Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me, what your life was like before you died.

Dianne Sherman 0:08
Well, I'd sort of come to a standstill in my life. I was divorced, I had a six year old daughter, I had been a model for 17 years, and I'd kind of come to the end of that. I didn't know what the next step was, and that was concerning. So, I was kind of hitting the wall emotionally, you know. You get to certain stages in your life where there are markers for you, where you think you know you need to be in certain places, and I wasn't there, and feeling badly that I'd not had a successful marriage, and whatnot. And, like the good Catholic girl that I was, I went to church and prayed that, you know, help. I need some guidance. What am I doing? Where am I going? I knew there were all kinds of feelings inside of me, but I had no idea of what I was supposed to do with those, so I just needed guidance. Now, both of my parents were dead at that point. I was in my early 30s, and I just didn't have anybody to go to to say, "Hey, this is maybe the next logical step. So, here I am praying like crazy, and three days later I'd had an accident in Mexico with my ex-husband and dislocated my knee, did all kinds of damage, but could not have the big patella surgery because I was a working model, having that big scar was not okay. So I waited, and it was finally time to have that, and that morning I'm sitting on the gurney in the hallway, waiting to go into the surgical suite, and I'm just freezing, I'm racking with cold, and part of it, I'm sure, was nerves and whatnot, and this lovely nurse came by me and said, you know, would you like a heated blanket, and I said, sure, I would love that, that would be great, and she gave me a heated blanket, and that seemed to calm things down, and I'm still a little, you know, unsettled, and whatnot. The next thing I know, I'm in the surgical suite, and they put another blanket on me, and I'm out. I haven't even had the anesthesia yet, and I'm out, which was kind of a precursor, in a way, of what was coming at that time as a working model, I was really thin, and they had so much more damage to do to repair than they knew, because they didn't have MRIs and all that stuff in 1981 you know. We didn't even.. well, arthroscopic surgery was fairly new at that point, but it was still, you know, they knew what they were doing, so I'm on the table like almost two hours longer than I'm supposed to be, and that meant that much longer under anesthesia, and I guess because of my weight distribution and all of that with the anesthesia, it was too much for my system, so I'm, I'm a sensitive, I always have been, so the next thing I know I'm waking up in recovery, and I'm hearing all this commotion, and I don't want to pay attention to it, because I'm in my own experience right here, you know, I'm trying to groggy and disoriented and whatnot, and but I hear all this commotion, and I'm hearing them say, Dianne, wake up, Dianne, wake up, and I'm thinking to myself, How weird is that, that we had the same first name, and a few minutes later I'm hearing them say, Dianne Sherman, wake up, Dianne Sherman, wake up. At which point I'm thinking, oh my god, did they get the wrong patient? Did they do the wrong surgery? What is happening? And I'm waving to them, trying to get their attention without being intrusive, because clearly whatever they're doing is serious, and they're not paying any attention to me, Alex. I'm thinking to myself, maybe they can't hear me, and maybe they're just so focused on saving this person's life that you know it's okay. The next thing I know, I'm standing at the bottom of her bed, looking up at her, while they're working on her, and I'm looking down at myself. I see me, I'm looking down at me, and I'm looking up at her, and I realize it's me, and I have no connection to the me in the bed that they're working on.

Dianne Sherman 3:47
It was as if somebody had said pass the soul, you know, it was just neutral. There was nothing, and the weird thing was it wasn't scary or off-putting, or it was just I was notating what was happening, you know. I was in that, that frame of reference where you're just the observer. I was the observer. I don't know that I'd ever been the observer that way in my whole life. So, it was next thing I know, I am floating up, I'm in the corner of the surgical room or the post op, and I'm now looking over everything that's going on, and in watching it, there's no real fascination, except that something's happening, and I'm not even questioning it, and I'm very analytical. I'm not, I'm not going to fear, I'm not going to anything. I'm just watching it, and from there I'm feeling extricated out of the corner of the ceiling of that room, and now I'm being pushed, and every time I say that, I can build my body push against it. I'm being pushed into this abject blackness, and as a kid I was terrified of the dark, and so being in that absolute blackness, where I couldn't see, could I had no reference to anything, it was terrifying, and I'm being pushed forward more and more into it, and I'm thinking to myself, okay. If I can just find one little glimmer of light, one little tiny glimmer of light that I can hold on to, I'm going to be okay. And so I'm just like staring and stretching myself to find something, and all of a sudden, as far out as my vision could go, I'm seeing one little tiny glimmer, and I'm just like glommed onto that to hold on to for dear life, and it starts getting bigger and closer, and I'm like fascinated by this, and as it's getting closer, the fear, of course, is starting to abate, and I'm just watching this, and just hopeful, and you know, all the feelings of relief, you know, there's something happening where I feel a little sense of control, or a little sense of there's something more than this blackness, and now it's surrounding me, it's everywhere around me, and I'm fascinated by it, because it's nothing I've ever seen before, it's a color of white I've never seen, and a substance, it's like being in clouds, but not, not exactly that, the white has all the colors of the rainbow in it, you know, it's iridescent and it's loving and it's protective and it's supportive and it's here for me, and it's first time I've said that, I just got that it's here for me, that was such a divine sense for me, because I think where I had been before this experience was in a place where I didn't feel people were there for me, so to have this be here for me was, wow, coming home, really coming home to that sense of belonging, that sense of all rightness within yourself, that that sense of everything you've ever hoped for in your life, whether it was the work of the family or the marriage or the this or the that, this was the ultimate goal, was that sense of coming home to self, and I felt that in this, in this moment, and as this white is totally surrounding me, I'm now floating in it. I have an odd sense of humor, but at the moment I got the fact that I was floating, I had the awareness that I was thinking I'm floating, and it was like it didn't feel unnormal. That's what was so interesting. It felt so right and normal to be floating. So, as I'm coming through this white, diaphanous cloud-like area, there are two rows of monks in front of me, dressed in the brown monks' robes, with the hoods up, and I know, having listened to so many near-death experiences, I realized that people have experiences that are analogous to them in some way, and the monks were kind of like the safest part of my religion, you know, and being in Catholic school for 12 years, I went through lots of missions and whatnot. Yes, and the monks were always sweet to me, which the priests were kind of scary. So these monks felt okay for me, you know.

Dianne Sherman 7:52
There was nothing scary going on in this whole experience, except being in the dark, and that was my own childhood fear. It really, in retrospect, was a very gentle experience, so now I'm coming to the end of these two rows of monks, and the one on the end steps forward, and he speaks to me, and I say he because he had all those wonderful male qualities, you know, sort of that masculine being in charge, and and knowing what to do, and caretaking, and observing, and you know, just he had the energy, had the powerful energy, and he looked at me, and I say, "Look, the hood was up, but there was no face, it was a blackness, and it was almost like little sparks of colored things dancing in this hood, and it almost looked like a picture out of some kind of sci-fi film, where you see things moving, and when, but it seemed again normal, natural, not scary. And he, he spoke to me, and when I say spoke, he spoke inside of me. He didn't verbally say anything out loud, and he spoke to me, and he said, "It's not your time, you must go back. And I said, you can't send me back. I've just found home. I've just found feeling cherished. You can't send me back. And he said, it's not your time, you must go back. And I said, you can't bring me this far and send me back. You can't. And he said, you have a child. And I said, yes, I do. He said, Well, you must go back. It's not your time. You have a child. And I started thinking about my daughter, my six year old daughter, who I loved and adored. And I thought, I want to stay. I love my daughter, but I want to stay. And so he kept repeating, and I started thinking about who would take care of her if I stayed. My parents were both gone. My sister was not emotionally healthy enough to raise my daughter, my ex-husband was my ex-husband for a reason. I didn't have anybody that I could entrust her to, to be loved and cared for, and watched over and supported the way I wanted her to be, and in that thought form back in my body. So, to this day, I don't know if they. You sent me or I sent me back, and I won't know until I'm on the other side. When you cross over, there's that kind of help to bring you back to, you know, your essence, who you are as a soul, and to remember the brilliance of you. And so I tell them, there's nothing to be afraid of. There's absolutely nothing going to go on that's scary, that's demeaning, that's hurtful, that's there's nothing but love and joy on the other side, and I don't want people to be fearful of something that's so beautiful. I think we should be celebrating death just like we celebrate birth. It's the same, it's on the same par. It's going to the next level of your beingness. How can that be detrimental in any way. How can that be scary? It's not. It's an adventure, the most divine feeling you could ever imagine. It's connection, it's satisfaction, it's comfort, it's preciousness to love and be loved.