Incredible Journeys -- Dr. Melvin Morse Looks For Insight Into Near-Death Experiences

A LOT OF THINGS WE can't see or hear are real.

We can't see ultraviolet light or hear dog whistles. We can't see the magnetic fields birds use to navigate the earth or the radio waves that put Oprah in our televisions or the strings of DNA without which we would not be alive. Yet we understand all these things to be real.

When we die, this too is real, though it is not well understood. We go to heaven or hell, we are reincarnated, we simply cease to exist. It all depends on your beliefs; nobody can say for sure because we can't see what's on the other side. Except for a few people who claim they have been there, seen it, come back. They say they've seen a loving light, God, their own bodies from above. They say angels and the afterlife are as real as algebra and language and love.

If you are the type who has little patience for New Age allegory, it is easy to dismiss such near-death experiences as hallucinations, fabrications, the fluff of tabloids and morning talk shows.

Melvin Morse was exactly that type, a skeptical doctor-scientist headed for a life of dissecting rat brains and testing cancer drugs. Until, that is, he resuscitated a child who nearly drowned. Seven-year-old Kristle Merzlock was comatose, without heartbeat for 19 minutes, her brain swollen, the pupils of her eyes fixed and dilated. Yet she completely recovered. And the little girl told Morse that while he was sticking tubes up her nose and needles into her arm, she was floating around the emergency room watching him, watching her family at home. She said she went through a tunnel with a tall nice lady with bright golden hair and met the Heavenly Father and her late grandfather and two girls who were waiting to be born. "If I am not a good person and live a good life," Kristle said on a recent talk show, "I cannot go back."

That was 12 years ago in Idaho. Morse became so intrigued by encounters like Kristle's that he gave up rat-brain research. He now practices pediatrics in Renton, and, in his spare time, researches and writes about near-death experiences. It is an unusual hobby; the 41-year-old would come off as flaky if the rest of his life weren't so remarkably normal.

By day, the pediatrician deals with earthly problems - kids' ear infections and drippy noses. At night, he watches Bugs Bunny videos with his own five children and then, after they're tucked in, writes about people who have visited the pearly gates and seen Elvis. His research on near-death experiences is published in best-selling paperbacks with cheap bindings as well as in the American Medical Association's scholarly pediatric journals. In all his writings, Morse validates other people's out-of-body journeys, yet says he does not believe in God or the afterlife himself. For this, he is accused of being coy, of smudging the line between science and theology, of two-timing academia by appearing on Oprah.

Morse laughs. "They're just being silly," he says of his critics. The subject of his research is death, but his point is to learn something about life. Given that, he asks, does it really matter whether near-death experiences are real?

ANGELS ARE TRENDY. NEARLY 40 books about the cherubic creatures were published in the past two years, not to mention gift wrap, calendars, umbrellas, underwear. This fall, NBC premiered a weekday talk show called "The Other Side" about ESP, ghosts and paranormal phenomena. (Morse has been on it twice already.) Local bookstores stock shelves of other-worldly titles, including Morse's latest, "Parting Visions." It keeps company next to "Tarot Games," "UFOs and How to See Them," and "Embraced by the Light" by Eastside author Betty Eadie, which sold well over 2 million copies last year and hovered for 72 weeks at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list.

Morse, who did the foreword to Eadie's book, nonetheless tries to distance himself from most of the rest, even fellow doctors who write on the same subject. "Moody is spiritual," Morse says of Dr. Raymond Moody Jr., who started the near-death publishing phenomena almost 20 years ago with "Life After Life." "But he doesn't use any references, doesn't do footnotes. He's not that kind of a guy."

Morse is. His most recent academic paper, "Near Death Experiences and Death Related Visions: Implications for the Clinician," published last February in a respected pediatrics journal, included 220 footnotes. It also admonished other researchers for using biased samples, poor data collection techniques and leading questions "heavily weighted toward answers that would please the interviewer by disclosing mystical events and personality transformations."

So I was a little surprised by Morse's reaction when I mentioned to him that, well, I had had a near-death experience as a child.

"Great!" he said, his eyes turning brighter and buggier than his bright red Volkswagen bug. "That's WONDERFUL!"

About now, if this were a morning talk show, we'd take a brief commercial break to sell a fast-acting cold remedy. Instead I'll just go ahead and tell you what happened.

I was 6. My older cousins and several neighbor kids were playing "bogeyman" in the basement of my aunt and uncle's rambler in Delaware. The way it worked was someone would yell "bogeyman!" and switch off the lights and we'd all scream and run up the basement stairs. What a stupid game. Especially since the stairs had no railing on one side and somehow, somewhere near the top, I fell off and landed on my head on the linoleum. I don't remember falling, but I do remember floating up to the ceiling, watching from above as the ambulance attendants and my 300-pound uncle bent over my body and carried me upstairs. I saw myself inside the ambulance and remember my dad quizzing the paramedics. My mom recalls I was unconscious until sometime after arriving in the emergency room, and that I woke up saying things that didn't make sense. She doesn't remember exactly what; she has blotted the incident out of her mind, she says, because it was so horrible.

Actually, it wasn't horrible at all. I was out of my body! There were no tunnels, no angels, no Elvis, nothing like that. But there was also no pain or fear. Behind a corner, there was a light, a kind of glow. I felt calm and not cold.

So that's it. Nothing notably weird has happened to me since. I am not New Age or religious. I observe certain Chinese customs such as eating noodles on my birthday, more out of tradition than superstition. I don't follow horoscopes. I have never been to a medium. I do not believe in the power of crystals, even as deodorant.

Yet here I am, one of 8 million Americans who, according to a Gallup poll, have had near-death experiences. Morse says it counts, even though it wasn't dramatic, even though we don't know if I was actually almost dead.

He is convinced near-death experiences permanently transform people. Statistics, control groups, validity scales and other particulars of his research on this matter are in the appendix of his second book, "Transformed by the Light." The gist is that adults who had near-death experiences in childhood ultimately give more to charity, eat more fresh fruits and veggies, take less aspirin, spend more time in contemplation (jogging or whatever) and have more dreams that wind up coming true. They are far less afraid of death than control groups. They have a zest for life. Also, Morse says, they have trouble with electromagnetic fields; watches and computers go kaput. It could be because a near-death event creates unusually high voltage in a person's normally weak electromagnetic field, but really, nobody knows.

I am not afraid of death (though not crazy about aging). Commenting on most of Morse's other findings would be either self-serving or self-incriminating, so I won't. But I can verify that last bit about the computers. My Macintosh Powerbook breaks down constantly. Weird unexplainable glitches, repeated equipment failure, total frustration.

The technicians at University Book Store blame my software. My editors wonder about the technicians. Morse, of course, attributes the problems to you-know-what. Me, I think the laptop is simply a lemon.

Or maybe not.

THE BRAIN IS infinitely more complex than any computer.

Deep inside the cranium, above the right ear, is the right temporal lobe, a blob of gray Jell-O smaller than a fist. It controls hearing, memory, sense of time and personal quirks.

When the right temporal lobe is damaged or surgically removed, people act like automatons. When it is electrically stimulated, patients often hear sweet violins and flutes, see people who are not really there and relive old memories as if plopped down in the middle of a 3-D video about their own life. They float around. "Oh, God, I'm leaving my body," a patient reportedly told Wilder Penfield, the father of neurosurgery, as he stimulated a ditch in the right temporal lobe during experimental surgery in the 1950s.

Out-of-body accounts have hovered on the fringes of history for ages. Sigmund Freud reported a near-death experience, and before that, the Prophet Mohammed, St. Paul, Tibetan Buddhist monks, medieval bishops, Aztec heroes. Explanations for the phenomena are as varied and colorful as the cultures from which they spring. These days, many scientific researchers, including Sherwin Nuland, author of "How We Die," attribute other-worldly sensations to oxygen deprivation, endorphin secretions, plunging blood pressure. As the body breaks down in death, a popular theory has it, the brain is confronted by memory gaps and pieces of information that don't fit. So it starts making things up. The right temporal lobe fills in with a little memory here, a little harp music there, images of favorite stuffed animals, Grandma, God, and pretty soon you're shaking hands with Elvis. Your brain believes this model to be true because that's what it created. That, after all, is what the brain does for a living - generates models to explain what you see and hear and feel. To the brain, this reality is no different from any other. So when 7-year-old Kristle nearly drowned, according to this theory, her right temporal lobe created a collage composed of reality (doctors resuscitating her), memories (her late grandfather) and comforting images (the two girls).

Morse taps his forehead where his hairline is receding, a spot on the skull over the right temporal lobe. "Everyone agrees the right temporal lobe allows you to see God," he says. "I am not interested in: Is it a real god? False god? Is it a neurochemically induced god? . . . You know, these kinds of questions I don't really get into. I'm not really into philosophy. I'm not really a deep thinker. If you saw Jesus, that's great! If you saw Elvis, that's great!"

Other scientists would characterize these encounters as seizures, psychotic visions, abnormal behavior. Morse disagrees. If a spiritual experience helps you grieve, comforts you during abuse or accidents, or, in any way gives you the warm fuzzies, then Morse says your right temporal lobe is doing its job. Furthermore, he says, spiritual experiences are not just "reactive dissociative fantasies," as the other scientists claim. "They spring from spiritual sources outside our bodies," Morse says. Which sources, exactly, the pediatrician doesn't know.

"All I'm really saying is that if you see God when you die, you should be able to see God when you're alive."

Whoa. Scientific blasphemy!

Skeptics can be sorted into four schools of thought:

1) Those Who Never Daydreamed During Neurobiology. "Years ago we used to call these hallucinations, fantasies. All of a sudden, they're dignified by calling them near-death experiences. That's a lot of hogwash. What we see is determined by organic chemical effects on our brains. People are creating supernatural explanations for things we don't understand." - Sherwin Nuland, Yale surgery professor and author of "How We Die."

2) Maybe There's Something To This, But I'm Fed Up With Talk Shows. "Over the years, the kids who I have seen die, I've been real impressed with a sort of calmness that occurs . . . Yeah, I think there's a (load) we don't understand. But don't milk it beyond that . . . You can't see a TV show without seeing the tunnel." - Pearl O'Rourke, director of the pediatric intensive-care unit at Children's Hospital.

3) Yes, I Believe It, But Not During Work. "It's important not to confuse science with theology . . . I think `research' implies the scientific method, that you can have a hypothesis that's possible to disprove. There's no way to determine the truth when someone's heart stops . . . whether it's a dreamlike delirium or whether they truly went to another life." - Peter Roy-Byrne, chief of psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center.

4) Clergy To Docs: Take It Back To The Lab. "I would say it's science and not theology. I don't think they're seeing God. They're seeing something from their background they may presume to be God. They're experiencing the nature of dying. From the point of view of faith, it doesn't surprise me it's a good experience. But for all we know, it could be the final great moment in `2001: A Space Odyssey' - and then the movie ends!" - Seattle Pastor Gerald Stanley of St. Edward's Church, who has been at many deathbeds as a chaplain at Children's Hospital and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

IT IS HARD to know what is real.

Take Morse's childhood. He calls it totally normal, your average kid growing up in suburban Maryland. Did your family talk much about the afterlife or other spiritual matters? Naah. Raised Jewish, there wasn't much emphasis on life after death. Religious? Nope. In fact, if a religious holiday fell at an inconvenient time, Mom would move the celebration to another day. Hasn't been to synagogue in 20 years. Married a Catholic, and now they're both agnostic.

But wait, there's more, tales that hint at extraordinary early years, far more unusual than what Morse describes. This version as told by the pediatrician's 75-year-old mom, Gertrude Morse: "Melvin is a biblical scholar. From an early age, we thought he was going to be a rabbi because he loved to conduct services for the other little children."

What else? Well, the Morse family had no television, an aberration during the 1960s when 90 percent of American households owned at least one set. Instead, Morse's father, Malcolm, read classics to his five children every night and took them to the library once a week to select their own books. Afterward they always went for ice cream.

Also, Gertrude Morse says, "We lived by poetry." Melvin and his siblings memorized and performed poems for Thanksgiving and other special occasions. Their father, diagnosed with cancer at 50, was brought home from the hospital after three months, per dictum of a poem. "I thought, if he's going to die, he should die heroically surrounded by his children," Gertrude Morse said, quoting lines to that effect from a Robert Service poem. As it turned out, Malcolm Morse lived 18 more years, good years during which he was able to work as a scientist for the National Bureau of Standards and travel around the world attending conferences about his passion, anomalous phenomena. Translate: Weird stuff science can't explain. Sound familiar?

An average childhood? Not religious? No emphasis on other realities?

"You can also say this," Gertrude Morse tells me. "The mother says parental recollections are totally different and possibly at odds from the child's recollections. This is normal."

MORSE LIVES ON 15 acres at the end of dirt road in rural Hobart, in a sunny log cabin he built with his wife Allison, a painter and sculptor.

They met at a University of Washington pediatric clinic where he was a resident and she was a clinical assistant. By odd but not other-worldly coincidence, Allison had not had a date all year but got asked out twice that week. The other guy suggested they go hot-tubbing at Tubs - this, before they even knew each other, so Allison blew him off, instead opting for pizza with Morse at an Eastlake tavern. Little did she realize that Morse would tell several stories about the Grateful Dead and then invite her back to his apartment to read an article he wrote about a little girl who had a near-death experience. "It was a let-me-show-you-my-etchings kind of thing," Allison says.

It worked. Allison was impressed, knew from the moment she read the article this near-death stuff would be big. They kissed. The article, featuring Kristle Merzlock, the 7-year-old whom Morse resuscitated after she nearly drowned, was eventually published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children.

Call it a cosmic convergence. After meeting Kristle in the emergency room and Allison in the clinic, Morse realized he was sick of being an on-call resident and didn't want to move away from Seattle to finish his specialized training in pediatric cancer research.

Morse married Allison, got permission from the National Cancer Institute to use his rat-brain grant for near-death research and went into private practice. On the side, he helped start a care home for babies born addicted to crack and other drugs. He adopted five children.

These days, with his gray beard, black cowboy boots and brown-bag lunch, Morse looks like a horse-and-buggy doctor, and he acts like it, too, ambling around the stable of examining rooms, chatting so long with whomever he's examining that subsequent patients have inordinate waits.

The basic principle Morse follows, in life and in medicine, is to validate what people are feeling. Many years ago, when Morse was a senior resident at Children's Hospital, he used this principle on an overwhelmed and under-confident intern. It was Richard Shugerman's first night on call. He had 14 new patients to care for and not a clue. Around midnight, Morse paged the intern: Meet me on the eighth floor. Oh no, Shugerman thought. Another place I don't know how to find to do another task I don't know how to do. Morse took Shugerman up on the roof, plugged him into a Walkman playing the Grateful Dead, handed him a Creamsicle.

You just need a break, he told the intern. Then we'll get back to taking care of patients and you'll be fine. Shugerman survived. He is now the director of the Children's Hospital residency program.

Validate. A mother comes in with a colicky baby, cries all the time, ALL THE TIME! "I don't say, `Recent studies on colic show your baby does not cry more than other babies.' I say, `What's it like to have a crying baby?' They say, `It's a nightmare . . . My husband . . . my neighbors . . . the cramped apartment . . .' " They cry.

Morse treats spiritual matters exactly the same. "Whether you believe in God or angels, you have to acknowledge they are an important part of human existence. I'm just telling fellow physicians, nurses, don't trivialize these experiences."

Surf the channels these days and you'll see Allison Morse's prediction came true; near-death experiences are hot. As to why pop culture glommed onto them, theories abound: the coming of the millennium, aging baby-boomers wrestling with mortality, pessimism about crime and poverty, a general anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, anti-rational feeling among the populace. Society has lost its spiritual core, Morse says. "People are grappling with these issues of meaning."

Asked what he has personally learned from researching near-death experiences, Morse's reply sounds both trivial and profound. He spouts a few corny quotes borrowed from children who have nearly died: "Life is for living and the light is for later . . . It's nice to be nice."

Then, he adds, "I live my life differently than I would have. I work hard at my job every day and then I come home and play with my kids."

"IF I TELL you the truth, you probably won't believe me," Morse says. The reason he wrote that first article about Kristle Merzlock? Publish or perish. He was a research fellow on academia's fast track and needed to get his byline into medical journals. Kristle's case seemed interesting and no one had written anything like it. Voila! What was originally conceived as a few lines for the pediatrician's resume ended up changing the course of Morse's life.

He got caught up in it. Someone suggested he write a book. Before Morse went into private practice, he moonlighted as a nighttime emergency-room doctor at Children's Hospital and as a flight physician for Air Lift Northwest, jetting as far as Alaska to transport sick children to Seattle for medical treatment. These were the extreme cases, kids on the edge, and not all of them lived. Losing young patients was sad enough. Handling parents' grief was even harder.

"Why my child?" says Wilma Macdougall, an Okanagan mother who lost 3-year-old Meagan to leukemia in 1992. "Could you please tell me that my child is OK?"

Once a child is dead, knowing where they are or how they are doing is out of the medical realm. Most doctors awkwardly suggest the family turn to clergy, counselors, friends.

Morse sat down at the computer and reworked his near-death research into an easy-to-read book so grieving parents would know what children went through at death. His publisher predicted it would sell fewer than 20,000 copies. "Closer to the Light" hit The New York Times' bestseller list and stayed there three months.

The book has a plain yellow cover with no picture. It is not a literary masterpiece. It is a rehash, in simple language, of Public Health Service Grant #1F3ZCAOF234, perhaps the only study of near-death experiences funded by the U.S. government. In 1985 Morse and other researchers interviewed 26 critically ill children at Seattle's Children's Hospital, kids on the brink of death who somehow recovered from cardiac arrest or deep coma. Twenty-two of them reported sensations of being conscious yet not alive, leaving their bodies, seeing a wonderful light, relatives, comforting images. The study included blood gases, drug names with dozens of syllables, coma scores - basically, data of interest to scientific types.

What grieving parents such as Macdougall extract from Morse's research is, "I can say 100 percent, I know Meagan is OK. It may sound crazy, but I think someday I will see her and she will tell me things."

Macdougall is already hearing things. Sometimes at night, Meagan's music box plays spontaneously without anybody having wound it. Macdougall believes this is a sign. About one in four bereaved parents receive such signals. For some, it comes as a whisper from their daughter or a sensation that their son is still in the playroom among his favorite dinosaurs. For others, the vision is as seemingly coincidental as a parking space opening up at just the right moment.

Morse nods. He says to the parents, "Thank you for telling me that. I believe that happened to you." They cry.

"Him being in the medical field, saying that he believed you," says Macdougall, who met Morse this summer at a Vancouver support group for parents whose children died of cancer. "He doesn't believe in the afterlife, but so many of those children who had been near death talk about it."

Trouble is, most parents don't have such spiritual experiences. And these days, when the talk shows make it seem as though all the other moms and dads get letters home from children off in eternal summer camp, it feels absolutely rotten to have an empty mailbox of a mind. On top of everything else. Used to be parents who heard voices felt crazy. Now they feel normal and others feel deprived.

This summer, a mom lashed out at Morse. She loved her child, her child loved her. Why hadn't she received some sort of sign like the other parents? Tell me there's life after death. Tell me my child is OK. Morse could not. Parents, he believes, can only know that for themselves. He fumbled through a literary allusion to all of life being short, but it came out wrong and the mom got more upset.

"We all feel as doctors we want to help," Morse said later. "Sometimes the best thing is to say nothing."

The pediatrician cannot console every grieving parent. He does not know what is on the other side. People will die. The world will go on. Sometimes there's not much anybody can say.

Morse offers little, but it often means a lot. Spiritual Creamsicles. The Grateful Dead. Reassurance. The things that help us find meaning in life he refuses to relegate to the realm of unreal.

Paula Bock is a Pacific magazine writer. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.