When Grace Hatmaker of Shaver Lake, California talks about dying, she doesn't use the same words most people would.
She talks about dying as something she has already experienced.
Not many people can claim they died and came back, but that is exactly what Hatmaker said she did.
Hatmaker is one of a number of people who have experienced clinical death.
Clinical death means the person’s heart stops and no blood flows through their veins.
During those few minutes, many people have said they experience visions of what sounds like the afterlife.
They see dead relatives, wonderful cities and landscapes and come back with lessons on what life is really about. Their experiences are collectively called near-death experiences.
Back in 1981, Hatmaker was a supervising nurse at the local hospital.
One weekend, after she went home, she said she suddenly experienced severe pain in her stomach.
She was immediately rushed to the hospital she worked at with internal bleeding and an internal temperature of over 107° F.
That is when things really started to go wrong.
"At one point the nurse said: 'I can't get her blood pressure!' and the resident who was there just pushed her aside," Hatmaker said.
She was experiencing the first necessary step of people who have near-death experiences: death, or the closest thing to it.
Most often, people with near-death experiences will go into cardiac arrest, but some will also cease brain activity.
After the clinical death, the patients start experiencing things that seem fantastic. The same was true with Hatmaker.
"At that instant I was in a different position. I don't know if it makes sense, but I was looking at their backs, and I kept trying to tell them: 'Calm down!' because in that instant all my pain had gone away."
According to the website near-death.com, observing one’s death as if outside of it is the second step of a near death experience.
Hatmaker said she was seeing what she could not have seen with her eyes, like she was outside of her body and watching what was happening as an observer.
It was at that point she started leaving the room.
"I flipped, like a pancake, out of the room in a different direction, up and onward, and left that whole scene behind me. Where I was, I don't know, and time didn't make any sense, but I was moving," she said.
She described hearing incredible music in the distance, and slowly being helped in that direction by someone or something.
"The only way to describe it to people is the way your father helps you down the aisle when you're a bride. It's somebody [by your side], helping you, and it was beautiful," she said.
After leaving their body, most people said they experienced something comparable to the afterlife.
Some describe talking to beings made of light, others describe landscapes like parks or even golden cities. However, most people experience one common thing: a life review.
After being pulled towards the music and the light, Hatmaker stopped suddenly.
"At some point in the process, I stopped, and I saw my whole life," she said.
"It was about realizing the feelings that other people had. I think that's the most important thing. It's all laid out there for you, and inside you know this is exactly what happened, but it wasn't a sense of being judged. I felt like it was more like someone lovingly teaching me something that I wasn't getting.”
However, as the name implies, near-death experiences always involve the person coming back to life.
Hatmaker said she tried to argue her way into staying in the afterlife.
"It was like trying to argue a point with someone who knew so much. In words, I would have been saying: 'No, let me please go on!' but I needed to go back," she said.
"I guess my life wasn't over."
However, not everybody believes near death experiences are actual visions of the afterlife.
Scientists have proposed that near-death experiences are caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, increased carbon dioxide levels, or even by endorphins which are chemicals that produce happiness and relieve pain.
In his article entitled “Do near-death experiences really happen?” Ron Kurtis said there are several arguments against the validity of near-death experiences.
"On the other side of the argument is the fact that scientists and doctors have been able to duplicate many of these experiences through the use of drugs or electronic stimulation of the brain," he said in the article.
A 1993 study at the Laurentian University in Sudbury also found that similar experiences could be triggered with magnets.
The study had patients put on a helmet, and then would influence brain waves. The effect was that some people reported feelings of another person in the room, or floating outside of their body.
Hatmaker said critics need to "grow out" of their insistence to disprove things.
"You can't say what's right or what's wrong," she said.
Ten years after her experience, Hatmaker opened up about it for the first time in her book, entitled Beyond This Reality.
In it, she describes her life and the experience, and the trouble she had opening up afterwards.
"Don't be afraid to open up, especially if you witness something like this," she said.
This story appeared in the January 2011 edition of the Charlatan magazine. For more stories from this issue, please see: