I'll never forget this guy that just went down on the grass, I shocked him, he opened his eyes looked up at me and said...
"What happened, why am I laying down on this wet grass.....everything was so nice, the people I was with, they're all gone".
Then I also remember helping the ME pick up the body pieces from a guy who layed down on the train tracks, my partner tapped me on the shoulder to look down at my boot....you know how some people get toilet paper stuck on their shoe and drag it around behind them...well... I had his eye ball nerve stuck on my boot and I was dragging his eyeball behind me while I was walking around.
Him I didn't bring back.
Damn, that must've been hard. My dad sees similar scenes during the night (mostly due to crashes), and I've had my share of gruesome sightings over the years (one involving an attempted suicide), so I'm sincerely sorry.
My mother had a near death experience as well, and she "saw" Saint Barbara talking to her. I chalked it up to her mind just going with something that brought her comfort, but she didn't know about SB prior to that. Another example, is a monk that died a few years back. See, this guy was different because he didn't do any of the tricks like claim that he heard messages, or that his icons would start bleeding and whatnot. He was a hermit that was regularly visited by folks all around the world, no matter their religion or views, and they'd talk with him. In the end, due to the many POVs he encountered, he was well versed enough to "predict" certain happenings. There was nothing supernatural there, just a guy who got to hear lots of info from all acrosss the globe. Of course now they consider him a saint with divine connections, but that's besides the point.
A bit before he died, folks asked him about the afterlife, and his (sorta paraphrased) answer was this (keep in mind that he was a monk): "There are no clouds and music in Heaven, or rocks and fire in Hell, they're just "feelings". The former is like a happy dream, and the latter like a nightmare". So as you can see, it's a pretty logical answer. No anthropomorphisized entities, landscapes out of fiction, just "something more". And dunno, a monk essentially going against the scripture of his very faith is kinda weird. I guess he saw the words as merely metaphors taken too far, and had a more deistic view of the universe blended together with Orthodox Christianity as his dogma.
In the end, despite the metaphysical questions, there's something my grandpa used to say: "This is Heaven, and this is Hell. If your life is happy, may your years be long, and may your Heaven last forever. If your life is troubled, may your years be short, and may your Hell reign no more. Death is torture for the former, and salvation for the other". He lived through WW2, the Civil War and was a firm Right-Wing Capitalist who identified as an atheist, so he had a very clear "black and white" view on most things.
Han and Leia racing through Echo Base with Vader hot on their heels becomes terrifying after RO.
