The story of my heart attack

by Imre Égerházi

I should stress that I could never accept the notion of dying. I always protested it, so I let’s call that a typical case of fear of death. I was very scared to have to die once and I always ignored the thought. But now I think quite differently about this thing: i believe there is life after death, but I don’t know what form and dimension we’ll go or what exactly will go there. I can only guess, because when I was dead (it probably happened) short sequences of pictures (like in television, only snippets of something) appeared. 8 pieces of these snippets that are so specific, accurate, clear, and sharp, I remember them so precisely that I can recall them to the smallest detail any time. I don’t even know how this pictorial world got stuck in my head so deeply and strongly.

I won’t start my story yet, but I would say this: we work through his life, live our usual life. If you have access to some literature, you read it and might agree or disagree. I heard that plenty have been written on this subject, but I did not want to know about it. I didn’t want to read about things related to death, so I knew nothing. I think it’s important to say this in advance, because later, when I started telling my story, what I saw and how it happened, several people said, “Well, I’ve read about it somewhere!” I later received a book from Éva Kovács, pHD, that detailed what i went through. I was so surprised when I read (my first experience of that kind) that these people say exactly the same thing as me. And I thought, who’s going to believe me that I haven’t read some books before and now I’m just telling it as my own experience. It was a bit debilitating that the authenticity of my word was undermined, but I later became reassured what’s important is not that whether they believed me but the experience i had. I also shared these experiences with doctors, the GP who started my resuscitation in the Netherlands for the second time I visited the hospital in Breda. He knew me because he saw me, but I couldn’t recognize him because I only saw him from outside the wall (so when I wasn’t alive). He came to my room and looked for the bed I could be on. He looked almost the same, only the balloon was on his arm now. There were three of us in the room, but since there was ventilation, we were heavily covered. I said to him, “Hello Doctor!” Then he came and inquired about how i feel. He said he consulted with the chief of medicine: I’m pretty good, he knows his stuff, I’ll survive… and so on. “How do you know me?” he asked, “We haven’t met!” and I said, “I saw you ring, coming in and taking care of me. I recognized you.” “How is this possible?” then he said, “A moment!” and left, but after a while he came back with an assistant who was the current duty officer of the ICU. He told him about me recognizing him and they started asking about the things I told him before: how I had seen him from outside the building, that he was coming, then pressing my chest, to revive me.

I told them everything. They were amazed and were joined by several doctors and then discussed the topic for a long time at the end of my bed, in Dutch. One of the doctors asked, “Do you allow us to record this in some form?” “Of course, please! If that means anything record it!” and that’s how I got into a database as someone who experienced these events.

They even asked me about my other experiences, which I will share here later.

I described everything, but it was very difficult because I know very little German. It was very difficult to say such complicated, complex psychological things, technical terms, to make my point. But when they understood, they were amazed at it, too. They were mostly amazed that I could reproduce these visuals and feelings so accurately and sensually. This visual rendering stems from the fact that I paint. But I don’t know what emotional rendering is. The point is, after I told it all and they knew I was a painter, one of the doctors (whom I don’t know, I only saw him several times in the hospital) suggested it would be worth painting these.

And that was it. Later, when I was home, I noticed several times that, despite explaining what I saw to anyone, it was not possible to give back what happened. When I say it was blue, everyone thinks of a kind of blue. If I said that the tree was moving and it looked like so and so, then everyone is thinking of the tree forms stored in their own mind, not at all sure of what I saw. So, the forms also needed to be described accurately. It has been mentioned several times that those I have talked about this have not understood as deep as I would have liked because they have asked me for more details afterwards. I could feel the big picture, the whole thing, not being seen. Then, at the Artists’ Colony in Böszörmény (1 year after my heart attack), I decided to start painting these pictures that I saw in my state of clinical death. I tried to recall if there is anything else, but I only have 8 clear pictures I can give back. Of these, 3 are related.

When I painted the first picture at the colony, I started to feel sick, my heart was beating terribly (it was over 100).

I think I relived the experiences too heavily. I have a dear friend, Gábor Katona, who is an internist.

I called and said, “Gabika! What the hell am I doing? Should I get to a hospital? I am painting this experience of mine and I have an elevated heartrate.”

“Do you really want to paint these things?” he asked.

“I want to, but it makes me scared.” I answered.

He told me what medications to take because he had treated me before. (I named him in the Netherlands as a referring Hungarian doctor because the system is different there: you don’t give the name health care institution you assigned to as we do in Hungary, but the name of your attending physician.) I took the medication, went to bed, and got better. About 1 hour later, he called me, asked how I was, and how I decided about painting this experience.

“Although I want to see that as a doctor too. You can give it back. But if you don’t want to, don’t do it!” he told.

“I don’t know, I’m thinking about it a lot.” I answered.

“To ease the situation, paint something else. Don’t do the death experience anymore, paint something else and it will be easier.” he suggested.

“What the hell should I paint?” I asked.

“I saw a drawing of the old cemetery in Nagyivány, paint it! That way you stay on topic.”

And then I painted that. The bad feeling and anxiety went out, and I painted the 2nd picture in the next few days so a pill of Chlordiazepoxide, Trazikort and one I don’t know what was enough. I managed to paint four pictures then, but it wasn’t an easy task because what I saw was moving. The world was not static but shifting (we’ll talk about that later). Motifs had to be chosen that could somehow depict the moving world in a stable situation, with the essentials on it. It’s like when I painted the Hajdús, the story of the Hajdús (hundreds of figures on 6 metres by 185 centimetres panneau). Their story is depicted from 1605 to the present day, and a million things have happened during that time. There, too, was necessary to select the most characteristic motifs that were best able to bring back this age.

For this short snippet, I have similarly selected the moving motifs that best reproduce the sight I have seen and should be at home in colour if possible. I would add, I like ochre, red, warm colours, I work with those. Colleagues always said, “Don’t you have money for blue?” and of course I have. “Then why don’t you use it?”

I never used blue; I simply ignored it. In the olden days I used greenish blue, but only for a short time and I don’t even know how it got into my hands. But here, everything was blue. So, I had to force myself to move from the warm ochre and red to a blueish world of colour and express myself in it. It wasn’t an easy task; it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Because it would be real if it moved: the trees that moved. They changed, and suddenly, their lower part turned out to be a man. A visibly breathing man with eyes. Then he grew ears, just to stretch like butter, and a human form emerged from it. In old pictures you can see such dragons and devils. There was a stake in the ground, it had a head, it blinked, it moved, it lived, it breathed. This is my first visual experience, but it would be best if we could go and see the pictures now.

This is the first picture I painted, and I got sick doing it. In the foreground of the picture is a small, watery, muddy (not to say water, something more jelly-like) river, and fish-shaped, more like shark-like figures swimming in it. But they also became smaller and larger. And in the middle, there is a tunnel-like structure (not a tunnel, more like a drain, but not a canal in our sense) that I had to go through to see it all. My first experience was a strange sound, like a whisper. When you pull down a window on a car traveling at high speed and the wind passes by. But it wasn’t soft, but metallic. It’s like a very hard metal, with a high and low voice at once, giving a special sound. I felt like I was going with great momentum. Otherwise, I always felt this, there was always (in all 8 pictures) crossing some tunnel, pipe, bridge. I’ve heard this certain sound everywhere, I’ve never heard it in my life (granted, my experience with sound is poor). Obviously, this sound could exist, but maybe I don’t know it.

When I crossed that hole, an image unfolded, all in blue.

There were two big trees and in them different figures, monstrous things (as they moved, they became monsters). The branches moved, later shifted, and changed. The whole world was breathing, moving, even the fence post. In the background stood a bell-shaped, beehive-like structure that I never seen before. On this muddy, wet something, a piece of wood was floating (say a broken branch) and when it got to the drain, it suddenly became human. He grew an arm, able to hold on, and that inanimate object took human form. He steadied himself with his foot, grabbed another drooping branch, twisted it, and fought against slipping into the hole. I watched as a branch that had become an unfortunate man struggled and I noticed that his hand had grown and everything around him became brighter. It was a regular hand that gripped a branch convulsively and would not let go. As he struggled, the whole world moved, lived, breathed, changed. This is the most characteristic, from afar it looked like this. Then here was this creature with peeping eyes. Only his eyes were visible, hardly anything else. Not a man, but something else that had eyes. Eventually, another hand reaches for the twig that became human (unfortunately I couldn’t paint this, it can’t be done), grabbed it by the foot and threw it out to the shore. As it hit the ground, it turned back into a piece of wood. Then, behind the tower, a thin ray of light appeared and moved (as beams of car lights in the dark), widened, brightened, and the whole vision was over. This is my first picture.

Afterwards, as I became ill, I painted a ‘relief’ on the suggestion of Chief Physician Gábor Katona. This relief image is still a related theme, a graveyard, but not so awful. Unfortunately, when it was on display, they poured some water on the back and it was completely deformed. Although it has been exhibited in several places since then.

Then I painted the 2nd picture, my other experience. It is also a cold world, with blue ice and so. What we interpret as cold in this picture, was warm. The whole world was so cold that I had never experienced it before. And I also found the formations strange, which I wanted to draw very accurately, to give back the experience authentically.

This was all on the horizon of an icy field. I can’t imagine what purpose these buildings served or what they could be used for. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my life, not even close. Or maybe my mind mixed it up. This other edifice sometimes had an eye in it. It became clearer and clearer that it was an eyeball. It gave a strange, sneaky feel, as if watching the many ice-frozen, petrified people (women, children), most of whom lined up, but some laid on the ground. Here, however, were no trees, but huge, blue-coloured leaves, but the blue was also silvery (as in steel). The leaves felt like they were made of metal, but they weren’t, instead some other strange material, and they moved very little. There was a little sway in them, but nothing moved in the picture, only the eye in the middle blinked. The leaves bowed a little, but otherwise everything was stiff, motionless. I have been thinking about how happy it felt when a radiance came, and the big cold parts changed, and they became ‘just’ ice cold. Nothing melted, just came this light from the left, it widened, and everything turned white. The vision was over again. It was the shortest experience because I only saw the blinking eye in the middle, the bending of the steel-bluish woody leaves, and the ice-frozen figures for a short time. It was very interesting to be able to see through them. They were not frozen solid but made of ice, and see-through. There was one more thing about this picture: a kind of music. It couldn’t be called explicitly music, but like when we pluck a tuning fork, a clear sound in front, but a little vibration remains in the air. Something like that could be heard all the time, but it had no melody, and it was impossible to know where it was coming from. Anyway, it would have been a very pleasant, even, beautiful music if it could have been heard better.

The 3rd painting also shows a type of bridge, pipe, or hole, multiple times. (I don’t tell you about every picture, but it all starts with having to go through something, you always heard that certain sound, then you saw the whole picture. It felt like you were flying swiftly. It was fantastically easy, it was not painful or bad, it was not hurtful, instead a pleasant hovering.) Even so, I painted the two trees (it seems it could have been a related world) where it could be discovered that they have hollow parts, forms, eyes, noses, chin, like a living thing. And the twigs on the tree took human form before they fell.
Until then, bulging, parts of the branch shifted, so that it became a head, an arm, and so it fell, then they just lied, waiting. People kept falling. On the left side of the picture, you can see that they are still hanging, still holding themselves, but some have already fallen. They lay on the ground lifeless, shapeless. The human figures are all unrecognizable, not detailed human faces. And again, the vision ends with brightening, as if we open a window and the light rushes in, until it fills everything. And then, I’m back (at least I think so).

I have already experienced the 4th visual experience several times, as I have already said. When compared to the first, it is somewhat related. Here, however, this struggle was more dramatic because the same branch clung to a railing, a fence – like thing, and it broke. Two equally fallen but not yet stiff figures tried to help this twig. There was no throwing around, no other arm reaching for it and throwing it out on the field, just wrapped itself around this pillar and fought against entering that dark hole.

Az egész egy jeges mező horizontján látszott. Hogy milyen célt szolgáltak vagy mire voltak használhatók ezek az építmények, el sem tudom képzelni. Az biztos, hogy életemben ilyet nem láttam, még hasonlót sem. Vagy az agyam kombinálta ki. Ebben a másik építményben néha benne volt egy szem is. Kivilágosodott és tisztán lehetett látni, hogy az egy szemgolyó. Furcsa, leskelődő hangulatot adott, mintha nézegetné azt a sok jéggé fagyott, megkövült embert (asszonyok, gyerekek), akiknek a legtöbbje sorban állt, de némelyik feküdt a földön. Viszont itt a fa nem volt fa, csak hatalmas, kék színű levelek, de a kék színnek is az ezüstös (azt szoktuk mondani: acélos-ezüstös kék) változata. A levelekről az érződött, mintha fémből lennének, de mégsem abból voltak, hanem valamilyen más anyagból és nagyon keveset mozogtak. Volt egy kis imbolygás bennük, de a képen semmi nem mozgott, egyedül a középső szem pislogott. A fák kicsit meghajoltak, de egyébként minden merev, mozdulatlan volt. Azóta is gondolok rá, milyen boldog érzés volt, mikor jött egy sugárszerűség és a nagy hideg részek átváltoztak, és már ’csak’ jéghidegek lettek. Nem olvadt meg semmi, még akkor sem, mikor baloldalról jött ez a fény, kinyílt és minden fehér lett. Ismét vége lett a látványnak. Ez volt a legrövidebb élmény, mert csak kis ideig láttam a középső pislogó szemet, az acél-kékes faszerű levelek hajlását és a jéggé fagyott alakokat bent. Nagyon érdekes volt, hogy át lehetett látni rajtuk. Nem tömören voltak megfagyva, hogy a mögöttük lévő részt lezárják, hanem keresztül lehetett rajtuk látni. Még egy dolog volt, ami ezzel a képpel kapcsolatos: valami zeneszerűség. Nem lehetett kimondottan zenének mondani, hanem, mint amikor megpengetünk egy hangvillát, a tiszta hang elül, de a levegőben megmarad egy kis rezgés. Valami ilyesmi hallatszott állandóan, de dallama nem volt és nem lehetett tudni honnan jön. Amúgy egy nagyon kellemes, egyenletes, szép zene lett volna, ha jobban lehetett volna hallani.

A 3. képen ugyancsak megjelenik egy híd-, cső-, lyukféle, többszörösen. (Nem mondom el minden képnél, de mindegyik úgy kezdődik, hogy át kellett haladni valamin, azt a bizonyos hangot mindig hallotta az ember, utána látta az egész képet. Olyan érzés volt, mintha nagy ’slunggal’ repülne az ember. Fantasztikusan könnyű volt, nem volt fájdalmas vagy rossz, nem sértett, kellemes lebegés volt.)

Ennél is megörökítettem a két fát (úgy látszik közeli világ lehetett ez), amiknél fel lehetett fedezni, hogy üreges részei, alakjuk, szemük, orruk, álluk volt, mint egy élőlénynek. A fán lógó gallyak pedig mielőtt leestek volna, emberalakot vettek fel.

Addig dudorodtak, formálódtak az ágnak egyes részei, hogy feje, karja lett és úgy esett le, azután lent várakoztak. Szinte lehulltak az emberek. A kép bal oldalán látszik, hogy még csüngenek, még tartják magukat, de némelyek már lehulltak. A földön feküdtek élettelenül, alaktalanul. Ami emberi alak volt, az mind felismerhetetlen, nem konkrét emberarcok. Itt is a kivilágosodással fejeződik be a kép, mintha kinyitnánk egy ablakot és betör a fény, addig, amíg szépen be nem tölti a teret. Olyankor keveredhetem vissza (ezt csak én így gondolom).

In the 5th painting, I once again can talk about the sound, the whisper, and so on. It could be given a title like “Before the Light”. I have felt many kinds of warmth in my life: maternal love, the kindness and warmth and good heart of a lover, the love and respect of a fellow human being, so something we would call a very pleasant experience, it is good to feel that particular feeling. I have never felt as pleasant and wonderful in my life as when the white light came again (I couldn’t even describe it well, because I would have had to draw a big fog indicating it’s not an animal nor human). It looked at me kindly, didn’t say a word (the communication happened without words), but I understood it said “Wait!”
Then I was waiting, with company, others here and there. Two people stood in front of it, standing next to each other, and it talked to them. What it said, I don’t know. I only remember when it looked at me: it was infinitely pleasant, it felt good, it was loving. I did not feel such a depth of love in my life as I had at that moment. I waited and watched the two figures standing in front of it, and it talking to them. No sound could be heard, but everything could be understood. It took a while, and then a great warmth and strong light radiated from this figure, but this light is not like the light of our lamps. Something tangible, something that could have been touched. It was not the light and the air that filtered through, but it was permanently resided in the material of the air. It remained there as some matter. This was my greatest experience. Meanwhile, a glassy sound. I can accurately describe it as it was like someone slamming a bottle: the sound dies, but not quite and this sound lingers on and surrounds. The sound and warmth were also very sensual, caressing.

The next painting could be titled “The Flight of Figures and People” or “The Flight of Souls”. Only once I flew with others, all other times I was floating alone, flying through something, with sounds, but this time, there were others around me. Both before and after, and like the carousel, we revolved around, but the faces were not specific faces; more like dead faces, unrecognizable as women or men, young or old. We swam through this tubular something, spinning for a while. Here, too, the vision ended with light, rushing in, and whitening the field.

In my last painting (again the same sounds and whispering, I won’t describe it) there’s a city with a bridge in front of it. On it, a barrier or rather a kind of folding railing. Perhaps the title could be “The Death of a Twig or Man.” A completely unknown, alien world, with unknown houses, forms, but it was obviously a city, something that existed. Different structures, in different colours, were visible next to each other, so in this world of colours I painted it. But what purpose they served, or what were they built for, how they could be used, I don’t know. However, the landscape here did not move, it was static, rigid, motionless. Only this particular tree moved in this world, which was sandwiched between a stony part (or rather some kind of material, iron or concrete) and the railing. From there it tried to get out, to escape, but couldn’t. That was all the movement here: it was jiggling, it was tormented, it was determined to flee. And then the white light, that once again came and later covered the whole vision, reached it, the twig collapsed, no longer struggled, and it was over: it died.

That’s all I can say about these paintings. The missing 8th will be the toughest. I want to do it in a size of 100 x 80 centimetres, and it would be about I first described: the way my colleagues trying to resuscitate me, the arrival of the doctor, a dog, and so on. It would be nice to paint this last one, as I don’t have any more experiences, that’s all.
Now, as I talk about it (quite a few times, I have to say it), it doesn’t shake me like it did in the beginning; back then, I had to lie down, had to rest because I was completely spent.

To sum it up, I imagine that by physically ceasing, decaying, disintegrating, something still lives on. It is not known where, or what dimension it goes or what it becomes, but it is my true belief that it will survive. I haven’t been afraid of death since I went through these. I know it’s inevitable, but with a sure belief that I will continue, because I experienced something when I was very probably dead. Maybe something comes out of us that we don’t yet understand. While we know a few dimensions, science is already dealing with it today: they say there is much more to it than that. In the same way, we may continue to live in some form after death. It is very difficult to imagine this from here – since our knowledge is so limited.

• Can you tie this belief to any part of the experience? Did something like this happen during the experience?
• Of course. I’m sure I wasn’t alive, because I was lying there, they found out I was dead, and they talked about me resignedly (It doesn’t matter anyway! Let’s try to revive him. If we break his ribs, let it crack!) So, I’m sure I wasn’t alive, I wasn’t breathing. Maybe my brain was still working, or I still had something in me that didn’t die right away as soon as my heartbeat stopped. Doctors know better than I do that things are still going on for a while. But I still saw it, I could see through walls, I observed from above, I was somewhere above it, as if I was looking down from the ceiling. I’m sure of this because I’ve experienced this once (not once, several times!). That I’m dead (so my heart isn’t beating anymore) and yet I’ve seen it all. This is inexplicable. How could I see things? I didn’t have a body, I didn’t speak, but I knew everything. The other is the connection to light: how is it possible for light to materialize and talk to me?
  And strange as it may sound, I almost long to meet that wonderful warmth. I do not wish my death, do not get me wrong! I really want to live; everything has been much nicer for me since then. Even the bad is beautiful, in fact, what I didn’t like before, I’m at peace with now. I just have a kind of longing. Encountering that light is the greatest experience of my life and if this is death (again, I do not desire death) … I had never felt so deeply emotional. And because of this phenomenon, I am no longer afraid of death. And if anyone was afraid of death, it’s me. I have some cheerful longing for the fact that even if I die, I will live on (I am convinced). One is waiting, but he does not know when and how this will happen. Wait, but don’t fear. There is no fear!

• All in all, were these pleasant experiences?
• They weren’t, except for one when I was standing in front of this light. All the others, there is struggle everywhere. On four, there is death. I don’t know what those branches represent (I’ve been thinking about them a lot), obviously there is a reason for this, which I couldn’t explain yet: a lifeless branch becomes something alive; it fights, it struggles not to go into the hole, into the darkness. I can’t decipher, but these experiences are definitely not good. Because there is struggle and death through 3 paintings, and terrible cold in the 4th. It was downright uncomfortable, so the release from the uncomfortable feeling was felt when the white light, the ray, and the warmth appeared. From then on, the experience became pleasant. There wasn’t much left (let’s just look): there was this flight, which was more of a pleasant hover. It was not a bad feeling at all, it was a pleasant, disembodied flight one after another. Afterwards, the sound that could be heard was also pleasant.
  There may also be something in the structures, as they have always been similar, repeated. Not the same, but some of the motifs are repeating: the static city in blue, the hive, and so on. Not even constructions, I would rather call them objects. It was one of the hardest jobs for me to draw these nicely separately. I filled half a drawing book with them to make them as accurate as possible, the same ones I saw. Luckily, these little cuts are so clean for me that I can stop them for a moment, they live so much in me still, today. But it would be real if the image moved, at least for a short time, and would be more colourful.
  But it is also more than nothing because I think helps to deduce my pictorial world. It was not an easy task!

• Did the white light appear in these visions and quit, somehow moving from one to the other?
• Not one after the other. All separately.
• So, are they differing in time?
• Nem közvetlen egymás után következő dolgok. Nagy időközöket éreztem köztük.
• I thought before it entered the vision, they were one after the other. And then what happened when the vision ended? Not the last, but at the intervals?
• I don’t know, but they didn’t follow one another. I felt like it took quite a while for another vision to take place. But the whisper, the flight, the strange sound repeated every time, in every vision. It took some time but had no concept of time between events. Nor do I know for sure whether they occurred when my heart stopped or when I was conscious again. It’s a big riddle, this.
• When your heart stopped, you saw his own body, right?
• Sure, from above.
• Were these experiences completely independent of it?
• They are independent. But it may have happened at the same time, I don’t know for sure. I just saw them busybodies around me, I heard them converse, but I couldn’t answer, I was just amazed at how scared they were. They were in complete shock over me being dead, though I wasn’t. I even felt sorry for them. Maybe these visions happened at the same time, and it could even be that there were two visions in a period because the boys added up: I was dead for 7 and a half minutes, with three interruptions. That’s a long time. Instead of going to the museums, they sat there next to me and try to cheer me up with such trivia, they were very decent. I was lucky.
• I have one more question: maybe you have some feeling or vague idea about why this black hole or bridge occurs in almost every case, or why this branch (a branch that has become human) struggled to get away from it?
• Nothing. I do not know that. There is nothing about me. I have already thought a lot about this, there must be something in it, that a branch, a lifeless branch appears three times in a row, in different scenes and situations. It struggles, fights and I suffer with it. And the reassurance happens when the white light comes, and everything is fine.
  It brightens, as you can see in the 1st painting: a thin ray starts and slowly, firmly thickens, intensifies, until it finally illuminates everything around it. Like an airplane coming into view. It had a very good, warm colour and radiated encouragement. I could have added gradients, paint transitions, or somehow suggest that this is not a spotlight, but a moving, changing being, but this cannot be accomplished in the painting. Maybe it can be discussed with an CGI professional and make some technical machination based on the painting to make it all feel real.

• The hovering, when did it happen and how did you feel your own body?
• It had none. I felt completely disembodied. I existed and lived, but I didn’t feel any mass, just that I was.
• And your senses? Because you saw and heard the others.
• Of course. I surely had sight and hearing.
• I mean, was it through these (eyes, ears) or in the way you described in relation to the light?
• I think I saw those through my eyes.
• Then somehow your body had to exist, but how?
• Ezt egyszerűen elképzelni sem tudom, hogy mennyire voltam ’testes’, amikor ott néztem az értem küzdőket. Vagy ez is csak olyan volt, mint mikor a fény szemben állt velem (az sem volt anyagszerű dolog), nem lehetett megfogni, nem volt szája, de mégis hangot adott és mondta, hogy várjak. Én akkor éreztem és megértettem mit mond. Lehet, hogy a létezésnek van olyan formája, hogy nincs test, csak ez….?!
• Were you aware that your body should exist?
• I didn’t think about having eyes or ears then. I don’t have a vision of myself. There is only consciousness: what they do and say, and there is an emotional part to it. Because I felt sorry for them, I knew how much they were suffering and for me it didn’t go well. I felt with them. So, I saw, heard, felt somewhat about them, but there was no smell, for example.
• And you couldn’t even connect that vision, hearing, emotion to your body then? Or thoughts?
• No, definitely not. It was a condition of corporeality. I didn’t feel like I had a body at all.
  It was a terribly large job for me. Since then, I’ve exhibited some of the paintings in several locations, so the professional scene values these a lot. Not because of their subject matter (the profession isn’t very interested in what I mean by that), but as a painting, as a work of fine art.
  I’m not cheerful about my near-death event but feel good about giving back at least that much from the experience. Obviously, it’s also a matter of talent, because a person more talented than I could have given back even more of it. But even this is much more than someone without this skill, who could only tell the story. If this was simply told you can’t relate to it, or maybe not connect it to the pictorial world I wanted.

• Well, it was a great experience for us too, quite different to hear. And as you mentioned, have you read on the topic since your experience…?!
• Yes, I have, and I am shocked that those who have already took this path almost all tell the same thing.
• We read these too, but this is extraordinary, this visualization does not compare.
• A great issue for me too, the expression of something that is neither human nor animal. I thought about it a lot because if I’d put a blur of white it won’t do justice. I wanted to express the ‘living’ nature of this phenomenon, not only it’s physical manifestation as simple white fog.
• Might I ask, are you religious? I can see the Bible on that table.
• I had to confess, it surfaces when there’s trouble. “My sweet, good Lord, help me!” I say in times like that, then forget to say thanks afterwards, so unfortunately, I am not too religious. But sometimes I do go to church.
• Did this experience change your religious views, and if so, in what way?
• My faith has changed in a positive direction. So far, I have read in the Bible that after our death we will be resurrected, and a better life will come. I had a private opinion on that. I confirmed, I knew the answer to it, but deep down I thought faith is just needed to make life on this earth somewhat easier. A handrail, and for us to say “Well, it’s bad here, but it’ll be good for us on the other side.” It’s religious mysticism giving ordinary people the faith to endure the hardships of earthly life more easily. That was my opinion, but when I was officially asked (when I confirmed), I said the text needed. Now, however, without any compulsion, with conviction, I’ll say that we will continue to live after the end of our current existence. It is not resurrection, not something or other, but we simply do not die, it continues. And with this, faith gets it right; we won’t die after this life. Our body decays and ends, but we go on.
• How do you imagine God?
• Like that, the kind white light. Like something wonderful. It can’t be compared to anything. When I see a sign of it during the day (while working or listening to music), my heart always warms up.
  I believe that besides a lot of nonsense there is a kind of miracle in the world, some great feeling, and there will be in the next one, too. I have experienced this once and a little bit long to experience it some more.
  Sure, and I know this well, these pictures are barely adequate to show it all, but this is all I have.