What Dying Taught One Man About Living and Spirituality

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BY HARV BISHOP

Dennis Oliver was livid.

He had been brought back from the dead not once, but twice in the same day.

The year was 1997. The Saturday after Good Friday. Oliver, who had been hospitalized in intensive care for five days from an unknown virus, went into cardiac arrest following liver and kidney failure and internal bleeding. It started with a code blue alert and specialists responded from across the hospital.

“A doctor jumped up on the bed and started beating on me,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I don’t like this, I’m out of here,’ and I rose up out of my body and watched the nine people working on me.

“I drifted over a private waiting room in the hospital I had never seen in the physical world. I identified my friends, everyone there. Where they were sitting, the color of the chairs and what they were wearing. (Oliver later learned from the friends present that day that everything he remembered about the waiting room was accurate.)

“Then instantly I was above the farm where I grew up in eastern Colorado.  The colors were intense, so brilliant beyond description, bright with great clarity.

“Then there was intense white light. I took a quick turn and I was heading into it. There were two entities further down this ‘tunnel’ of bliss waiting to greet me. I say entities rather than humans because I didn’t get close enough to see who they were.”

Just as suddenly, Oliver was jerked back to life by a painful zap.

“Boy, was I pissed,” he says. Now in his body, Oliver watched as the medical personnel filed out. He remembers his nurse arranging his body and washing the blood from his mouth. Looking down, he could see his chest was black from the electrical paddles.

Four hours later his friend Dorothy Ortner, a Catholic nun, entered the room. Oliver looked over and saw the life-saving crash cart still by his bed. Then he went into cardiac arrest again.

“I thought, ‘I’m getting the hell out of here now and I’m not coming back!’ I was more than pissed!”

During his second near-death experience (NDE) in one day, Oliver says he clearly saw what he now terms his “four guardian angels” – people who had been part of his life, but were now dead: his mother, his maternal grandmother, a childhood friend, and a good friend from his college years.

He returned to the bright tunnel of light and once again was jerked back into his body and the ICU.

This time he was in unbearable pain with ribs broken and bruised from the efforts to restart his heart.

“I was just as pissed as the first time,” recalls Oliver, “even more so. I used some four-letter words with the medical personnel.” The cleaned-up version of his message:  He wanted the peace and light, not the painful life-giving alternative offered by medical science.

Doctors asked his friend Dorothy to leave the room. “Nothing doing,” she told the doctors. “I’m a nun.”

When Oliver came to again, Dorothy was praying. “Your friends would love for you to stay,” she said to Oliver, “but I’ll understand if you choose to leave. If you stay, you’ll make many people happy. What do you want?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Oliver angrily replied. Dorothy broke out in laughter.

After 13 days in the ICU, Oliver left the hospital. Before he left he requested a do not resuscitate medallion that hangs around his neck to this day.

Oliver is no stranger to medicine and science, both its gifts and pitfalls. He was born with Marfans syndrome, a genetic connective tissue and circulatory disorder that for him has included lifelong heart complications. In 70 years, he has had 69 surgeries due to complications from Marfans; 24 of them during his childhood.

Oliver’s first NDE experience was in 1963. Then 12, he was admitted to Denver Children’s Hospital as one of the pioneering patients for children’s cardiac surgery. Following heart surgery, a nurse was trying to help him stand. She fell under his weight and dropped him. He went out of body and encountered his maternal grandmother who had died when he was two.  A woman he had no memory of in the physical world.

“My consciousness went directly to the upper right of the hospital room. I looked down on myself and the nurses. I did not like what I saw so I just took off.

“I saw my grandmother sitting on a red vinyl kitchen chair from the ’40s or ’50s with intense, bright green grass all around her. She had a lovely smile and was very comforting to me. It seemed like I was with her for a long time.

“My grandmother said, ‘No, no, you have to go back. You are too young to be with me. It will be painful and it will be a long recovery.’

“I knew if I stayed with my grandmother that my parents would be so disappointed. They had put so much love and effort into my care. So, I came back and it was a painful and long recovery.”

“They took the nurse out on a stretcher,” he says with a bemused expression. “She had wrenched her back.”

When Oliver was born in 1951, the average life expectancy for those with Marfans Syndrome was 40 years. Oliver has exceeded all expectations and still lives with high energy and a social schedule that leaves his hundreds of friends in awe. “My doctor friend says I have an extraordinarily strong life force,” he says as a matter of fact. “I think it’s because I still haven’t learned all my lessons in the physical world,” he adds with his trademark twinkle.

Following the two NDEs as an adult, talking about death, dying and what happens when we die became part of Oliver’s life. The nun, Dorothy Ortner, wrote about Oliver’s 1997 NDE experiences on the internet. He received about 400 letters from people “desperate and wanting to know about life after death and wanting answers” about what their loved ones experienced in dying. It took a year, but Oliver responded to every letter. He then served as a hospice volunteer, offering comforting words to the dying. He gave talks, including one for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. He was interviewed by Dr. Robert Pensack, himself a near-death experiencer, and author of the 1994 memoir Raising Lazarus . (#Commissions earned)

My own father, Ezra, experienced an NDE  in the aftermath of a car accident when he was 20. Like Oliver, my dad experienced leaving his body, traveling through a tunnel of light, meeting an energetic presence who told him it was not his time, and while he would be in pain, he would recover. My dad came back reluctantly (and thank goodness he did or I would not be writing these words). These characteristics described by Oliver and my father are classic NDE themes. These experiences have been recorded throughout history and across cultures. Ernest Hemingway famously had such an experience on the European battlefields during World War I.

As these experiences show, there is more to NDEs than just a narrow escape from death, such as narrowly missing a car crash. Experiencers are in the process of dying prior to medical or other interventions. Often people describe their consciousness leaving their body. The classic features of NDEs include bright lights, traveling through a tunnel, meeting angelic spiritual guides and loved ones and feelings of bliss and love. Less discussed are negative and frightening experiences. Many find the experience life-changing.

Scientists try to explain the phenomenon in mechanistic terms, as the gyrations of a dying or deeply traumatized brain and body. But that is a limited explanation. A psychologist friend once told me about being in surgery for a life-threatening stroke. His consciousness floated above the operating table watching the medical team at work. After the surgery he was able to recount their positions around the table and what they had talked about. It could be argued that there was a part of his sedated brain that continued to be aware of the conversations in the room, but that can’t account for his “seeing” of their correct positions and actions. So, too, for Dennis Oliver’s awareness of the waiting room where he had never been. A dying brain can’t explain how he described who was there, what they were wearing and where they were sitting.

Near death experiences are in and of themselves spiritual because they show that consciousness is not bound to the body. They demonstrate there are other non-physical beings or presences to relate to and that life continues in non-physical dimensions. That such experiences show signs of being influenced by cultural perceptions such as Christians encountering Jesus or Buddhists encountering buddhas doesn’t mean there isn’t a real presence of some kind there to be perceived even if human consciousness relates to it through cultural filters. The same filter hypothesis has been argued to be true of mystical experiences and many otherworldly encounters.  One of the best books I have found on the topic is Changed in A Flash: One Women’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (#Commissions earned) by the celebrated Rice University comparative religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal.

What’s also intriguing is NDEs often bring deep change in beliefs and behavior. Oliver has used his experience to help others.

In 2003, Oliver had tea with a Tibetan lama during a death and dying retreat. The lama said Oliver’s experiences were in line with Tibetan Buddhist understandings.

“Holding attachments lightly is one thing I have learned through these three near-death experiences,” Oliver says. “What we possess and our beliefs are only temporary. This goes along with Buddhist philosophy.

“Another thing, I found is that in the physical world there’s so much religious prejudice such as the Jewish are bad or the Muslims are evil. Over there, on the other side, it’s all a blend. I don’t understand the prejudice while we are alive. I don’t have a single religion I adhere to. My beliefs are based on my experience. I have disappointed some friends by saying that your specific religious beliefs here in the physical world, one way or the other, won’t change your outcome on the other side. Whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or undecided, the outcome is the same.”

He was also left with a reminder in the physical world of his other worldly experiences. For a year after his two adult NDEs, electronic devices including watches and computers would repeatedly fail in his presence. Later, at a support group he learned this was a common occurrence for those who had experienced NDEs.

Oliver has experienced other anomalous psychic occurrences, which is not uncommon for NDE experiencers.

In 1973 at university, he and five other students sat in the back row of a large lecture hall for their hated sociology class. They eventually took turns showing up one at a time to take notes to share with the others.

“One day the professor called me to the front after class,” says Oliver. “I was sure I’d been caught. But he said, ‘I think you are psychic and I have a wonderful opportunity for you.’ ”

It was at the peak of military and defense interest in studying extrasensory abilities for defense purposes to match the efforts of our Cold War opponents, the Russians. Oliver tested highly and also discovered an ability for medical intuition.

“I remember having dinner with a young lady in South Dakota,” he says. “I told her ‘You need to quit smoking and get a medical check-up.’ She did and tested positive for cancer. But she is alive today.”

For most of his life he has been conscious in his dream state and able to direct and interact within dreams, an experience akin to lucid dreaming or Tibetan Dream Yoga.

“If I don’t like the colors, I change them,” he says. “And I choose the subjects to dream about. It’s so natural to me. I don’t know any other way.”

In college, he had repeated dreams about a female friend driving from the school to the small eastern Colorado town where they were raised, but being killed after being hit by a semi-truck during the trip.

“The dreams got more intense in the spring. In the dreams she would wear a yellow polka-dot dress. One day I pulled up for us to make the trip home. She came out wearing a yellow polka-dot dress. I said, ‘Nope! We’re not going!’ ”

Oliver became known at the hospice where he volunteered for having a knowing of when someone’s transition was imminent.

“I got a call from hospice saying a patient was likely to die in three hours. I went over to talk with him. I came out and said, ‘He’s not dying in three hours. He’s too feisty.’ ” The patient did indeed live longer than the medical professionals expected.

Writer Whitely Strieber, in his 2017 book The Afterlife Revolution (#Comissions Earned), terms near-death experiencers as “modern day shamans.” The irony, Strieber writes, is that NDEs and conscious memories of “the other side,” are made possible by medical science, the very science that denies there is consciousness and life beyond the physical world.

In traditional indigenous cultures Shamans visited other realms to bring back healing messages for the community. The latter very much describes Oliver. You can read these messages in many books, but Oliver’s understanding of these timeless truths comes from having gained a vast perspective on the difficulties of life from dying three times.

He often shares his NDE experiences to give peace to hospice patients and their families.

“I tell them that live or die, you win either way. If you regain your health or go on to another plane, it will be good.”

Perhaps it is this deeper understanding of life, both here and in the hereafter, that makes Oliver accepting of people as they are. “Everyone has faults,” he says. “So, you take that as a starting point and go from there.” Echoing the Dalai Lama, Oliver says, “My only religion is kindness.”

He continues: “My life changed so much for the better. I worry not. I am not attached to this plane. It’s freeing. Whatever happens is only temporary so I don’t sweat the big or the little stuff.”

Books mentioned in this post:

#Commissions Earned

#Commissions Earned

#Commissions Earned