DYING TO LIVE

A woman reflects on a spiritual life, including a near-death experience, and offers lessons to readers in this memoir.

Hards was born “highly sensitive”—at a very young age, she discovered she was remarkably attuned to the spiritual world around her and later understood that she was both clairvoyant and clairaudient. As a young child, she had an out-of-body experience. According to the author, she could also communicate with dead people, see the aura colors of others, and detect “little goblins” playfully interacting with her. She recounts that when she was around 30 years old, she developed the ability to detect the past lives of others. While in the hospital undergoing a C-section, she had a near-death experience, one in which she encountered Jesus: “When I…went further, I started talking to Jesus. I saw him and started having a conversation without speaking. I don’t remember having any sensations or feelings of any sort. It was all a peaceful calm, as if I had an awareness of everything.” The author recounts her principal challenges in life, including her childhood in a “dysfunctional” home environment, a broken engagement, and a divorce, and articulates the diverse spiritual lessons she learned along the way. Hards’ remembrance is impressively candid, even intimately confessional in content and tenor, and conveyed in a lucidly informal register. Readers comfortable with the author’s mystical sense of spirituality—those inclined to also see a “synchronicity of coincidental things” as more than brute chance—are the ones most likely to appreciate her memoir. Much of the advice she dispenses is neither original nor searching: “We need peace with ourselves and others.” For the most part, while such counsel is perfectly sensible, it is also platitudinous. Hards’ personal, eccentric reflection is closer to a long essay than a book—it is under 110 pages—and will surely grip the attention of those who know her.

An intriguing but idiosyncratic account of a wide-ranging spiritual journey.