Divine Encounters Episode 027 | Near-Death Experience Story
Rob Gentile grew up around the steel mills of western Pennsylvania, was raised Catholic, and was home in North Carolina recovering from a neck procedure when, he says, a massive heart attack took him to the edge. His heart stopped for about 20 minutes, and in the moment before it did, he says he sprang up and cried out a name: Frosty, his wife’s brother, who had died seven weeks earlier. In this Divine Encounters episode Rob tells Alex Ferrari about the message he says Frosty gave him, the doctor who refused to quit, and how it all changed his view of God and what comes after this life.
Key Takeaways
- Rob says he suffered a massive heart attack in January 2016, four days after a procedure to remove bone spurs from his neck.
- He says his heart was flatlined for 20 minutes before a doctor found a slight pulse, and that he then lay in a coma for four days.
- Just before he flatlined, Rob says, he sat up and screamed the name of Frosty, his wife’s brother who had died seven weeks earlier.
- Rob says Frosty gave him a message for the family: he was in a good place, and he wanted Rob to go back and help clean things up.
- Rob says that message was his first big paradigm shift, because his Catholic upbringing had taught him that someone in Frosty’s situation was condemned.
- He describes learning that a doctor’s late father had been urging her to keep working on him, and says he now sees spiritual connection as usual rather than unusual.
| Guest | Rob Gentile |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 027 |
| Background | Raised in the Pittsburgh area and in the steel industry; raised Catholic; now lives in North Carolina |
| When it happened | January 2016, four days after a neck procedure |
| What Rob says happened | A massive heart attack at home around 11 pm, then a flatline at the hospital |
| Time away | About 20 minutes flatlined, followed by a four day coma |
| Who he says he met | Frosty, his wife’s late brother; and, he says, the late father of the doctor treating him |
| The message | Frosty is in a good place, and our real identity comes from God |
Steel Country and a Catholic Boyhood
Alex opens with his usual question: what was life like before you died? Rob answers with where he comes from. He is originally from the Pittsburgh area of western Pennsylvania, and he grew up in the steel business. He worked in the mill, and a lot of his family is still back there. Today he lives in North Carolina.
He was raised Catholic, and that matters later. He is 62 as he tells the story, and he remembers the version of Catholic teaching he grew up with: certain things were a mortal sin, and certain endings meant a condemned soul. He carried those ideas for decades without questioning them. As a younger man he had also picked up bone spurs in his neck from sports injuries, which is where the trouble begins.
Rob has a family at home that he describes with real tenderness. He and his wife have a child with special needs. Their daughter Maria has a seizure disorder, and Rob says she has Rett syndrome, a rare condition. Keep that in mind. When his heart stops, Rob does not describe fear for himself. What he hears about, afterward, is his wife begging for him to be saved because their daughter would not make it without him.
A Quiet Night, Then a Scream
The bone spurs led him to Pittsburgh, where he says a well-known doctor had developed a newer technique for removing them. Rob describes it as a small cut at the front of the neck, a night in the hospital, and then home. Nothing about it sounded dramatic. He had it done in January of 2016.
Four days later, around 11 pm, he says he had a massive heart attack in bed. He tells Alex that in hindsight doctors believe a blood clot or a piece of plaque broke loose and lodged in a major artery, though he says they are not exactly sure. He does not remember any of what happened next. He knows it only from his wife.
She was asleep when screaming filled the house. Her first thought was for their daughter, and she ran down the hall to check on Maria, who was fine. Then she turned on the light in their room and saw Rob flopping around in the bed like a fish, screaming in pain. She called an ambulance. The hospital is about three miles from their home, a detail Rob returns to with gratitude. A neighbor came over to watch Maria, and he was wheeled into the emergency room.
The Name He Screamed Before the Flatline
In the emergency room, Rob says, staff knew he was having a massive heart attack. They connected him, gave him blood thinners and medications to calm him down, and called the cardiologist, who was not yet at the hospital. His wife and a nurse stayed in the room. The nurse told her they had him calm and stable until the cardiologist arrived.
Then, Rob says, the moment his wife heard those words, everything changed. When he writes about it in his book, he says, it reads like a scene from a horror film. He is unconscious. All of a sudden he sprang up off the gurney from the waist, as if somebody had grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him forward with great force. His eyes popped wide open. He screamed the name Frosty. Then he collapsed backward and flatlined.
A code blue rang out through the hospital and a team rushed in. Before the doctors took her out of the room, his wife turned to Dr. Patel, who is now a good friend of Rob’s. She told her to save her husband, because they had a special needs child who would not make it without him, and she could not do this alone. In the hall, Rob says, his wife dropped to her knees and began praying out loud for God to save him.
Twenty Minutes and a Doctor Who Would Not Stop
Dr. Patel and her team did everything, Rob says: paddle shocks, injections of epinephrine directly into the heart, chest rubs, all of it. He was flatlined for 20 minutes. The cardiologist arrived in the middle of this.
Rob wants Alex to notice something about Dr. Patel. After that long, he says, she should have called it. Normally doctors think the brain is gone by then. But something compelled her to keep going, and she obtained a slight pulse.
The cardiologist, Dr. Boswell, then took over. Rob says he sent a pump up through the thigh, found the blockage and placed two stents in his heart. By then, Rob says, it was too late to avoid cardiogenic shock. Another doctor, Dr. Carson, intubated him. He went on a ventilator and slipped into a coma that lasted four days.
Four Days in a Coma
During those four days, Rob says, doctors were not sure he would ever wake up. They sent in neurologists to assess whether he was brain dead, including a world famous one who also happens to be his daughter’s neurologist. Rob says no one could really determine it.
His oldest brother drove down from Pittsburgh. Because Rob was raised Catholic, his brother called a local parish priest, who came in and anointed him with oils and gave him the last rites. Rob explains that this sacrament, extreme unction, is received once in a lifetime. Family gathered.
On the fourth day his doctor told his wife they could not wait any longer. They would take out the ventilator and see what they had. Rob began pulling the tubes out and choking, and then, in his words, there he was. In recovery, the first face he saw was Dr. Boswell, who is a Sikh and wore a purple headdress. Rob, still groggy, thought he was watching a movie.
“It Was Frosty. He Came to Me.”
Rob’s wife was the first one into the room. He says she was talking like a child, in a high-pitched rush: it was Frosty, your brother, he came to me, you have to believe me. Rob had no idea what she meant. She was calm now, and told him what he had done. Right before the flatline he had sprung up on the gurney, screamed Frosty’s name, and fallen back.
Here is the background. Frosty was his wife’s brother. Rob says he had passed by suicide seven weeks before the night Rob died. Frosty ran a surveying business, was going through a divorce around Christmas time, was living in the upstairs room at his parents’ house, and had a daughter with a child of her own. Rob says he had struggled with addiction, had been clean for about five years, and was under heavy pressure at the end of the year. The family does not know exactly why he did it.
Frosty’s mother called Rob in the middle of the night and asked him to look in the bedroom for a note or a journal that might offer a clue. Rob went up seven times and, on the seventh trip, found a journal. He says it was a hard thing to do, and he leaves it there.
If you are struggling, you are not alone. In the US you can call or text 988 any time.
The Message Rob Says Frosty Gave Him
Rob’s wife asked him to tell her exactly what Frosty had said to him. Rob says Frosty told him: “I’ve made a big mess out of things, but I want you to go back and help clean things up. Tell my parents I’m in a good place.”
Rob says that landed hard. He had been raised Catholic and is 62. When he was young, he says, suicide was called a mortal sin, and the teaching was that your soul was condemned. He says this was his first big paradigm shift, a spiritual shift in his own mind: hey, something is not right here. Hell, he came to feel, is not the place we were taught it was.
There was a second detail. His wife later told him that in that moment she had been screaming, no, no, no, “Don’t go to Frosty.” Stay here with me. She believed, as Rob does, that when someone is dying a loved one often comes to ease the passing. Rob says he felt that with his own mother when she died. It is “that a spirit comes to welcome you and ease your passing to the other side.” His wife was pleading with Rob to stay on this side with her. For more on how people describe these moments, see our glossary entry on deathbed visions.
Dr. Patel’s Father
The second story came on the second day after he woke. Rob did not know it at first, but the woman who walked into his room, pulled up a chair and introduced herself was Dr. Patel, the doctor who had worked on him that night. She became very emotional. She told him how many times she had almost lost him. His arms were paralyzed for three or four days after the coma, so when she reached down and put her hand on his, he could not move.
Then she began to talk about her father. She told him they were extremely close and nearly knew each other’s thoughts. He helped her through medical school. All he wanted to live for was to see her first child. She was pregnant with her first son when, she told Rob, her father suddenly had an aneurysm and died six months before the baby arrived. Since then she had lost her faith. She is Hindu and spiritual, she told him, but she did not believe anymore, and she had been bitter.
Seeing Rob alive, she told him, “there’s no way you should be here.” It gave her hope that maybe there is something more. That was when, Rob says, the puzzle came together. During the resuscitation he had heard a male voice repeating again and again: “Keep working on him. Don’t give up. You can save him.” He understood in that moment it was Dr. Patel’s father, encouraging his daughter to keep going.
A Year Later, and Every Year Since
Rob did not tell her. He was on the second day out of a coma, still piecing things together, and he thought she might believe he was crazy. So he let it go. A year later, he met her at the hospital and told her the story.
Since then they get together every year on her father’s birthday and talk about him. Rob says it was her father speaking through him, though she never heard it herself. She now knows her father is always with her. Rob’s view is that we are “spiritual beings, first having a human experience,” so we should not find this so uncanny. We should think of it as usual rather than unusual.
Placing Rob’s Story Beside Other Accounts
Rob’s account follows a path many cardiac arrest survivors recognize in outline: a sudden collapse, a long time without a pulse, a coma, and an awakening with a story to tell. A 2001 study in The Lancet, led by Pim van Lommel, looked at 344 cardiac arrest survivors and found that 62 of them, about 18 percent, reported a near-death experience.
What stands out in Rob’s telling is that the central visitor is not a being of light or a tour of another realm. It is a family member who had died, and a message meant for the living. In his words, it is a relationship that continues. You can read more about this pattern in our complete guide to near-death experiences and the glossary entry on after-death communication.
A Spirituality of Wholeness
When Rob wrote his book, he kept an urn holding some of Frosty’s ashes nearby to remind himself that in the end we are reduced to a pile of dust. Without spirit, he says, we are just a meat stick. That is why he says it matters so much to develop what he calls a spirituality of wholeness: understanding who we are, where we come from and why it matters.
He says “our real identity comes from God,” and when we learn to see the divine in everything, it brings freedom, no matter what happens in this life. It does not matter, he says, how much money we earn, what we drive, or what position we hold. His ultimate purpose is to grow spiritually, to connect with the love and light of the Divine, and to evolve toward being a better person. In the end, he says, “our spiritual relationship with the Creator is really all we have.”
Questions to Sit With
- Rob says his wife prayed on her knees while doctors worked. Who has held space for you when you could not hold it for yourself?
- He says his Catholic upbringing taught him one thing about loved ones lost to suicide, and his experience pointed him toward another. What belief have you inherited that you are ready to look at again?
- Dr. Patel lost her faith and then found hope in an unlikely place. Where might hope be arriving for you right now?
Think of someone you have lost and say their name out loud once this week. Share one memory of them with another person.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Rob says that a spirit often comes to welcome us and ease our passing.
- He says Frosty’s message made him question what he had been taught about hell.
- He says we are spiritual beings first, having a human experience.
- He says the people we love can encourage us, even when we cannot hear them.
- He says our real identity comes from God, and the spiritual relationship with the Creator is what lasts.
Please enjoy my conversation with Rob Gentile.
Guest Links: Connect With Rob Gentile
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Rob Gentile?
Rob Gentile is the author of a book about his experience. He grew up in the Pittsburgh area in the steel industry, was raised Catholic, and now lives in North Carolina. He says he was flatlined for 20 minutes in January 2016 after a massive heart attack.
What happened to Rob Gentile in January 2016?
He says that four days after a neck procedure to remove bone spurs, he had a massive heart attack at home. At the hospital, he says, his heart stopped for about 20 minutes. He was then in a coma for four days.
Who is Frosty in Rob Gentile’s story?
Frosty was the nickname of Rob’s wife’s brother. Rob says Frosty had died by suicide seven weeks before Rob’s heart attack, and that Rob screamed his name just before he flatlined.
What message does Rob say Frosty gave him?
Rob says Frosty told him that he had made a big mess of things, wanted Rob to go back and help clean things up, and asked him to tell his parents he was in a good place.
Why was Frosty’s message a turning point for Rob?
Rob was raised Catholic and says he was taught that suicide was a mortal sin that condemned the soul. He says hearing that Frosty was in a good place was his first big spiritual shift and made him question what he had been taught about hell.
Who was Dr. Patel?
Dr. Patel was the emergency doctor who worked to revive Rob. He says she kept going long after she could have stopped, and that she later told him about her father, who had died of an aneurysm six months before her first son was born.
What did Rob hear during his resuscitation?
He says he heard a male voice saying, “Keep working on him. Don’t give up. You can save him.” He came to believe it was Dr. Patel’s late father encouraging her, and he told her about it a year later.
How did Rob’s wife see the moment he flatlined?
She says she was screaming for him not to go to Frosty and to stay with her. She believed, as Rob does, that a loved one often comes to welcome us and ease our passing.
What does Rob mean by a spirituality of wholeness?
He means understanding who we are, where we come from and why it matters, and seeing the divine in everything. He says it brings freedom no matter what happens in life.
If you are struggling, where can you get support?
If you are struggling, you are not alone. In the US you can call or text 988 any time.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the guest’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What after-death communication means
- A short explanation of deathbed visions
- Amber Kasic on a shared death experience with her dying father
- Hospice nurse Julie McFadden on what happens before we die
- Brian Hoyland, a veteran clinically dead for ten minutes
- Ellyn Dye on meeting a father she never knew
- Vincent Tolman, clinically dead for 45 minutes
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Rob Gentile 0:08
I'm originally from Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh area, and in the steel industry. I grew up in the steel business and worked in the mill, and a lot of my family's still back there. But anyway, I live in North Carolina now, but I had had some bone spurs on my neck from sports injuries when I was younger. And there was this famous doctor that is in Korea, that came from Korea, he's in Pittsburgh, and developed this new technique where they go in through the front of your neck and they drill out these bone spurs. So they just go in, they make a small cut, they move your esophagus aside. They go in, they drill these things out. No big deal. You're in the hospital one night, and you and you released. I went up there. I had that done, and this was, this was in January of 2016 so four days later, I came home and had a massive heart attack in my bed at around 11pm in retrospect, now we now we know what happened is that I threw a blood clot or a piece of plaque broke off. They're not exactly sure, but it went right into my widow maker and both, of course, everything stops, so I didn't know what was going on my wife, we have a special each child who has a seizure disorder, and you know, it's 11 o'clock at night, you're asleep. All of a sudden, there's all this screaming in the house, and it's me screaming in pain. Don't remember any of this. So my wife, my wife, runs down the hall to check on Maria, and she's fine. And you know, she's confused, turns on the light and area and flopping around in bed like a fish, screaming. Don't remember any of that. She calls the ambulance, and thank goodness the hospital is like, three miles away from our house. So neighbor comes over to watch Maria wheeled into the emergency room. They know that I'm having a massive heart attack, so they hook me up. They give me some whatever it is that they give you blood thinners and things to, you know, calm me down, submit all the night, they call the cardiologist. He's not in the hospital, so my wife and nurse are in a room, and she says, hey, look, you know, we've got him. Got him calm down. He's okay right now until the cardiologist gets here and he's stable. Soon as she said that, as my wife says Now, when I detail that in the book, it was like a moment from the movie The Exorcist. All of a sudden, I sprang up off the gurney, from my waist up like somebody grabbed me by my shirt and just pulled me forward with great force. So I'm unconscious. I spring forward like this. My eyes pop wide open, and I scream out the name frosty. I scream out frosty, and I collapse backwards on the gurney, boom, my flat line, code blue rings out through the hospital and in Russia, team of doctors to start working on before the doctors take my wife out of the room, my wife turns to the to the doctor, who is now a very good friend of mine, a little beautiful Indian woman named Dr Patel. And she turns to Dr Patel and says, Look, you have to save my husband. We have a special needs child, and she's not going to make it without him, and I can't do this alone. So she takes my wife out of the room. My wife drops to her knees, starts praying out loud to God to save me, and Dr Patel starts working on me. Well, Dr Patel and her team did everything I'm talking about, the paddle shocks, four injections into my heart with the needle of epinephrine, sternal rubs, the whole thing, I was flatlined for 20 minutes. So during that period of time, you know, the cardiologist finally arrives. Dr Patel, for some reason, she should have called it long ago, because, you know, after a while they think your brain did so, but she kept on working on me. Something compelled her to continue to work on me, and she obtained a slight pulse. Dr Boswell comes in, the cardiologist, puts a pump up through my thigh, finds the blockage, puts two stints in my heart, but it was too late. I'd gone into cardiogenic shock. Another doctor comes in, who's a friend of mine now, Dr Carson comes in, intubates me. I'm on the vent, and I slip into a four day comb. So that's how it all began. They think that I'm probably brain dead. So, and I don't know how this works, but they send in neurologists during this four day period. And ironically, one of those neurologists, world famous, Dr corbier, Dr Jean Ronald corbier, who happens to be my daughter's neurologist. My daughter has Rett syndrome, very rare. He he comes in as well to see if I'm brain dead. But you know, nobody can really determine that my oldest brother drives down from Pittsburgh. I was raised Catholic. He calls a local parish priest. Parish priest comes in, gives me my last rights, the Catholic faith. It's called extreme unction. You only get it once in your lifetime. So he comes in, anoints me with the oils, gives me my last rights. Everybody. Was home, and on the fourth day, my doctor says, Look, tells my wife, we can't wait any longer. It's four days now, we're going to take out the vent. If he starts breathing on his own, we'll see. We'll see what we got, you know, so obviously I start pulling the tubes out. I start choking and and here I am. So I go into recovery. The first person that I see is Dr Boswell, but my I'm still kind of like, unconscious. He's like, shaking me, you know, how are you feeling? Who's a Sikh, by the way, so he's got this purple headdress on. I'm looking up at this guy. I think I'm, I think I'm, you know, watching a movie. I don't know what's going on. Everything's still blurry. But my wife comes in. She's the first one that enters the room. She says, I'm talking like a child in this high pitched rush. You know voice, it was frosty. It was frosty. Your brother, frosty. He came to me. You have to believe me. You have to believe me. And she's like, calm down. I know, I know frosty came to you. I said, What are you talking about? She said, right before you flatline, you came you came up on the gurney, sprang forward, screamed out frosty's name, and then collapse backwards, and then boom, flatline. So to give you a little bit of history there so frosty is the nickname of my my wife's brother, and unfortunately, frosty had passed by suicide seven weeks prior to the night that I died. So frosty lives in this small country town. He was living with his parents at the time, which is about 35 miles south of where I live. And he had, it was around Christmas time, and frosty was going through a divorce. He was living in the upstairs bedroom of his parents house. And, you know, frosty had had some issues. He had some drug addiction, things going on, but had been clean for like, five years, but, you know, end of the year, and he had his own business, surveying business, and he's, you know, trying to figure out how to pay college. His daughter's got one child, her bills and lots of stuff going on. So he, so he went out to try to blow off some steam, you know, got, got some kind of drug that drove him mad for like, 40 minutes, and came home and unfortunately, took his own life. So his mother calls me in the middle of the night, and she said, come down here, please. And can you go up into the bedroom and try to find a note or a journal or something that would give us a clue as to why frosty did this. So I did. I went up into that bedroom seven times, picked through a rather gruesome scene, unfortunately, and finally, on the seventh trip up. I did find a journal, which I had given to the family So, but anyway, so my wife said, Tell me exactly what frosty said to me. And frosty said to me, I've made a big mess out of things, but I want you to go back and help clean things up. Tell my parents I'm in a good place. So that was very curious to me, having been raised Catholic, you know. And the whole, you know, I'm 62 so back then, it was a mortal sin. And, you know, you you went to to, to hell, your soul was condemned all these things. And so that was like the first big paradigm shift, the spiritual shift that took place in my mind, that, hey, something's not right here. I mean, hell is not a good place, you know. And it was kind of curious, because Melanie had told me what was going on at that moment, is that she was screaming to me, no, no, no, no, no, don't go to frosty. Don't go to frosty. Stay here with me, because you know it, and then we I've read it over and over again, and my wife actually has experienced it. I've experienced it with my mom during her passing, that a spirit comes to welcome you and ease your passing to the other side. That's very, very common. So she thought that frosty was coming to ease my passing into the spiritual realm. Was kind of interesting. She was just like pleading, you know, for me to stay there with him. So that's the first thing that happened, coming out of coma. There was another experience that I had which was really interesting. So on the second day, coming out of coma, I didn't know it was Dr Patel at the time, this lovely Indian woman walks into my room, and she pulls up a chair and sits down, and she introduces herself, I'm Dr Patel. I'm the one that was working on you that night. And she got very emotional. Can't tell you how many times I almost lost you. And this is what we went through. And my arms were paralyzed at the time, by the way, for like, three or four days coming out of coma. So she reached down and put her hand on mine, and she, all of a sudden, got very emotional, and she started talking about her father. I thought that was very odd, and she said, You know, I have to tell you something. My father and I were so close. He helped me get through medical school, and we almost knew each other's thoughts. Every time I was thinking of him. He called vice of her son. We were incredibly close in spirit, and she said all he was living for was to see my first child. And she said I was pregnant with my first son, and he just couldn't wait to see my son's face, but then unexpectedly, he had an aneurysm, and he died six months before my child was born.
And she said, you know, ever since then, Rob, I've lost I've lost faith, and I'm a very spiritual person. I'm Hindu, but I don't believe that stuff anymore. And you know, I've been very bitter about that whole thing, she says, But you know, seeing. Here alive against all the odds. There's no way you should be here. Just gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, there's something more out there. And it was in that moment that the puzzle unscrambled, and I began to put things together, because a male spirit had entered the room while Dr Patel was working on me. And I kept hearing over and over and over again, keep working on him. Don't give up. You can save him. Keep working on him. You can save him. And it struck me in that moment that it was Dr Patel's father encouraging her to continue to work on me. And interestingly enough, you know, Alex, I couldn't tell her in that moment because I'm thinking, Hey, okay, this second day coming out coma, I'm still trying to figure all this stuff out, he's going to think I'm crazy. So I let it go, and I didn't tell her, and it was a year later that I met her at the hospital that I told her that story. And it's like now every year since, you know, we get together on her father's birthday and talk about that. So it was her father speaking through me, even though she didn't hear him, you know, prompting her to continue working on me. So now she knows that her father is always with her, which, of course, you know, we're spiritual beings, first having a human experience. So why do we find that to be such a, you know, an uncanny thing. We really should think of it as being something you know usual instead of unusual. So that was the my first experience, my first envy. But the ultimate purpose for me is to grow spiritually. Is to learn more and more how to connect with that love and light of the Divine, how to become a better person, how to evolve more in that direction. Because, you know, in the end, as I, you know, when I wrote the book, I kept an urn with not all of this, but partial urn of Frosties ashes to remind me that, in the end, we really do just get reduced to a pile of dust. So that's all we are. Like you said, are we really are just a meat stick without spirit. So it's so important for us to develop this spirituality, what I would call the spirituality of wholeness, of understanding who we are, where we come from, why it's so important realizing that our real identity comes from God, and when we do that and learn how to see the divine in everything, it equals freedom or freedom, no matter what happens in this life. Doesn't matter how much money we earn, or, you know, what kind of car we drive, or what kind of position we we hold, because in the end, it's all folly. In the end, our spiritual relationship with the Creator is really all we have. That's it.
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