Brushes with the afterlife: Woman who was shot reconsiders stories about near-death experiences

From the Bible to popular culture, people have recounted experiences outside the realm of the everyday when having a brush with death.

Sometimes the experiences come in the form of beings they describe as angels, and sometimes they involve interactions with loved ones who have already passed on.

Still others describe stepping outside of their own body while watching their family members say goodbye as doctors struggle to save their lives.

After nearly 11 years in the medical profession, Kristina Bosco remembers many occasions where she's had patients talk of connecting with deceased loved ones, sometimes hours before they themselves died.

While always sympathetic and professional, Bosco is not sure if she ever gave the impression she believed their accounts.

Now she thinks she knows what they may have been feeling.

Suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, Bosco doesn't remember the ambulance trip from her Cape Girardeau County residence to Saint Francis Medical Center, though she found out later she was conscious and speaking to paramedics.

The first clear memory she has after being shot Sept. 8 came when she heard the words, "that vessel's not supposed to be there," Bosco said.

At the time, she was undergoing the brain surgery that saved her life.

When Bosco looked around, she realized she stood next to her grandfather, who she'd been with when he died four years earlier.

He told her "I'm not supposed to be here either, but I'm going to be," she said.

Taking stock of her surroundings, Bosco became aware they stood on a small crest of a hill, curving slightly as though a child had drawn it, and the sun was coming up over a field.

Her grandfather wore the same clothing she'd seen him wear every day for as long as she can remember, and she had on a blue sundress.

"I'm not sure where that came from because I don't wear dresses unless I have to," Bosco said.

When she woke up Sept. 11, she told her mother, Kathy Newell, about the experience. When she met Dr. Joel Ray, the neurosurgeon who'd performed the operation, she knew whose voice she'd heard at the start of the vision.

She recognized Ray's voice instantly and told him what she remembered hearing and seeing during the time doctors were saving her life.

Ray recorded everything Bosco told him to preserve her memory of the details. Though her memory of some of the events before and after seeing her grandfather have become fuzzy, Ray said Bosco's account of the vision has not wavered even slightly.

"It's like it happened yesterday -- clear as a bell," Bosco said.

Bosco underwent three surgeries Sept. 8, one to treat injuries caused by an entry wound at the front of her head, one to relieve the pressure on her brain and one to remove bullet fragments from the back of her head.

A hernia, or protrusion of tissue, would have moved the vessels in her head, Ray said, explaining his choice of words during the surgery.

Bosco's father, when he came to visit, brought her a handful of pictures of her new home in Arkansas. Included in the stack was one from Bosco's childhood, the only family picture he'd chosen to bring. It was taken at a park in Nevada that mirrored the field she'd seen in her dream.

She hadn't even been 3 years old at the time.

"It blew me away. I hadn't seen it before," she said.

Now she finds herself intrigued by what happened to her and avidly read a book Ray provided her on the subject, "Closer to the Light," by Dr. Melvin Morse of Seattle, a pediatrician and researcher of near-death experiences.

Dr. Brian Anderson, the senior pastor at CrossRoads Fellowship in Jackson, has had people confide in him about experiences with the afterlife and with angels. He believes they have been credible.

"I certainly believe in angels, and I think if God chooses to send one to talk to them, they will see an angel," Anderson said.

He recalled one conversation he'd had with a woman while they waited in the emergency room after her nephew had been in a serious car wreck. She told him she wasn't afraid of death, and she shared her own brush with mortality, when she'd been brought back after her heart had stopped beating.

"I think it's something that, unless you've actually experienced it, you can't really know," Anderson said.

Two years ago, Ray had another patient, Viola Surface, who suffered a broken vertebra in her neck. She underwent a life-saving treatment during which she had an out-of-body experience.

The 80-year-old woman described a blue light bathing her body and said she saw a tiny version of herself on the emergency room treatment table.

Ray recorded Surface's description shortly after she regained consciousness to preserve the details of her experience.

In his book, which involved hundreds of in-depth interviews, Morse wrote that near-death experiences are natural and normal parts of death and dying.

"They are not obscure psychic phenomena to be lumped together with UFO sightings and Bigfoot," Morse wrote.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

388-3635

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