Born in the Ozarks, I grew up in a series of Congregational parsonages in New York State, first in the snowy upstate region and then, blessedly, the New York City metropolitan area. I graduated from White Plains High School and did my undergraduate work at the State University at Albany – SUNY with a major in English and minor in speech and drama. I hold a BA in English from SUNY and a master’s degree in Pastoral Ministry and Spirituality from St. Joseph College in Connecticut. Professionally, I have gone from teaching to nonprofit management, a time doing pastoral counseling, then a late-career stint as a technical writer.
A near-death experiencer myself, when I fell into a “temporary” management job at a start-up nonprofit agency in 1982, I had never heard the term “near-death experience.” It took only a couple of weeks at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) for me to realize that the bizarre and terrifying experience I’d had twenty years earlier had a name. Soon there were clues from phone calls and letters that other people had also had a frightening NDE; but there was not a shred of information to help understand them. That was the turnaround, and I’ve never looked back.
I have been writing all my life, about near-death experiences since going to IANDS. I wrote the first study of children’s near-death experiences; was co-investigator and author of the breakthrough 1992 study of distressing NDEs, published in the journal Psychiatry; and have presented subsequent work in journal articles and conferences. I wrote the chapter about these experiences for The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (2009, Praeger) and have presented on them widely.
Now President Emerita of the Association, I am retired and living in coastal North Carolina. My three children are grown, with families of their own.
dancingpastthedark 
After companioning more than 1000 people in their last chapter of life, there are some experiences that happen as they are living that vary tremendously. Many people within the couple of weeks before death see and report things that the rest of us cannot see.
Have you read George McDonald? He has a fairy tale about a man who is sick who sees people who are like black silhouettes, or two dimensional cutouts. This is not a positive thing in the story. I need to look for my book, if I still have it. When I read his story, I was reminded of several experiences told to me. These black men were reasons that I was called in several times – to make them go away.
Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had read and admired George McDonald.
Nancy, thank you for your blog!
I’m the author of a book called Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born (www.yoursoulsplan.com) If the topic is of interest to you, I would be pleased to send a copy to you.
Blessings,
Rob
Rob, thank you for your offer of a copy of your book. Although I agree wholeheartedly with your thoughts about the foundational aspect of unconditional love, I have not been able to work my mind around pre-birth planning, although I know people who find the subject intensely interesting. Given my disappointing lack of engagement with your subject and the pile of books already waiting for my attention, I’m afraid the book would just sit unread. Again, thank you for your offer.
Nancy
Nancy, too bad the fear factor has caused less research into the nature of the darker experiences. This research, in camparison with research from the more positive NDEs, could prove quite valuable in providing better understanding/insight/knowledge to the NDE as a whole. But also, having read of these “dark” experiences, I have been concerned about them, and am therefore glad someone is using scientific method to address the issue. I eagerly await your book!
Laurie
Laurie, thank you. I certainly share your views!
Nancy
I’m sorry that NDEs are being divided into “positive” and “negative” as I don’t
look at them that way. I do understand why they are distressing to some.
It’s a hard thing to think that this is all just a dream, not real and most people
aren’t ready to even contemplate such an idea, just my opinion, of course.
But I am glad that they are being looked at, studied and discussed.
Blessings to you, Nancy
Thank you. I hope you’ll stay tuned–it’s a really interesting conversation.
See the next post for my response. Ciao.
See the next post, probably tomorrow. Ciao.
my three nde http://opus6ixart.blogspot.com/
Thank you. Do you have your answer to “Who am I now”?
I saw your comment on paranormalia. I can help you in addressing skepticism. You either ignore them and tell your story or you point out the overall irrationality of skepticism in general.
I have a blog post on this subject:
Nancy, Ken Vincent said I should try to contact you. I’m doing some research into NDE’s of the dark kind, the kind Christians like Bill Weiss and Mary Baxter present in churches and books, etc. I would like to speak with you by phone. Please contact me via the email address I have provided in your form Thank you
Nancy, I only recently viewed your NDE on youtube, where you were told you never existed, nor did anyone else, etc. I have wondered about this in light of the claims of some scientists that we, indeed, all be “simulations” created by beings either in another dimension or in the future (think of the little kid in the Twilight Zone, tinkering with little humans in the doll house).
I am curious if you have considered or examined the possibility that your “life” (very BEING) was interrupted or otherwise acted upon by a type of “programmer”. If one sets aside our humano-ethno-centricism, for lack of a better phrase, we could all agree a 14 year old playing with a computer program could create an Avatar, simply to be mean to it. Or, in the alternative, be mean to someone ELSE’s after hacking into it.
Scotty, fortunately or not, my NDE occurred twenty-some years before I encountered the cyberworld, so this thought had not come to me until now. Blue screen in the Matrix? It does have story potential, especially for the genre of sci fi that explores the nature of reality. Thanks!
Hi Nancy,
I have been thinking about: 1) NDEs where one interprets that one isn’t and that others aren’t and 2) Buddhist meditation and lifestyle of detachment and Nothingness that leads one to Nirvana. I have been thinking about the “hellish” Nothingness in NDEs in contrast to Nothingness as a spiritual goal via meditation. Are the two the same Nothingness? Or different? If the same, how would awareness of Nothingness meditation influence one’s interpretation of a Nothingness NDE? If different, in what ways are the two Nothingnesses different?
I have been thinking about the bicameral, human brain with the left hemisphere being used in physical life/reality with the Ego-Self and the right hemisphere, the spiritual life/reality, with the Higher Self. The Ego-Self and the left hemisphere thinking separates reality into parts and sees the world as competitive, limited, never enough, and scary. The Higher-Self and right hemisphere thinking dissolves boundaries, connects, unifies, cooperates, and sees reality as a non-threatening One and Whole. The Distinct-Separate-Something of the left hemisphere contrasts with The Indistinct-Oneness-Nothing of the right hemisphere.
I’m wondering if any NDE research has been done that looks at left and right brain functioning and dominance. I’m wondering if there are differences in NDE interpretations for those who meditate upon Nothingness, as a desirable goal. How would right brain functioning interpret that one isn’t, ones aren’t, and that One is Nothing? I am wondering if one who has little practice in right brain functioning is more likely to be uncomfortable with an NDE in darkness, silence, non-existence, and Nothingness. Would one who has difficulty moving from left to right brain functioning be more likely to describe an NDE as distressing?
As Bruce Greyson keeps pointing out, there has been little research about bi-cameral brain function and NDEs. However, as neither hemisphere is entirely self-contained (other parts of the brain share in their functions), it may not be possible to define a clear dualism to left/right brain activities.
I don’t know if there’s any way to know whether the difference in descriptions of the Nothing are different interpretations or different Nothings. The supposition I have presented in the book is that people with a Western (Judeo-Christian) background, grounded as it is in relationships, have far more difficulty with the Nothing, the Void, than people with an Eastern (Hindu/Buddhist) background, for whom Nirvana is the conscious objective. In other words, I suspect the difference is in the interpretation rather than in the experience itself.
Does this help?
Nancy,
Thanks so much for your comments in response to mine.
For purposes of discussion and simplicity, I wrote as if the two hemispheres of the brain are independently functioning or self-contained. The two halves, of course, operate in concert with one another. I was just attempting to describe the major differences in the two hemispheres as related to perceptions of reality and the primary “turf” of each hemisphere. In addition, other areas of the brain are in operation which makes separating the two hemispheres into two separate entities overly simplistic and unrealistic.
In their book, What They Saw…. at the Hour of Death, Kārlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson found that dying patients in India had more difficulty in interpreting that deathbed visions were positive than dying patients in the United States. (http://books.google.com/books?id=x_WAeWiQlcAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Karlis+Osis+and+Erlendur+Haraldsson&source=bl&ots=Fd3ynGQl8R&sig=1nwBq_vMLGVjMnEdu9ExkryYaOM&hl=en&ei=u17oS4SeEZKqswOQ9N3VCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Karlis%20Osis%20and%20Erlendur%20Haraldsson&f=false) I was surprised when I read that there were more negative interpretations and dying patients in India resisted going with the images or visions into death.
After having written you and having thought more about my questions related to the bicameral brain, I thought that there are probably differences between consciousness within the human being and consciousness outside of the brain. Questions regarding human brain bicamerality might be irrelevant to consciousness that survives bodily, physical death.
We’re likely never to run out of these good questions!
Buenos Aires , March 5 2012.-
Dear Mrs.Nancy Evans Bush :
First I want to thank you for your excelent blog which is filling an important place in the adequate understanding of the whole fact of nde.-
I am a nde experiencer as a result of a cardiac arrest in my 20´s (i´m 50 years old now), but this comment is not about my own nde.-
I also want to thank you because you helped me to validate a conclusion I arrived to in an uncomfortable situation that was a painful part of my entire life .
Trying to be short: when i was born my mother was close to death for a hemorrhage an had a pleasant nde but interpreted negatively by her , so for her that nde was a distressing nde in such a way that she considered that something evil was about the newborn baby (me) and as a result she blamed me all my life and rejected me and I was like an orphan even having father and mother , she was not a bad mother but she always kept distance with me as though i were some kind of hidden danger and my father tried to kill me when i was a baby for that same feelling .
The point became more clear to me with your post “15 THINGS WE KNOW ABOUT DISTRESSING NDES” because explained me that a pleasant nde may turn into a dark experience wheter is not well understood, an may be as in this case be like a stone in the shoes for a whole life.-
The whole thing is longer but I want to share with you that in my nearness circle of friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. I found, without counting that of my mother and my own nde, 10 cases of ndes , being 4 of them distressing.-
This 4 distressing ndes ,one was a lady going into a dark isolation a dark unpleasant void, and the other 3 included some kind of evil presence more or less actives in the experience, in the first one the lady was 40 years old at the time of the experience and after that she became actively religious she passed away peacefully three years ago at the age of 96 and the other 3 , two men and a woman are living the same life as before the experience but with such a terror about death that they become white recalling the experience and the idea of death , seems to me that the integration of this profound experience leads the experiencer to grow up and the opposite seems to frozen the experiencer .-
Mrs.Nancy Bush I will keep reading your blog and expecting your book that I buy in my country when available .-Yours, Guillermo Garcia.-
“…a stone in the shoes for a whole life.” What a perfect way to express what so many people feel after a difficult NDE!
Thank you so much for this wonderful quote, and for an equally insightful comment. I will see to it that you get to read the book!
I am so humbled by readers of this blog, and so grateful.