A glimpse of the 'other side': Seattle conference unites near-death individuals
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The day Kimberly Clark Sharp died was the day her life really began.
It was 1970 in Shawnee Mission, Kan., and she was registering her car at the Department of Motor Vehicles office. Leaving the DMV, she suddenly collapsed. She had no pulse. Cardiac arrhythmia, Sharp learned later, a wild fluctuation of her heart.
Several firefighters tried to revive her through cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, but couldn't.
By medical definition, Sharp was dead — but strangely, she never felt better.
Her spirit was alive.
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Suddenly an explosion erupted beneath her, and Sharp saw a light — what she later described as the light of God and of love. She learned the answers to the eternal questions, answers not in words but in a feeling.
She felt she was home.
But she didn't last long there. She yearned to stay but was pulled back to earth, to a lifeless body that lay on the ground.
Sharp's life should have ended right there, at age 22, a tragic end to an innocent and sheltered life. But her life had merely begun.
Now, 30 years later, Sharp is living in Seattle — a retired professor of social work and author of a book based on her story and the stories of thousands of people like her who came to the edge of dying.
And she'll be one of the expert speakers at the annual conference of the International Association of Near-Death Studies, which runs through tomorrow in Seattle.
(The featured speaker at tomorrow night's banquet will be Betty Eadie, the Seattle-area author whose 1993 book about her own near-death experience, "Embraced by the Light," became a best-selling phenomenon.)
People come to the conference for many reasons. There are health-care professionals who want to know how to deal with people who have had near-death experiences. There are researchers who will present the newest findings in the field. And there are those who, like Sharp, arrived at the brink, then came back, and want to know more.
Seattle may be the most appropriate place for the meeting: The city, Sharp says, has one of the highest rates of near-death incidents reported in the country.
One reason could be the level of emergency medical knowledge here. In Seattle, more citizens know CPR than any other city, and fully 64 percent of heart-attack victims get CPR from a citizen before emergency services arrive, one of the top rates in the world.
Good place to live
The city's nationally known emergency medical service, Medic One, has one of the best resuscitation rates in the world. Emergency-service workers here brag of the city's 30 percent survival rates in emergency situations, compared to 5 to 10 percent in the average American city. These factors give Seattle residents better odds of having a near-death experience.
After graduating from Kansas State University the year of her collapse, Sharp expected a steady life as a secondary schoolteacher in Kansas. But after her event, she enrolled at the University of Washington's School of Social Work and soon became a social worker in the intensive-care unit at Harborview Medical Center.
There she met Maria.
Maria was the first in a long line of more than 2,000 near-death experiencers Sharp interviewed while working at Harborview and researching her book. Maria, a Spanish-speaking migrant worker who had a heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle, was admitted to Harborview's critical-care unit.
After she stabilized, Sharp came to calm her. Maria told Sharp she had floated to a corner of the room, hovering over her body as doctors worked on her. She was able to describe exactly what the doctors did when she was unconscious. Then, she said, her body floated out of the room, and she described the scene outside.
Living proof
As if to prove her out-of-body experience, Maria described a dark blue tennis shoe, scuffed a little on the left side, sitting on a window ledge not visible from Maria's hospital room.
Skeptical, Sharp searched for the shoe. She found it, just as Maria had described it.
Maria was the also the first Sharp felt comfortable sharing her own near-death experience with. There would be more — and Sharp would use her experience to calm others in Harborview who were spooked by their glimpse at the other side.
In the 1980s, Sharp started the Seattle chapter of IANDS, which is now the organization's largest, with as many as 100 people attending each meeting. They meet monthly to discuss how their near-deaths changed their lives.
And Sharp feels it did change her life. She worked at Harborview, taught for two decades as a social-work professor at UW, married the man of her dreams — a former director of Medic One in Seattle — and wrote her book. None of these things, Sharp feels, would have happened to her if she had not had her near-death experience.
She beat breast cancer after the doctors told her she had eight months to live. She says it was because she was comfortable with death — knew it wasn't an ending but a beginning.
From near death to marriage
Paul Carr met his wife, Libby, through IANDS. They both had near-death experiences in the 1970s, and they married four years ago. Paul said the unique part of Seattle organization is that they aren't proselytizers.
"Perhaps what's unusual about this group is that we're sharing a memory from our life experience," Carr said. "We're not asking you to believe. It's not a religious discussion. It's just a discussion about an experience."
"Plenty of people have these experiences," Sharp said. "But they don't talk about them because that's often a one-way ticket to the psychiatric unit and lots of scary medications.
"As weird as all this sounds, to me and all these people it seems very natural."
Reid Forgrave can be reached at 206-464-2785 or rforgrave@seattletimes.com.