What does it feel like to die?

Death is not something we like to think about, but it is something that each of us will experience. Few thoughts fill us with fear and fear. It is easy to ask questions about this issue, either during the day or at night. Will it hurt? Are we scared? Will there be release or just panic and pain? Until we succeed, we will not know what comes after our last breath escapes. But we can have a good idea of every moment that leads to it. There are people who have gone to the brink of death and who wrote down all the sensations they felt along the way.

1.- Death by drowning - Grant Allen

Grant Allen almost drowned during a skating accident. For a moment, Allen insists he was dead. "As soon as consciousness goes," he wrote, "I was then dead there, and I never expected to be more mortal."

The ice beneath him cracked as he skidded, and Allen fell into the icy water. He tried to swim to the surface, but hit his head against the solid ice above their heads.

Allen could not think straight. "I was numb from the cold and stunned by the sudden and unexpected fall," he wrote. Instead of looking for the hole through which he had fallen, he began to bang his head against the ice, trying to break it. "I gasped and swallowed a large amount of water. I felt my lungs fill. A moment of suspense, during which I knew perfectly well that I was drowning; And then ... I died. "

His life did not pass before his eyes. "On the contrary, I felt only a feeling of cold, damp and breathless, a ferocious wild fight, a terrible feeling of suffocation, and then it was over." His friends managed to get him out and bring him back. But until then, Allen was clinically dead.

"Dying in itself, like dying, is quite painless, as painless as falling asleep," Allen wrote. "It's just the previous fight, the sense of his approach, which is uncomfortable."

2.- Death by poison gas - Kassem Eid

In 2013, Syrian rebel Kassem Eid was in Damascus when he was hit by sarin gas. He heard a rocket hit the ground, but it did not explode as he expected. Instead, the gas began to spill.

"It only took seconds before I lost my ability to breathe," Eid said. "I felt like my chest was burning. My eyes burned like hell. I could not scream or do anything. "

"He started to pound his chest, trying to force himself to breathe. "It was very painful," he said. "I felt like someone was tearing my chest with a knife made of fire."

His neighbor knocked on his door, asking for help. Her children were dying, vomiting white substance through her mouth. She and most of the others around did not come out alive. "I saw hundreds of people die. My heart almost stopped. And they put me with the corpses. Eid was taken out of the body when he managed to make a sign of life. He survived, but he went through hell to get there. "To die like that," he later said, "is one of the ugliest ways death has ever known through history."

3.- Visions of Heaven - Anita Moorjani

"It was wonderful," said Anita Moorjani about her experience with death in 2006. She was dying of cancer with no hope of survival when she fell into a coma. Moorjani, however, believes it was something else, which actually happened on the other side.

"It's hard to describe," Moorjani said. "It was as if I let my body and my consciousness expand, and I was everywhere, in a divine state where I could see my loved ones and feel the presence of other souls."

"When I entered this other dimension, I felt an overwhelming sense of love and peace. I did not feel any pain. I discovered my purpose in life and what I should do. I realized that the solution to my cancer was always within me. "

After leaving that state, his body went through a miraculous recovery. In four days, 70 percent of his cancer had disappeared. In five weeks, she was completely healed.

1. Visions of Hell - Matthew Botsford

Not all visions on the other side are so peaceful. Like Moorjani, Matthew Botsford went into a coma and saw what he believes is a view from the other side. But his vision was not so cheerful.

He had been shot in the back of the head. "I felt a hot piercing, like a needle, terribly painful, for a brief instant on the top of my head," he said. "Then the darkness enveloped me as if a thick black ink had been spilled over my eyes."

For the next 27 days, his body was in a coma. But her soul, Botsford believes, was trapped in hell. "This just showed me that it was really contained in some kind of cell," he said. "The cold penetrated to the marrow of my bones." He felt naked, helpless and surrounded by a demonic presence. "I could feel the real pressure of evil pressing against my body," he explained. Apart from evil, I could not feel much. "There was no breathing," he said. "There were no thoughts at all. I had no thoughts of anything else except despair and fear, misery and sadness. "