What Did You Say to the White Light?

Although I have fictionalized this incident for the novel, this really happened to my mother.  My approach to fiction is to take all the most interesting things that have happened in real life and throw them into a story and see where it takes you.  Buy the novel at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU.

Her brother was driving.  The car rolled several times.  My mother went through the front window and was hanging half in and half out.  She had to wait an hour for the ambulance to come because they were way out in the boonies of Downey.

She really did have a conversation with a white light.  Later in the novel, I divulge some more intriguing details, including the nature of conversations with white lights.  My mother was haunted by this experience for years, until sometime in the 1980s, it became socially acceptable in her circle to talk about near-death experiences.  A friend of mine was doing her Master’s Thesis on near-death experiences and heard about my mother’s experience.  She sat her down for an interview and got it all on tape.

Initially, the near-death experience was disorienting.  Loony bins were mentioned.  But over the decades, the experience became a comfort.  Suddenly, she knew that God existed because she had seen him.  I don’t have that certainty, not having seen firsthand what my mother has seen, but that knowledge is a comfort for anyone as they’re growing older, especially my mother, who’s now 83, knowing that there is someone who will catch you when you fall for the last time.