Written by: Davina Gramley about her life after a near-death experience.
At twenty-four, death was not something I spent much time thinking about. I had already lived through enough difficult things to understand that life could change without warning, but twenty-four is still twenty-four. There is an arrogance to being young that
has nothing to do with ego; the future simply feels inevitable.
You assume there will be another birthday, another Christmas, another argument to resolve, another place to go, another person to meet. You make plans because it never occurs to you that time itself is something you have been borrowing.
My life was already complicated long before August 31, 2004. I had grown up faster than most children should have to, and by sixteen I had survived experiences that would follow me well into adulthood.
At the same time, I had always been ambitious. I was academically gifted, skipped grades, graduated from high school at sixteen, earned my first college degree at eighteen, and learned early how to work, create, solve problems, and keep moving.
My life contained both things at once: tremendous capability and tremendous pain. I had become very good at surviving without ever stopping to consider what survival meant. After years of infertility and failed pregnancies, I was told I would not be able to have children, and my marriage ended as soon as it started.
And then, a few months later, in early 2004, a little girl entered my life. Kylie was only eighteen months old, and neither of us could possibly understand what we were becoming to each other. There had been no courtroom, no adoption papers, and no official declaration that I was her mother.
That would come much later.
At the time, there was simply a little girl whom I loved and an attachment that grew with the quiet certainty of something that did not need anyone’s permission to become real. I could not have known that years later I would adopt her at thirteen. I certainly could not
have known that one day she would give me a grandson and I would move across the country to help her with him.
But, in 2004, I knew only what was directly in front of me: she was here, I loved her, and somehow my understanding of my own future had already begun to include hers. Then, five months after she came into my life, my body began to fail.
There was no beautiful transition between ordinary life and catastrophe. On August 31, 2004, I was with her and her father at a wedding; I collapsed, and a medical emergency became multiple-organ failure and emergency abdominal surgery. Part of
my bowel had to be removed. My lungs collapsed.
Somewhere in the frantic work of trying to keep my body alive, my heart stopped, and as my dreams of motherhood were
finally coming true, I died.
Life After a Near-Death Experience Began With a Promise
What would come next was like existing in two places at once. I lay there on that cold, hard table naked with my body cut open, my intestines in the tray next to me. I am being shocked, then I am getting compressions deep into my chest while at the same time, I
am also watching this all happen from above.
I am floating above my body as if there was no ceiling in the room, and then I am drawn to what sounds like a thousand voices calling me. I turn slowly towards it, and I transport somewhere else far away, while still being in the same room. The voices were loud, and I remember distinctly thinking this should be hard to hear, but I have never understood words more clearly.
It’s only now that I’m close to my 50s and 5 years past hospice, with my medical team telling me they don’t know how I’m still here, that I feel brave enough to say the following things.
Because since 2004 I have only told parts of this story in fear of judgement of what I am about to say next. I guess there is something freeing about knowing you are on limited time; that fear fades and is overcome with the urge to get the story out.
My conversation with the thousand voices lasted for what seemed like an eternity. We conversed while sharing our expressions of life and our dreams for my future. I was shown various possible endings to my life, different paths and different meanings. I understood in that moment that life was meant to contain a “meaning”.
As I was shown all the various possibilities of the lives I could return to, if I chose to return, they would all contain tremendous pain and heartbreak; but they all had one permanence of joy.
If I chose to return to my physical body, I could only do so if I swore to be Kylie’s Mother. So, I swore and made my promise to the Universe and returned. The next thing I knew, I was back in my body and sat up at the table.
What happened next was chaos, screaming, and then I was knocked back out. When I woke, I woke to the most intense
pain. As if the possible futures were all screaming at me, “We didn’t lie, we told you there would be tremendous pain!”
The next day I was more aware of my surroundings, and I was more awake. They put an implantable pain pump in my abdomen, and I was still very out of it but still aware of what happened. The nurse came in and was happy to see me awake; she asked me
how I was feeling, and I responded, “Did I die?”
Just then her happy, good morning face turned to complete fear, and she ran out and came back with the Dr who proceeded to
read me what my medical reports still show today. That at 18:47:00 on August 31, 2004, I died and three minutes later I came back.
Life After a Near-Death Experience Was Still Painful
Life happened very quickly after that, and all the premonitions and promises to the universe faded, and I was thrown back into
survival mode. I did my best as a mother; I failed in my own ways.
My anger and rage could not be contained. Living in constant pain took its toll.
I have now had 25 surgeries in my life. Between 2004 and 2012, I had 18 surgeries; that calculates to about 2.25 surgeries a year. I was surviving in hospital rooms, drowning in medical bills, motherhood, relationship issues, work, anger, exhaustion, and pain- tremendous pain!
Survival doesn’t always look inspirational while you are living it.
Sometimes survival looks like getting through one more procedure, making dinner when your body is screaming, finding a way to earn money when you are barely functioning, or trying to be a good mother while privately wondering how much more your body can withstand.
I had returned because I promised to be Kylie’s mother, but returning did not suddenly make me wise, peaceful, or fearless. I was still human, and I still had to live the life I had chosen to come back to.
For years, I thought perhaps that promise was the entire answer. I came back for Kylie. I raised her, eventually adopted her, and watched the little girl I could not leave grow into a woman. But life continued unfolding in ways I could never have understood at twenty-four.
There were more surgeries, more illness, cancer, losses, mistakes, beautiful moments, terrible ones, and eventually another time when I came frighteningly close to leaving this life again. Eighteen years after that operating room, I found myself confronting my mortality all over again.
Somehow, I survived that too.
I Spent Years Asking Why I Came Back
It was only after all of that that I began looking differently at what I had experienced in 2004. I had spent years asking myself why I came back, as though there had to be one enormous purpose waiting somewhere in the future with my name written across it.
I no longer believe that. I think the answer has been revealing itself to me piece by piece for more than 20 years. It was Kylie. It was becoming her mother. It was the grandson I could not have imagined when she was eighteen months old.
It was my best friend Selia, my husband Evan, it was every person I have ever loved, every stranger I have encouraged, every piece of art I have created, and every moment when my own pain allowed me to recognize pain in somebody else.
And that brings me back to the thousand voices. I understand now why that part of my experience has been the hardest to explain. What I experienced did not feel like a lesson about death as much as a lesson about life.
For those few minutes, I experienced existence as something larger than one body and one individual story. I experienced what I can only describe as energy—countless voices and lives somehow existing independently and together at the same time.
I was still myself, yet I did not feel separate.
There was connection without competition, understanding without the struggle we normally have to make ourselves understood. Whether someone else calls that heaven, consciousness, the universe, energy, or simply the final activity of a dying brain is entirely up to them.
I stopped needing other people to believe me a long time ago. I know only that I experienced it, and that experience permanently changed the way I understand what it means to be alive.
Life After a Near-Death Experience Changed What Mattered
Before August 31, 2004, I measured life much differently. I cared about success, accomplishment, money, possessions, and all the things we are taught are supposed to prove that we are doing life correctly. Afterward, those things became much smaller. I began to understand that the most important things we leave behind may never have our names attached to them at all.
They are the moments when we choose to stay.
When we help. When we listen. When we love someone through something unbearable. When one hurting human being recognizes another and says, in whatever way they can, I see you.
You are not doing this alone. That understanding is part of what eventually led me back out into the community, looking for connection, and then to start my own business, DMG Eclipse Creative Studio.
I get to watch people who have survived tremendous pain begin to recognize something valuable in themselves again. I get to create, help children, connect people, encourage them, and sometimes simply sit beside them while they find their way through something difficult.
Life After a Near-Death Experience Taught Me Meaning Is Created
Twenty-two years ago, I thought I had been shown possible meanings for my future. Today, I wonder whether meaning was never
supposed to be one destination at all. Maybe it is something we create every time the energy of one life touches another and changes its direction, even slightly.
At twenty-four, I thought the future was inevitable. Then my heart stopped, and for three minutes there almost was no future.
What I could not see from that operating room was a daughter growing up, a grandson being born, people I had not met yet, art I had not created yet, lives I had not touched yet, and versions of myself I had not survived long enough to become.
I could not see any of it. I only knew that a little girl needed me. So, I made a promise.
And I came back.
Have you had a near-death experience? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Wow! Davina! This story is incredible! And a beautiful depiction of life after a near death experience! The transition from materialistic life values to understanding a deeper reality of the world we live in, was fascinating. You have endured an incredible amount of pain and uncertainty. Absolutely amazed by your resilience and bravery!