My Son's NDE
A Drowning Near Death Experience by Sherry
This is not my near death experience, but my son's. He was three years old when he fell into my mother's swimming pool, Father's Day 1988. I was under the assumption that he had gone to the basement with everyone else while my mother and I were in the kitchen talking. When they came back up, my son was not with them and I had not seen him since we had arrived. I was immediately sick to my stomach as I raced outside to the pool. There he was floating face down with his upper body beginning to sink. I let out a blood-curdling scream as I reached down, grabbed his ankle, and hauled him out. My mother immediately called 911 when she heard my scream. He was turning blue, his lips were purple, and he was not breathing. I began to prep him for mouth-to-mouth when my stepfather pushed me out of the way and took over. He later told me that I was hysterical and babbling. It took a few minutes (it seemed like an eternity to me) and he began coughing up a lot of water. The ambulance arrived shortly thereafter. They were taking him to Union Hospital in Elkton, a five minute drive. However, one of the paramedics said that he had lost consciousness again and that they should take him to Christiana, a twenty minute drive. I was totally freaking out at this point and was trying to get in the back with him. The driver had to grab me to try to keep me in my seat as he flew down 95 at breakneck speed.
We arrived at the hospital and I was asked a lot of questions, one of them being how long he was in the water. I told them that I had no idea how long he had been under and was worried about brain damage. They kept him overnight for observation. He told me the next morning that he snuck out the door when everyone else was going downstairs, because he saw that they had gotten a new raft.
The next morning my mother came to retrieve us and take us home. We went to her house. The first thing that my son asked was, "Can I get in the pool?" My mom kept telling him no. I finally said, "We should let him. If he's not afraid, don't make him afraid." Now, before the drowning, my son would only play on the steps. So, donned in his "swimmies", he headed straight for the deep end and jumped in. My mother and I were shocked!
Later that evening I took my son home. We were sitting there watching TV when all of the sudden he broke down and began sobbing so hard he could hardly breath. I thought something was wrong and that I would have to take him back to the hospital. I told him that he had to calm down so that he could tell me what was wrong. He sobbed out, "I just want to go back to heaven with Pop-pop." My heart stopped. I had heard of NDEs, but never knew anyone who had actually had one; and here I was with my three year old son telling me he wanted to go back to heaven. I asked him to tell me about it. He told me that the raft was floating in the pool and that he had tried to grab hold of it when he had fallen in the pool. He said that he had tried to get back to the side of the pool, but "guessed I didn't swim to good." He said it was very painful to drown, but then it was peaceful. He told me that there was all this white light around him and this guy, who he somehow knew was his deceased great-grandfather, told him that he had to go back because it wasn't his time. He said that it seemed like he was there for a long time.
Now, my grandfather died when my son was only ten months old, so it's not like he even knew him. We never really talked about him and there were not a lot of pictures sitting around. But when I asked my son to describe the man that he saw, he described my grandfather to a tee. He said that he was kind of bald, but had some hair going around the side of his head, that he was short, and that he wasn't fat but kind of stocky.
After the pool incident, my son started seeing and sensing things. He told me a couple of months later that he got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and that there was a tall, bald guy in a suit standing by my bedroom closet, watching me while I slept. I asked him what happened. He told me that they just looked at each other and then he went to the bathroom. He said that he stopped by my room again on the way back to bed but the guy was gone. He told me not to be scared, because he was a nice guy. Needless to say, I was more than a bit freaked out because I had always had a creepy feeling in the house. I had taken him out of daycare, because my grandmother said that she would watch him. He drove her crazy, because he would go through her house and pick things up and say, "This was Pop-pop's, wasn't it?" He was always right. He told her quite frequently that Pop-pop was still in the house. He began talking about really deep subjects that no three year old would normally talk about, like how the universe was created and it sounded very logical and scientific. He just went on and on and when I asked how he knew all this stuff he would just say, "I don't know, I just know it."
My mother lives next to a graveyard and my son would go there all the time. I wasn't worried, because I could clearly see him. There is a child's grave there with a statue of Mary on it. I would see him standing in front of that statue for several minutes before he came back to the house. I would then ask him what he had done and he would reply, "Oh, I was just talking to Mary." One time he told me that Mary had told him that he was going to get a book from his great-grandfather. I asked him when this was going to take place. He said, "I won't get it until I am much older." I know that this all sounds like a bunch of crazy talk, but I am just telling you what my kid was telling me. The funny thing is that my grandmother was recently in the nursing home and she was talking to my son and she told him that there was a book that his great-grandfather wanted him to have. When he related their conversation I said, "Oh, my God!" He said, "What is wrong?" I asked him if he remembered going to talk to Mary all those years ago and he said he did remember. I then asked if he remembered telling me the book that Mary said he was going to get from his grandfather. He did not remember that. I told him that he was very young at the time. We still don't know which book my grandmother was talking about, but I thought it mighty strange that she had told him something like that.
My son is now 22 years old. He stopped talking about his NDE a couple of years after it happened and would get very upset if asked about it. He is now once again okay with talking about it. He says, "If they want to know, all they have to do is ask." He is very spiritual in a Wiccan sort of way. He now lives with my grandmother, who is 81 years old, and he still insists that my grandfather is in the house that he built with his own two hands, fifty some odd years ago. He says that there is something else there, too. He may be right as there were Indian burial grounds in that area.