Chapter 7

The Return

Trigger warning: This is a newsletter about my Near-Death Experience in 2015, after I tried to end my own life. It discusses domestic violence, child abuse and suicide. It’s also funny and ultimately healing and inspirational. I just want to make sure you feel safe here and can choose to look away if these themes might trigger your own trauma and pain. Much love, A.

Read earlier chapters by clicking on them here:
Prologue & Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapters 4 & 5
Chapter 6

I suddenly found myself floating in a long corridor—vast, industrial, very bright white and sterile. I knew this hallway was also square, each segment about as long as a hospital hallway. The walls were smooth, almost shiny, glowing slightly under the harsh buzz of overhead fluorescents. It looked like the hallways of a high school—or maybe a processing center for souls. It was filled with figures. Humanlike shadow people, some of them gray and some of them palest blue. All the figures were marching counter-clockwise together, shoulder to shoulder in tight rows, but absolutely unaware of one another. Each soul was deeply engrossed in whatever was happening on the small screen floating in front of what would have been its face. Marching, and watching. Waiting. Suspended. The mood was one of quiet resignation. Not punishment. But not peace, either. And definitely not joy. Just... stuck.

I was one of them. Gray. I knew I wasn’t alone. But none of us spoke. We weren’t there to socialize. We were there to learn, if possible. Those who’d were learning were blue. Those yet to learn were gray. Now and then a blue soul, its learning over, turned silvery white and, poof! Vanished. The rest of us just watched our screens. Glimpses of lives. Decisions. Reverberations. Mistakes. Regrets.

I looked down and saw my own light—flickering, dim. A smoky gray.

Then a screen appeared in front of me.

And I saw him.

My son.

Older now than when I’d died. A teenager. In a locker room. I experienced the scene unfolding as though watching a movie, but also in three dimensions as though simultaneously inside the movie, but invisible to those in it. I was aware of being in two places at one time, equally present in both. I was a gray shadow person plodding along in this endless school hallway with all the others, and I was an invisible spirit in a scene, watching and feeling it unfold. I sensed everything. Sights, smells, sounds, emotions.

My son was wearing a purple basketball uniform, standing stiffly near his teammates, who all gave him a wide berth. Some of them were trying to act normal. Others weren’t even pretending. They exchanged looks with one another that communicated bewilderment and overwhelm, but also the cruelty of their age. They didn’t know what to say to a kid whose mother had killed herself. Some said mean things because they needed attention and were so small already that the only way to feel bigger was to hurt someone worse off than themselves.

I felt everything.

Their discomfort. His loneliness. His pain, and the way it grew. The jagged void where I should have been.

I followed the team out of the locker room, hovering near my son as he trailed behind his teammates down the long corridor to the basketball court. I felt his nausea, his dread, his confusion, his sorrow. But more than anything, I felt his solitude as though it were a mountain he didn’t have the strength to climb.

At the edge of the court, he looked up into the bleachers where his father and stepmother sat together. He searched the crowd for me.

But I wasn’t there.

He knew I wouldn’t be, and he hated that part of himself that kept hoping. I felt this as though I were him.

And something in him buckled.

He dropped to the floor at the edge of the court and sobbed in front of everyone. He felt humiliated but also broken beyond repair. I realized his father was no comfort or help, and his stepmother was too preoccupied with her own codependence to be of any use.

My son was absolutely alone. And this despair yawned open into a monstrosity of a mouth, ready to swallow him whole.

It wasn’t just grief. It was betrayal. It was shame. It was the echo of a wound that wouldn’t close. It was the story I had left him with: I’m not good enough to stick around for.

And then the cube’s voice pierced the scene—not loud, not cruel, just true:

“If you go through with it, Alisa, you will lead your son to go through with it, too.”

It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a spiritual law.

The moment hit me harder than anything else in my entire NDE.

I couldn’t breathe. Not in the usual sense—I had no lungs—but something in my core imploded. I felt like I’d been punched by truth.

I had told myself I was ending my pain by killing myself.

But what I was really doing was handing it to him. Killing him.

I had fought so hard to break the cycle of generational trauma. I had clawed my way out of abuse, built a life, raised him with gentleness. And here I was, about to set the fuse on his self-destruction with the same match that had been handed to me.

That was the moment I chose.

Not because I wanted to live for myself.

But because he was still becoming. And I could not—would not—leave him alone in that gymnasium with the lie that I had left him on purpose because he wasn’t good enough to love.

“I’m ready,” I said to the cube, and this time I meant it from the very center of what was left of me.

I had no idea how I was going to get back. But I would find a way.

“Have you experienced enough of this?” the cube asked me.

“Yes.”

And, just like that, we left the horrific scene from the future, a future in which I did not return to my body but stayed dead.

I found myself back in the void-funnel, in the blackness. This time, when I focused my attention upward, I saw the rim at the top, and it was lined with a square aquarium filled with a glowing liquid, a hot pink-peach color. It had not been there before.

“Are you ready now?” asked the cube.

And I was.

I couldn’t tell you how I moved, exactly. One moment I was paralyzed in the funnel of the void, and the next I was in motion—flying, accelerating upward through the dark space, pulled by purpose. I shot toward the square rim of the funnel like an arrow loosed from a bow, rising until I came face to face with the strange, glowing aquarium that encircled the perimeter of the exit.

It was a massive, floating container—square, like everything in this realm—and it shimmered with quiet malice.

I didn’t need to ask what it was. I already knew. The cube downloaded the knowledge directly into me.

The fluid was Lamictal. Nine times the fatal dose, suspended in symbolic form, orbiting the exit like a final boss.

This was the poison in my system. Not metaphorical poison—actual. This was what was killing me. And I couldn’t go back until I removed it.

The cube had told me earlier: you have to get there yourself.

And now, I understood what had been missing in every previous attempt to return.

Selflessness.

All my earlier pleas had been rooted in ego—in my pain, my fear, my regret. I had begged to be saved. I had wailed about my purpose. I hadn’t truly let go of what I now understood was the illusion that my life was all about me.

That conceptual shift—from self to service, from me to someone else, from fear to love—was the key.

The moment I remembered that my life was not mine alone…
That I was here to love my son, and through him, love the world…
That the purpose of living wasn’t to be healed, but to heal others through love…

I became powerful.

I raised what felt like my will, my intent, my spiritual body—and I smashed the glass.

The container shattered. The pink poison poured out like rain, falling down, down, down through the funnel’s trapdoor, away from me, out of me, into whatever cosmic drainage system handles broken illusions and deadly choices.

And I was free.

I didn’t wake up in my body. Not yet.

My spirit was free of the void, but still somewhere else.

I was suddenly floating, alone, above the most beautiful lake I’d ever seen, on a beautiful, clear, perfect winter’s day. I suspect this was a glimpse of what my version of heaven would look like when the time finally arrived.

High mountain plateau. Jagged snowcapped peaks surrounding me. Crystal air, crisp with petrichor and purity. The lake below was vast and clear, and I could see rainbow-colored stones shimmering beneath the surface, each one glowing like a polished gem. Languid fish glided beneath me. The world was alive—really alive—and I felt not separate from it, but one with it. Water, wind, fish, peaks… we were kin.

I was ten feet above the surface, and I began flying low and smooth, drinking in the beauty with every particle of whatever body I now had. I felt whole. Loved. Healed by nature itself.

Across the lake, something called to me.

A window.

Wooden frame, no glass. Curtains flapping gently in a wind that did not disturb the trees. It hovered midair, waiting.

Your son is on the other side, I somehow knew.

I flew toward it without hesitation. Not to escape, not to return—but to reunite.

The moment I crossed the threshold—

WHOMP.

I was back.

In my body.

In excruciating pain.

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✨ More to come soon!

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