Howard’s NDE has personal significance for me because at the time it occurred he and I were both professors at Northern Kentucky University, and we talked a good deal about it, in the process becoming friends.
In the summer of 1985 Howard and his wife, Beverly, were leading a small group of students on an art tour of Europe. On a Saturday morning in Paris while meeting with students in his hotel room Howard began to feel nauseous. All of a sudden he felt as if he had been shot in the stomach.
He was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery, but because it was a weekend, no surgeons were immediately available. Howard’s stomach felt like it was full of burning coals, with hot flashes of intense pain shooting into his arms and legs. He repeatedly and unsuccessfully begged for morphine. Sometime around nine o’clock, a nurse came into the room and told him the doctor had gone home, and the operation couldn’t be performed until the next morning. Howard knew that he wouldn’t survive until then. He had fought as long and as hard as he could to stay alive. He knew he was dying and that dying was the only way out of his pain. To die, he believed, would simply be to stop fighting to breathe. He turned to Beverly, who had been crying for hours, told her that he loved her, and that it was over. They said goodbye.
He knew that what would happen next would be the end of consciousness or existence. He had no thought whatsoever about any kind of life after death because he didn’t believe in that kind of thing. In his way of thinking, only simple-minded people believed that. Furthermore, he didn’t believe in God, or heaven, or hell, or any other religious ideas that he saw as fairy tales.
Howard drifted into darkness, like falling asleep. Then, at some moment in some way he became aware that he was standing up. This made no sense. His mind told him it had to be a dream, yet he knew that it wasn’t. He was aware that that he felt more alert and more alive than he had ever felt in his life. All his senses were extremely vivid.
At that point, off in the distance, outside the room in the hall, Howard heard voices calling him, pleasant voices that were male and female, young and old, and they called in English. He asked who they were and what they wanted, but they didn’t answer. Instead they called him to go with them, that they had been waiting for him. They could get him fixed up, but he had to hurry.
The area outside his hospital room door seemed light but hazy, like when a plane we’re on passes through thick clouds. The people calling him were some distance away, and he couldn’t see them very clearly. However, he could tell there were both males and females of various ages, but no children. Whenever he tried to get closer to identify them, they backed away into the thick foggy atmosphere. As he continued on, the fog thickened, and it gradually became darker. Meanwhile, their numbers seemed to be increasing.
Howard kept asking when they were going to get wherever they were going, and complaining that he was too sick to continue. This only irritated them, and they became increasingly angry, sarcastic, and antagonistic. They began whispering about how pathetic he was and making remarks about his bare rear end, which wasn’t covered by the hospital gown When Howard tried to find out exactly what they were saying, they responded to each other, “Shhh, he can hear you; he can hear you.”
As they continued to walk, he realized it was getting darker and darker, and he became overwhelmed with hopelessness. He told them to leave him alone, they were liars, and he wouldn’t go any further. Howard was aware that by this point there were dozens or hundreds of them all around him. They came so close he could feel their breath, and they began hurling insults and pushing and shoving him about.
Howard began to fight back, which prompted what he described as a “wild frenzy of taunting, screaming, and hitting.” He fought like a wild man, swinging and kicking. They “bit and tore” back at him, and it was obvious that they considered his attempts to fight a source of great merriment. They were playing with him “just as a cat plays with a mouse.” Even though he couldn’t see anything in the darkness, he experienced sound and physical sensation with “horrifying intensity.” Their bodies felt exactly like human bodies, except they had very long, sharp fingernails, and it seemed like their teeth were longer than normal, although, Howard pointed out, he had never been bitten by a person. They didn’t seem to feel pain, but otherwise seemed to possess no special abilities. During his initial experience of them, they were clothed, but during the intimate physical contact, he never felt any clothing.
Howard realized that the creatures had once been human beings, the worst imaginable people stripped of every impulse of compassion. There didn’t seem to be any organization to the mayhem. They were simply a mob of beings totally driven by unbridled cruelty. Every new assault brought howls of laughter. They began to tear off pieces of his flesh. To his horror, he realized that he was being eaten alive, slowly and methodically, to make their entertainment last as long as possible.
Eventually, Howard became too badly torn up to resist, and most of them gave up tormenting him because he was no longer amusing. However, a few still picked and gnawed at and ridiculed him.
At this point, something happened that marked the end of Howard’s horror. As he lay on the ground with some tormentors still around him, a voice came from his chest that sounded like his voice, yet wasn’t a deliberate thought. The voice said, ‘Pray to God.’ But that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t believe in God. Although he was in an utterly hopeless situation beyond any help, he thought to himself, ‘I don’t pray, period.’ Praying would be a cop out. The voice said again, ‘Pray to God.’ Howard hadn’t prayed at any time in his entire adult life. He realized that he didn’t know how. He didn’t know what the right words were. One more time the voice said, ‘Pray to God,’ this time seeming more definite.
Howard didn’t know what to do. As a child he had watched adults pray. It had seemed to be something fancy that had to be done just so. He tried to remember prayers from his childhood Sunday school experiences. Somewhat tentatively, he murmured words, which were a “jumble from the Twenty-third Psalm, The Star Spangled Banner, the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, God Bless America, and whatever other churchly sounding phrases came to mind.”
To his amazement, the beings around him were enraged by his “ragged prayer.” They screamed at him that there isn’t any God, that nobody could hear him. Yet saying things about God seemed to be driving them away into the darkness, so he became a little more forceful. Howard recalls this went something like, ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of death, God is going to get you. Leave me alone, the Lord is my shepherd, and one nation under God..’
Eventually, all the creatures were gone. He was alone in some place that he wasn’t even sure was part of this world, with no idea how to return, even had he been able to crawl. And he began to think about his life. That life had been about working hard to build a monument to his ego. His family, his sculptures, his painting, his house and gardens, his little fame and illusions of power, were all an extension of his ego. Now all of those things he had lived for were gone, and they didn’t matter at all.
His life was ending up in the “sewer of the universe” with people who fed off the pain of others. And it dawned on him that he wasn’t unlike them. They had been led into darkness because they failed to truly love and only desired to inflict their inner torment onto one another. They may have been successful in the world, but they had missed the most important thing of all, and were now “reaping what they had sown.” Howard sank into a deep depression. As he put it, he “felt like a match whose flame had been spent and the ember was slowly dying away to nothing.” He knew he was lost, alone, and that he would never see the world again. What was left was to become a creature of the dark, one of his tormentors, for all eternity.
At some point, something happened that led to the beginning of the second phase of Howard’s experience. For the first time in his adult life, an old tune from childhood started going through his head. Although it was in his voice, it sounded like him as a little boy when he had been full of innocence, trust, and hope. The boy was singing the same line from a Sunday school song over and over again. ‘Jesus loves me . . . da da da.’ Those were the only words he could remember. Yet that was enough to prompt the hope that, somewhere out there in that vast darkness, there could be something good. There was someone who might love him. Howard desperately needed someone to love him, someone to know he was alive.
For the first time in his adult life, he wanted it to be true that Jesus loved him. He didn’t know how to express this, but with every bit of his remaining strength, he yelled out into the darkness, “Jesus, save me.” He yelled that from the “core” of his being. Never, he said, had he meant anything more strongly in his life.
Far off in the darkness Howard saw a pinpoint of light, like a very faint star, that was rapidly becoming brighter. Then he realized that, whatever it was, it appeared to be moving toward him at an alarming rate, and that he was right in its path. The light was brighter and more brilliant and more intense than anything he had ever seen, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Soon the light was upon him, and he realized, although it was indescribably brilliant, it wasn’t just light. It was a living luminous being, approximately eight feet tall surrounded by an oval of radiance. Its brilliant intensity penetrated his body, and Howard experienced an ecstasy that swept away his agony. He felt tangible hands and arms gently embracing him, and they lifted him up into the presence of the light. The torn pieces of his body miraculously healed before his eyes, all his wounds vanished, and he became whole and well in the light. But even more important for Howard, his despair and pain were replaced by love. “I had been lost and now was found; I had been dead and now was alive.”
Howard was aware that the loving, luminous being who embracing him knew him intimately, better than he knew himself. And this being loved him and accepted him unconditionally. He was “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Christ Jesus the Saviour,” and this Jesus loved him. The love, as Howard tried to describe it in words, was so intense it wasn’t comparable to anything he had ever experienced. It was greater than all human love put together, and it totally enveloped him. The luminous being from which the love poured was “indescribably wonderful: goodness, power, knowledge, and love.” He had called out to Jesus, and Jesus had come. The being held him and caressed him “like a mother with her baby, like a father with his long lost prodigal son.” And Howard cried and cried “all the tears of a lifetime of hopelessness and shame” due to his lack of belief, all the” tears of joy and salvation.”
As he was being held closely by the luminous being, they began to rise out of that place of darkness, slowly at first, then faster and faster. It seemed as though they crossed an enormous distance, “light years,” although in very little time. Far off in the distance Howard saw a vast area of illumination that resembled a galaxy. In its center was an intensely bright concentration of light. Outside there were countless numbers of spheres of light, flying around and entering and leaving the brilliant center. To Howard, it appeared comparable to seeing the sky at night on the top of a mountain with the stars so abundant that they almost touched one another.
As they approached, but were still a vast distance away, Howard was permeated with tangible intense feelings and thoughts of love. In later trying to describe this, he said he couldn’t put it in words, but that he simply knew that God loved him, that God loved the creation, that God is love. But then came the realization that he was completely unworthy of this love. He had time after time denied and scoffed at any notion of God, had in fact used the name of God as a curse. He was too ashamed to go closer to the center of love. The wonderful, incredible intensity of the emanations of goodness and love, Howard felt, might be more than he could bear. He was “scum” that belonged back down in the “sewer.” This was a terrible mistake. He didn’t belong here.
Then, for the first time, the being he was with spoke directly to his mind, in a young male voice, saying that they don’t make mistakes, and that he did belong where they were. At that point they stopped, still at an unfathomable distance from the “Great Supreme Being in Heaven.” Howard cried from shame, but the being he was with comforted him.
Then that being, Jesus, called out in what seemed like a musical tone to some of the luminous entities surrounding the great center of light. Several came and circled around them. The radiance emanating from these luminous being contained a range and intensity of exquisite colors, far exceeding anything Howard ever experienced or could adequately describe.
He realized that they knew everything he was thinking, and that included things he would be embarrassed for them to know. They reassured him that because they knew everything he had ever thought, he couldn’t surprise them. He was aware no one could know him more intimately. They were closer to him than anyone he had ever known.
They asked if he would like to see a review of his life, and Howard agreed. He was then presented with a record of his life, and it was their record, not his memory. Together they watched and experienced episodes from the point of view of a third party. Often the scenes he was shown were incidents he had forgotten. Sometimes they involved thoughts and feelings of people he had interacted with, and the effects on their lives that, at the time, he was unaware of. What they chose to show him was a complete surprise, not the things he would have wanted them to see.
For Howard, the message in this painful life review was clear. “We create our eternal judgment by what we do in this world. The truth judges us. In the light of God, there is no deception.” The next time he was to leave this world, he wanted desperately to be able to stand with the angels and Jesus and look at his life without constant shame and foreboding of what they would see next.
Following his life review, Howard was given an opportunity to ask any question. The first was, ‘What is the right religion?’ and the answer he received was ‘the one that takes you closer to God.’ Others included such things as, why is there war and why does God allow it to happen? What does the future hold? What are angels? What happens when we die? Why are we the way we are? To each question, they took pains to explain so that he could understand. This question and answer communication, Howard has later said, was a more extensive learning experience than the three years of seminary graduate school he was to have. He came to love the Bible, when he began to read it, because so much of what he was told he found there.
When Howard had asked every question he could think of, and received their answers, they told him he had to return to the world. This was a shock, since he was hoping that Jesus would make him perfect, and they would continue their journey to Heaven. He asked them to promise to always be with him, and they did. With that, he told them he was ready to return. Then, instantly, he was back. He immediately was taken for surgery.
After a difficult recovery Howard returned to teaching. Several years after that, he left the university, pursued graduate work at a theological seminary, and became the minister of a church. university, pursued graduate work at a theological seminary, and became the minister of a church. He has written two books, “My descent into death and the message of love which brought me back” (2000) and “Lessons Learned.” (2014)