so, you know, they were whatever it was I shared.
And I know I didn't share the whole thing, but they were pretty shocked.
I mean, I didn't tell them anything about my experience under the water, you know, or
you know, dying basically, but they were pretty shocked and they were pretty, I wouldn't say
angry like they could get angry and indignant.
But, but, you know, they were not very fond of the idea that I had not been wearing a
life jacket at the time, this kind of thing.
So, so they gave permission for me to skip whatever it was that I didn't want to do after
that.
But I went back and as an older teenager, I took some more swim lessons, things like
that.
And, and I've just, I've never been terribly fond of the water since that experience.
I'll say that.
But I mean, that was just, that was related to like the, the supernatural parts of it.
I would say for that, there were three experiences very different from each other that happened.
The year I was 13, that was one.
And there were two others.
I don't know that I was very much a different person in character, but I just, I thought
about all that stuff even more than I maybe even had for the few years before.
I would think about life after death and how, well, for sure, if anyone asks me, I'll tell
you, we're still, we're still us and we're still alive after we die, you know, again,
just the basic, I didn't usually go back to that underwater experience until I was older,
as far as where my ideas came from about how you should live so that you won't regret it.
You know, I just, I pretty much stuck with what my parents had told me as a tiny kid.
And then, and then these other experiences that happened in that same year would lead
me to just think generally about how, what kind of life am I living?
You know, am I happy with it?
Is this, is this who I want to be?
And, and more than that, because again, other things happened every year.
And, and my life got much more adventurous after age 13.
And I would spend time sometimes looking at other people and their stories and decisions
and thinking, maybe maybe the thing here is that you just don't know what I know.
And if you knew what I knew, you would do things differently.
You know, so that was, that was interesting.
I mean, really, it's only been in the last two or three years that I've, that I've really
shared about the voting experience with, with more people who aren't going to know anything
about me or ever hear anything more from me.
And generally when I do, I have been thinking of it from the point of view of how can I
just, if there is a situation where it seems like it might be relevant somehow, how can
I maybe just add to somebody's picture of kind of more for comfort, because I think
there are a lot of people who worry about, do I, do I live after this world kind of thing?
And sometimes, yeah, if somebody's making some decision that seems to me very extremely
foolhardy or something like that, I may think, again, if, if you knew what I feel like I
know, I think you might be doing some things differently.
Well, and that's one of the tough things about having an experience like this is such a young
age and especially not telling parents about it for a while.
As you had to deal with both the trauma and the things that you learned and experienced
under the water in a whole different kind of, you know, this was a spiritual experience
as much as it was a physical experience for you.
You know, how do we process that?
Even as adults, it's not an easy thing to process as a 13 year old girl.
I think you probably just shove some of this down and said, I'll deal with it later.
And you're finally, you're finally coming to terms with it and learning from it and
some of those kind of things, which is making you more comfortable sharing it.
And I appreciate you sharing it with us, by the way, because I know you've shared it
with a few people, but not publicly like this before.
So thank you.
I appreciate that.
One of the things that you had mentioned to me prior to this was about the colors that
you saw.
Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah.
Well, I just mentioned how bright everything was, right?
And as, I mean, it's a poor comparison to say it was going from the snowy TV to the
clear TV and even beyond that, that's still just not exactly how I would say it.
I don't know how I would say it, but for sure, not only was everything about my life there
that I could not have remembered, no matter how good my memory was, you know, but also
like even living it, even, even if like I'd gone back into my memory and I would have
remembered the basic tone of the light that was in this playroom with my brother, you
know, what kind, I knew what kind of light bulbs we had in there or whatever, you know,
I knew the color of the carpet.
I knew that how brightly painted the toys were, this kind of thing.
And how I was seeing it back in this experience was so much sharper than that.
So much, I don't know at what ages I experienced seeing things in definition, if that's even
the right word, how you can have, you can have things where you would even say the colors
of a shirt against a pair of suspenders over the shirt or whatever, you know, you would
say there's a difference in those colors, there's a place where this color begins and
that color ends, you know, on earth, everything about real life is much more subdued that
way and everything in those memories, everything about this life going back, there seemed very
sharp definition between every different color, between every different thing.
I would almost say as though somebody were painting bright yellow lines between the dark
blue and the red or whatever, and it was funny, I guess in some ways it's like when
you put a, like a glow in the dark vest on and you want it to be bright in the darkness
and it has not only the bright color but then also the reflective strips on top of that that
are a different material made to shine, you know, all these things, it just felt like
everything about the, what I saw of my life was, was very defined.
I just, and, and, and again, so, so again, I thought, well, you know, I thought I lived
life at the time, this was my memory of a thing that happened, you know, but again, when
it came time to say you can do what you choose to do with this record that you've just seen,
I just thought the fact that everything was so bright and so definite meant that again,
I couldn't argue with it, you know, I could add footnotes or whatever I thought I needed
to do but nobody would ever, me or anybody else anywhere would never get away from the
fact that this is the record, this is how it stands, it happened.
Okay, before we wrap up, two other quick things.
One is on a scale of one to ten, how much fear of death do you have?
Oh, I didn't mention this, I just, I feel like, I don't know when in the experience
this really happened, maybe, maybe all along a few different other things I did mention,
but, but I did have time, I felt like I had time to think about this a little bit and
I thought, again, I don't want to die because like I wanted to do things in the world, you
know, I wanted to grow up and be an adult, you know, that, I thought I was an adult when
I was four years old, so I, that I was living for that, you know, at the same time it was,
I don't want to die meaning, and I hear other people talk about this in experiences at least
sometimes that it's just your body has a natural response, right?
It's gonna fight for life, it is gonna fight with every, you know, the more dire a situation
gets, the more specifically your body is going to fight to stay alive, you know, it's a thing,
you know, and, and that was, that was not fun to be living with, I mean, as much as,
again, there came that moment when I was going, I guess, you know, I'm still alive, I'm still
me, but like, it's not what I was experiencing just a second ago.
I'm not, again, I wasn't, I wasn't fighting anymore.
And that's the thing, I didn't feel like I fought the drowning, it was just my body
was doing some fighting for air and so there was that for just a little bit, I don't know
how long it went on and, and I was, I was happy when it went away.
But what about today?
And so that's the thing, I am not fond of the idea of being in that position again,
right?
However it is, I have to die in the future, it's gonna happen somehow, you know, and
I don't like the idea of having to spend any time with my body's response to, no, we're
not gonna die, we're gonna keep living, you know, but same thing as lots of people say,
I think, especially if you're in some situation where death starts to seem preferable or something,
you know, you're not gonna be, I'm not gonna be worried at all about what's coming after
I die, you know, I know that, that I'm still gonna be me, that I'm still gonna be alive,
I still trust perfectly well, but things are gonna happen and, well, I had a pretty good
life all things considered and I assume that it's gonna be at least that good elsewhere,
you know, I don't know why it wouldn't be, you know, so it's not, it's, it's the dyeing,
not the having died, I suppose.
That's a good way to put it, the dyeing, not the actually being dead, because the dyeing
may be painful or long or very unpleasant for some reason.
There are, is somebody out there today that's listening, that's having a rough day, maybe
because they've lost a loved one or they're worried about the future or something else,
what message of hope can you leave with us?
I have to take it into consideration with everything before and after the experience
and I've also had other experiences that you couldn't call out of body or not near death,
but that have been at least as powerful and real as that and I'm not just saying even
mentally or spiritually but physically, I've had physical experiences and taking everything
together for sure there is a God and he is a good God and what we understand by good
is it's, it's certainly good, you know, but like for instance, the subduedness of life
compared to the brightness of the life review, our understanding of the word good when we
talk about a good God is so subdued and what God really is like is that bright stuff.
I mean, honestly, I think this life, all the experiences we have, I've gone through periods
of depression and other things too, life hasn't always been wonderful.
Just everything about this world is a softer take.
God is giving us a softer take on experiencing all the things we go through.
He's not going to just give it to us spear in the gut, you know, he doesn't do that.
And so whatever we lose, whatever we have to, you know, everything I thought I knew
has to get put down the drain and we have to start over, you know, all the, all the
sad and hard things we go through in life, even just from that experience in the water,
God's there.
I think that I, from that experience, I would say the sense of God being there is very much
a on everywhere in and through everything.
I don't see him, I don't feel him.
I write, he's not touching me, you know, kind of thing, but he's definitely there.
And I mean, I'm not, that's not to say I don't also believe God is a person as physical
as I am in different states and worlds, but, but the sense, and I know other people talk
about this too, that the sense of every whereness, that's a funny way to say it, or the sense
of then the intelligence, the mind that is, that is the atmosphere, that is the environment.
I mean, it's, it's a, it's an energy, it's an energetic thinking, a live mind.
I mean, that was what was telling me, you get to do with what you choose with what you
saw here.
And then once I said, I'm letting things stand as they were, told me that it was all getting
rolled up and put away safely somewhere for some future time, you know, older I get, I
think, well, we can't escape that then, there's no getting away from it.
You know, it is, and it's around us and it's, it loves us.
If the environment, if the, if the atmosphere around you could be hugging you, that's what
it's doing.
I know it was a big question, a big open-ended question, but I appreciate all of that.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and your smile.
Thank you so much for being with us today, Catherine.
Oh, thank you for having me.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
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If you want to share your near-death experience, or if you have questions or comments about
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Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.