A Book Review by Dr. Bruce Greyson
from The Journal of Near-Death Studies, Vol. 15, No.
3, Spring 1997
Kimberly Clark Sharp, former Northwest
Regional Coordinator of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) (when
IANDS had such things) and long- time coordinator of the Seattle Friends of IANDS chapter,
the oldest and largest local affiliate, has produced a remarkable book about her own
near-death experience (NDE) and its effects on her life. With so many first-person NDE
accounts on the market today, do we need one more? For myself (and, I suspect, for many
readers of this Journal), that’s a silly question: we can never have too many.
But this is not just another autobiographical NDE story, for Sharp brings to bear on this
story her clinical expertise as a critical care social worker and her earthy humor. It
contains plenty of "woo-woo" experiences ("woo-woo," Sharp explains,
is the sound the spiritual train makes right before it knocks us off the track). But its
style, like Sharp’s, is so down-to-earth that it’s difficult to dismiss these
stories. Sharp alludes to her "secret persona" as a stand-up comic: "Put a
microphone in my hand and a receptive audience, and you’d have to seal my mouth with
duct tape to keep me from spouting one-liners" (p. 143). After the Light puts her wit
beyond the reach of duct tape.
While Sharp leaves no doubt as to her traditional Christian orientation, she does not
preach or suggest that only Christians are saved. While she takes a Christian approach to
her own experiences of angelic and divine intervention, she does not impose that
interpretation on the NDE as a whole, particularly on her patients’ experiences, any
more than she imposes on them the medical interpretation ("ICU psychosis") of
her professional training. Rather, she takes each experience at its face value, telling
her patients first and foremost, "What you experienced is real," and allowing
them to formulate their own understanding. Is it true that what every NDEr has experienced
is real? As a scientist, I am not certain of that. Is it helpful to NDErs to have their
sanity validated? As a clinician, I am quite certain of that.
Significantly, Sharp starts her book not with her own NDE, but with that of Maria and her
now-famous tennis shoe on the ledge. Maria was a migrant worker admitted to Harborview
Medical Center’s cardiac care unit (CCU), where Sharp was working as a social worker.
While her body was undergoing a cardiac arrest, Maria floated out of the hospital and saw,
on a third-story window ledge on the side of the hospital farthest from the CCU, "a
man’s dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed on the left side where the little toe
would go. The shoelace was caught under the heel" (p. 11). Despite Sharp’s
having had an NDE herself, her professional training led her to doubt Maria’s story
until she finally located the shoe by going from room to room, pressing her face against
the windows--although the scuffed toe could only be seen from a perspective outside and
above the window. Sharp first published this account in my 1984 NDE anthology (Clark,
1984), and it has been repeated several times, most recently by Susan Blackmore (1995);
but the detailed account here is the definitive "Maria’s tennis shoe"
story.
Sharp flashes back in Chapter 2 to her own NDE at age 22. Since she was ostensibly
unconscious for much of the experience, she provides her father’s first-person
account of watching helplessly as his daughter stopped breathing and received
cardiopulmonary resuscitation. She then relates her own account of the NDE, using humor to
get around the ineffability of the experience ("Fade to black. Fade to
blacker"). The juxtaposition of Sharp’s own experience with her father’s is
compelling, and her down-to-earth style lends credibility to her story:
The only words I could formulate in the midst of this incredible Light were from my
childhood: "Homey home." It was something I used to say when we had been on an
outing and I began to spot the familiar landmarks of our neighborhood. (p. 25)
In the following chapter, aptly named "We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto,"
Sharp describes the bizarre aftereffects that made her fear she’d gone crazy
("Not lunatic crazy. Just a little ‘off’"). A spiritual force pulled
her away from everything she’d found security in: her family, her friends, her
fiancé, and, yes, Kansas. She describes the paranormal events that became commonplace in
her life as she followed the signs west, and following a ride in which her car seemed to
steer itself without a driver, concluded: "The reality test was over. Reality
lost" (p. 38).
Events turn from bizarre to ominous in Chapter 4, "Dance With the Demon," in
which Sharp describes her new residence in a farmhouse apparently haunted by a malevolent
force. Much of the apparent demonic content of this chapter is hard to integrate, as Sharp
relates it as she experienced it, rather than from a clinical perspective. She rejects the
notion that she was hallucinating (even though she had narcolepsy and was prone to sudden
daytime nightmares), and she also rejects the notion that her house was possessed by
Satan; yet she could not deny that the evil presence was real. Some of my difficulty
integrating this material derives from Sharp’s continued use of humor to deal with
the inexplicable; these matters are not funny, and one wonders why she continued to live
in the house as long as she did. This chapter will disturb many readers who, like myself,
would rather not acknowledge evil as a distinct force, rather than just a shortage of
goodness. By the end of the chapter Sharp comes to terms with these experiences without
fully understanding them, and tries to immerse herself in the here-and-now atmosphere of
her work in the Harborview CCU--which brings us back chronologically to her encounter with
Maria.
Chapter 5 outlines Sharp’s approach to patients with NDEs, not by a dry list of
clinical guidelines but by a series of vignettes and quotes from her patients. She
suggests gentle but effective ways to open a discussion of patients’ NDEs: "What
was your last memory before losing consciousness? Do you remember anything after
that?"
The next few chapters return to Sharp’s personal story, from her "going
public" about NDEs when a television talk-show host surprised her on the air by
asking about Maria and the tennis shoe; to further encounters with ostensible demonic
spirits; to her whirlwind romance with her fiancé, his tragic death, and his visitations
afterwards; to her Dark Night of the Soul, the inner explosion of wrenching doubt.
With her characteristic self-effacing humor ("‘C’mere, Kenny,’ I said,
pulling him to my side. ‘I feel a metaphor coming on’"), Sharp introduces a
graphic analogy for the interface between the two worlds she found herself inhabiting.
Passengers on a ferry see the world around them as reality, and when they look down into
the water they see only the surface reflection of that "topside" world. But on
rare occasions, individuals may catch a glimpse of another world below the surface, as
intricate and varied as the one "topside." Experiences like NDEs allow us to
part the veil that normally separates the spiritual realm from our familiar
"topside" world.
In Chapter 9 Sharp describes the founding of the Seattle IANDS chapter, the oldest
continuous near-death support group, and relates the stories of some of the founders and
their efforts to overcome "the damnable thing about a near-death experience":
its ultimate ineffability. She then takes us through further encounters with spirits,
angelic and demonic, and her eventual synchronistic meeting with "Mr. Right."
Through this odyssey, Sharp came to understand spiritual visions not as predetermined
events but as maps, from which we can chart our own courses.
In Chapter 11 Sharp returns to her role as social worker and near-death clinician. She
details with compelling anecdotes her clinical approach to patients who have had NDEs;
provides examples of the wide variety of near-death phenomena, including frightening NDEs;
and reviews various physiological mechanisms that have been proposed to explain NDEs. Her
prescription for working through the pain of spiritual growth is the same as for natural
childbirth: "Breathe through it, try to stay focused, and emerge with something truly
wonderful when it’s over" (p. 159).
Bouncing back to her personal story, Sharp relates more "woo-woos" involving
visitations from deceased persons; balancing marriage and motherhood with her increasing
professional notoriety; and being forced, after 15 years as an "NDE expert," to
reveal in public her own NDE. But the most difficult chapter in Sharp’s life was the
discovery that she had an unusually deadly form of breast cancer, followed by the
discovery that she was also pregnant again. Without treatment, the cancer, fed by the
hormones of pregnancy, would quickly kill her; but the poisonous cancer treatment would
certainly kill her baby. Unable to sacrifice her baby to save her own life, Sharp
struggled with personal death again, finally yielding to her husband’s plea not to
leave him alone with a 2-year-old and a newborn already damaged by the radiation from her
bone scan and mammograms. She dedicates After the Light to this never-born baby. "To
David Eugene Sharp and all of the other unborn who never left the Light of God."
In the weeks of nausea and pain that came with the chemotherapy and radiation, Sharp lost
much of her hair, skin texture, energy, and dignity, but not her sense of humor. She was
scheduled to have the radiation target tattooed on her breast on April 1. "I had to
do something. On my left breast, with a red magic marker, I wrote WRONG BOOB in enormous
letters. Underneath, in smaller black letters I wrote, APRIL FOOLS" (p. 228). With
her remission from cancer came a re-mission, a rededication to live the lessons she’d
learned, to walk in faith and be the Light, as she had seen and felt it, for those not so
blessed.
Throughout After the Light, Sharp’s life story is intermingled with her death story.
This intermingling is sometimes awkward, when the "topside" world clashes with
the spiritual. But I think that intermingling is part of Sharp’s message: when you
live in both worlds, life is awkward. Some readers will find this juxtaposition of seeming
opposites uncomfortable. I’m sure Sharp found it uncomfortable as well--but at least
we have the option of putting the book down.
People who are looking for integration--of the material world and the spiritual, or of
demonic and angelic forces, or of Sharp’s spiritual journey and her professional
role--will not find it here. Sharp lays out her story in compelling prose, but does not
tie together the loose ends. For those looking for a neat package, those loose ends are
annoying; for those seeking the truth, loose ends are how it is. For many readers, any
well-written NDE book (and this is surely one) will be welcomed. For those uncounted who
have been touched by Sharp over the years, this book is long overdue. For the remainder,
this is still a book worth reading. It made me cry; it made me laugh; and it made me
rethink some of my fundamental ideas. As Sharp might sing into her microphone, "Who
could ask for anything more?"