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
Chapter 7
Going from spirit form back into a damaged body feels like shoving your foot into a shoe three sizes too small and lined with spikes. It feels like being folded up and stuffed into a hot, bruising box.
I opened my eyes and found myself sitting up in a hospital bed, in the quiet blue-black dark of night, pulling something out of my mouth. What was it? A snake? A giant wormlike parasite? Something tubular and long, that didn’t belong in me, that as I pulled it out of me seemed to be trying to rip me open.
Crushing pain.
The alarms began. A loud, incessant beeping from the machines next to the bed. A chorus of them. And the sound of feet running down the hallway outside the closed wooden door.
I got the thing out and stared down at it in my hands. It was a plastic tube with ribbed sides, covered in blood.
“She’s awake!” some screamed. “And she’s pulled the ET out!”
The ET? My mind tried to place what they were saying. Extraterrestrial? Had I been abducted rather than died? And then it hit me, as the nurses and doctor came rushing in and the overhead lights blared on.
Endotrachial Tube.
“Did someone loosen her restraints?” a man asked.
I looked at my wrists. They were raw from where I’d wriggled my way out of the soft, padded restraints, secured by velcro and buckles, that were meant to keep me from doing what I’d just done.
I began to cough violently. Someone held a cloth to my mouth to catch the blood. People looked bewildered. Upset. I tried to hang onto the scraps of their conversation that reached my brain.
I was tangled in wires and tubes. Blood filled my mouth. The world tasted like copper. Nausea washed through me, and I dry heaved. The pain in my sternum, where I’d gotten the sternal rub, was unreal.
A man bolted from the shadows—a shape I recognized with immediate disgust. Brian. Still here. Still sitting in the dark like a vulture in wait.
He did not look happy to see me back in my body. And, even more than that, I knew, the same way I’d known what other beings felt on the other side, that he was preoccupied only with being blamed for my death or condition. He had zero care about me at all. I wondered how I never noticed that before.
Two nurses and a doctor burst into the room. They were stunned to see me up, conscious, off the ventilator. They seemed borderline panicked. I could feel their fear—literally. The same way I’d felt emotions on the other side. It hadn’t gone away. My sensitivity had come back with me.
So had the “voice” of the cube, though here, as on the other side, it wasn’t heard with my ears. It was intuited and understood.
You’re okay, Alisa. Just relax. Let them take care of you.
The doctor pulled up a stool and, and waited for me to stop coughing. The nurses made sure my various tubes and wires were attached as they should have been. Everyone calmed down, and all but the doctor left. The last nurse out turned down the lights again. The doctor waited for the door to shut, and began asking questions.
Do you know your name?
Yes.
Can you say what day is it?
I couldn’t. He told me. I’d been there two days. It was now between three and four in the morning.
What about the year?
Yes.
Do you know where you are?
“Hospital,” I mouthed. My throat burned. I was dizzy, and so very tired. My head felt swollen.
And then he asked the hardest question.
“Do you know what happened to you, Miss Valdes?”
I met his eyes. I didn’t blink.
“Yes,” I said. “I was abused by that man”. I nodded toward Brian. “I couldn’t live with the pain anymore.”
The doctor flinched. Not because he doubted me, but because he didn’t. His aura was clear to me: sadness, rage, conviction. He knew. He knew about Brian and had suspected him all along.
The doctor exhaled, as if he’d been holding that breath for hours. Maybe days.
He told me I had been in a medically induced coma, sustained by a constant drip of sedatives that should have made it impossible to regain consciousness. He told me that even if I had somehow awakened, I shouldn’t have been able to move, let alone unstrap myself, remove the respirator, and breathe again on my own.
He told me I had taken nine times the fatal dose of Lamictal for someone my size, and that I should be dead. Or brain-damaged. Or both.
And yet, I wasn’t.
He told me the trio of prescription medications I’d been on (lamictal, progesterone, and prozac) was known to be contraindicated, “because it can lead to suicidal thoughts and behaviors.”
I should have been furious with the doctor who’d prescribed them to me, a doctor I’d gone to seeking help because of the emotional toll an abusive relationship was taking on me.
“You shouldn’t be alive,” the doctor said softly. “And even if you were… none of this should’ve been possible.”
I told him it was possible because the cube made sure it was. For the first time, the cube whispered his name to me. I spoke it aloud.
“Michael,” I said. “I’m here because of Michael.”
The doctor stared at me like I was speaking fluent nonsense. So I told him. About the funnel. The lake. The fable of the tea party. The window. The trapdoor. The cube.
“He just told me that he is an entity known by many different names, but that the name most familiar to me in the faith tradition I’m most familiar with is Michael. The Archangel.”
To his credit, the doctor didn’t laugh.
He said other doctors had told him of patients with similar near-death stories, but he’d never seen it himself. Until now.
“Was I clinically dead?” I asked.
He nodded, but also shrugged. “You had a complete cessation of breathing. We had to revive you more than once. That machine was breathing for you.”
And still, I came back.
*
I stayed in the hospital for a few more days, as they tried to stabilize my electrolyte levels. I wasn’t quite ready, physically, to house a soul again. But I’d gotten myself back. Now, I had to fight.
At one point, my heart rate slowed to 24 beats per minute, and the nurses exchanged glances filled with quiet terror. They whispered. But when they spoke to me, they joked and acted like nothing was wrong. I could tell they were acting, that they were supposed to do that to put me at ease. I felt their authentic emotions, and knew from them I might die again any moment.
I was not afraid of this. But I wanted to stay.
They upped my medication. They prepared for the worst. My potassium would not rise, so they gave it to me intravenously, and if you’ve never experienced this, I hope you never do. It burned so much that I was reduced to a crumpled whimper. Brian wheeled me through the hospital, pretending to care but rolling his eyes when no one was looking. I didn’t have the energy yet to get rid of him. We lived together. There were logistics. And some sad part of me still hoped he might change after seeing what I’d been through.
(Spoiler alert: He didn’t.)
Everyone worried I’d die again.
But I knew the truth.
…I wasn’t going to die. Not then.
The cube, Michael, with his flowing red and gold robes, was still with me.
Not visible now. Not glowing.
Just… present. And totally chill.
Over my left shoulder, like he’d always been there.
I could feel him. Calm. Patient. Loving.
And in that stillness, I realized the most important truth of all:
He had always been with me.
I just hadn’t known how to look.
Then I saw it.
Across from my hospital bed, mounted on the wall like just another piece of sterile décor, was a large framed photograph—maybe two feet wide. A stock art print, the kind you barely register when you’re in a hospital room, because the pain and beeping take up all your attention.
But I saw it. And I froze.
Because I recognized it.
It was the lake.
The same high-mountain lake I had flown across just moments—or eternities—before. The same jagged snow-capped peaks. The same rainbow stones shimmering beneath the glassy water. The same color. The same shape. The same soul.
Later, a nurse would tell me what it was: a photo of Flathead Lake, in Montana.
I had never been there. Had never seen it. Had no conscious knowledge of its existence. And I had been in a medically induced coma when they wheeled me into that ICU room. I couldn’t have seen it.
But I had.
And in that moment, I knew:
The lake I flew across before returning wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t imagined. It wasn’t symbolic.
It was real, at some quantum level I did not quite understand and did not need to.
Real in the way music is real, though no one has ever been able to tell us why music makes us feel certain emotions. Real in the way fictional stories are real because they take shape in one heart and take up residence in another. Real in the way a soul remembers its home.
And that photograph, hanging quietly across from my bed, was a comforting message from the cube. From Michael.
A wink.
A punchline.
A gift.
See? it said.
Told you I was funny.
*
The first day I was home from the hospital, everything was quiet. I was too weak to stand for long, so I just sat in my high California king bed, half-upright, staring out the window at a backyard I hadn’t truly seen in months, if ever.
That’s when I noticed her.
A beautiful tree. Just outside. Red flowers. Bright green leaves. I’d passed her a hundred times without stopping. Thought of her as a thing, like the patio table. But now, in the hush of my rebirth, I could feel her—really feel her.
She wasn’t just alive.
She was aware.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Actually.
She saw me. Felt me. Knew me. Communicated with me—not in words, but in vibration, in energy, in soul. Her personality was feminine, protective, and deeply gentle. I knew in an instant: she had witnessed everything. The abuse. The sorrow. The rage that had poisoned our home. And somehow, through it all, she had tried to shield me, wrapping me in her own quiet, vegetal light.
She had a soul, just as I did. I felt it.
That tree had loved me, stood sentinel over my embattlement.
And I had never even noticed her.
I sent her a message—not aloud, not even with my mouth, but from my mind to hers.
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry I didn’t see you before.
She moved in the breeze, slow and deliberate, and I felt something lift from her. A weight. A sadness. A shared relief. She was no longer trying to save me. I had saved myself. And in doing so, I was helping her heal, too.
We are all connected.
Every life form. Every energy. Every soul.
Even the trees carry trauma.
No, wait. Because of humans, the trees, especially, feel pain. We torment them. And they abide. And they love.
*
Brian didn’t move out right away.
He pretended to care. Offered help. Played the concerned partner. I was too physically depleted to handle everything on my own, and so, like many women in recovery, I let him stay a little longer than I should have.
I developed a pulmonary embolism within a week of being released. Couldn’t breathe. Rushed to urgent care. Then back to the hospital. There, I learned I had a genetic clotting disorder—Factor V Leiden—which had put me at even greater risk of dying from my overdose.
I was placed on heavy-duty anticoagulants.
A week later, Brian threw me into my son’s drum set over something utterly forgettable. A comment. A look. Who knows.
What mattered was the bruise.
A massive internal one.
Thanks to the medication, I began to bleed inside. Quietly. Dangerously. the bruise blossomed on my backside and leg, in the shape of Africa.
And I knew.
Enough.
I looked at the tree. I felt the cube at my shoulder, silent but unmistakable. They would not tell me what to do. But they would help me feel the right path, through intuition. Part of the lesson of life is learning to trust your own instincts, for they are the very voice of Source. And Source wanted him gone from my life.
And I acted.
I packed Brian’s things. All of them. Quickly. Clearly. With no apology.
And I threw him out.
That was that.
*
My son was thirteen at the time. He had been staying with his father and stepmother during the crisis, protected from the worst of it, thank God. But our home—his home—had been broken. Violated.
Once Brian was gone, and my strength had returned, my son came home.
We sat down together. Just the two of us.
I told him everything.
Clearly. Calmly. Without drama or denial.
And then I apologized to him.
He hadn’t deserved the chaos. The absence. The fear. None of it.
And I promised him it would never happen again. I told him it was likely I’d never have taken things so far if I hadn’t been on a toxic cocktail of prescription meds. I threw all of them in the trash.
We both started therapy.
Things began to heal.
I’m not going to write much more about my son here. He’s a private person, and this is my story, not his. But I will say this:
As I write these words, my son is 24 years old.
He is a college graduate, starting his master’s degree program.
He is a kind, wise, deeply good man.
And he knows he is loved.
*
My healing wasn’t instant. It wasn’t even linear. It was work.
I enrolled in a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy program—DBT—and began the long, grueling process of rewiring a brain trained from birth to fear, to overfunction, to disappear.
It was harder than getting my master’s from Columbia. Harder than giving birth.
I had to become a different version of myself.
More honest. More attuned. More compassionate toward the child I had once been—and more ruthless in protecting the woman I was becoming.
My therapist, Teresa, was a light in the dark. Fierce, smart, grounded. She held me accountable. She held space.
I owe her more than I can say.
And yet.
After several years in the program, I requested access to my file.
What I read there broke my heart.
It said that when I’d shared the story of my near-death experience, the guides, the cube, the lake—they had concluded I was “delusional” and “hearing voices.”
The same system that had helped me heal had also quietly pathologized the most sacred experience of my life.
And that hurt.
Because the NDE wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a psychotic break. It wasn’t metaphor.
It was real. It was stunning to me that a therapist who probably wouldn’t write anything down about a client who prayed to Saints or believed in armageddon would nonetheless be so dismissive of a person whose medical record confirmed they’d actually died.
And I’m not the only one who knows that there is life after death and it is amazing.
There are hundreds of thousands of us—across continents, cultures, religions—who have seen the tunnel, or the light, or the beings, or the blueprint, whatever we each needed to see, and come back with the same message:
Love.
Not punishment.
Not dogma.
Not judgment.
Love.
That is the truth.
*
I came back from death with several new abilities.
And yes, among those gifts was this: I began to communicate with spirits of the dead.
Not all the dead. And not always. Not constantly.
But often.
They were real.
But that’s a story for the next chapter.
More coming soon!
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I love the part about the tree. It made me feel very sad happy. Thanks for sharing
Rationality can only shrink to become much smaller than existence. It is based on the five known senses, good for a compass needle sometimes, but no oracle of terrain. Rationalists will always simultaneously pat themselves on the back for putting things in a tidy box and breathe relief quietly that they have tucked the unknown beyond their fear of it. Thank you for risking their ire in sharing your story.
In a previous job, I was around dying a lot. I accompanied many in their dying weeks, days and hours. Some slipped into final sleep through weeks of longer and longer sleep, waking to this dream, trying to describe where they’d been, eyes lit, telling me over and over that it was real, more real than where my senses told me they were. This is how my grandpa went, unable to talk but with eyes brighter than a child’s at Christmas.
Some talked about long-passed loved ones coming to visit. Those with unresolved issues came back, urgent to resolve them. I was lucky enough to help with a couple of these. Two believed a lie, that they deserved hell. What they saw, I’ll never repeat to anybody.
Very rarely, people meet their psychopomp. It is an intense passage that most will avoid. Old-timey hermeticists call it “conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.” It’s an intense path. Intense enough so that I’ve seen it mostly attained through NDE. Some say you are meeting your higher self, then. Others say you’re meeting angels and gods, ascended masters, ancestors. All of them come back with a much increased awareness, as if they have developed a new sense. It’s uncanny.
This is all anecdotal. I’ve chosen to be curious, not judgmental. To an extreme, really. I own the kind of curiosity that kills cats. I’m pleased to say, though, that satisfaction has brought me back several times over.