FROM SUDDEN DEATH TO PARADISE

A debut memoir offers a guided tour of one man’s near-death experience.

Dismas opens his book with a stark declaration: He died for 10 minutes. After a long career in the military police and a vigorous indulgence in boxing and MMA, he’d come to think that he wouldn’t face death until he reached old age. But in August 2016, he woke up in the middle of the night experiencing the worst chest pains of his life and suddenly his views on mortality changed. Until his cardiac trouble and his subsequent near-death experience, he’d given no thought to the tales of people leaving their bodies and feeling as though they were approaching an afterlife. The author had never been particularly religious, but then he established a new relationship with God. He was at this point in his life when he had a massive heart attack that landed him in an ICU with his doctors and family thinking the worst about his chances. His recovery turned out to be amazingly rapid, and it convinced him that God had a plan for him. The bulk of Dismas’ lucid memoir is concerned with his long, rocky, and protracted heart problems as he encountered one serious complication after another. These medical scenes are entirely gripping, and they’ll be relatable to anybody who’s ever gone through endless rounds of hospital testing. The dramatic moment of the NDE is skillfully delayed. Its ultimate details will be intensely familiar to readers of NDE literature. The otherworldly vision of meeting God and surviving death will comfort believers, and the obviously subjective story will provoke skeptics.

A detailed and very readable account of a medical ordeal and an epiphany.