Gladys' Story - a Life After Death experience

I wrote this first on FB today, but am posting it here too because, time and energy allowing, I may turn this into a longer tale about the other Near Death Experiences shared with me unexpectedly.  I have forgotten the details of some already, so perhaps I should get down the ones I do remember clearly.  Anyway, here is Gladys' Story.

"Jacob's Ladder" in our garden, 2013

 

Cannot summon up the energy to write down all the unsolicited stories I have been told about OOBEs - like that acronym, a bit like OOPs as in 'is this for real?!' :-)!  But will tell one since I touched on it in my previous comment.  I was sitting worn out on a train returning to Berkhamsted from London shopping, worn out because I suffered with something a doctor told me is called “Future Shock” no less!!  (More of F.S. another time, perhaps.)  I was sitting quietly minding my own business, when a gentle tap on my knee by a gnarled old hand made me look up into the quizzical gaze of an old lady.  I'll call her Gladys.  She spoke with a strong Cockney accent which I will not even attempt to reproduce here so please use your own imaginations.

 

“I hope you won’t mind, duckie, but I have something I want to tell you.”

 

 “Of course,” I answered, only too pleased for a little friendly chat with someone.

 “I was dead once and I came to life.” 

 “I believe you.  I know several people to whom that has happened.”

 “Did they tell you why they came back?”

“Yes.  They were made to understand they had unfinished business or were not ready to enter Heaven.  Except for one.  She pleaded and pleaded, and one of her family’s old houseboys who had died pleaded on her behalf and God agreed she could go back.  She had a pair of very young twins.”

“The same happened to me!  I mean, the unfinished business bit.”

 

GLADYS’ STORY:  She was a pampered and over-protected only child with diabetes.  From an early age, she longed to work with disabled children but when she was old enough to work, her parents would not hear of her desire.  In their minds, she was too frail.  So she became a dutiful nine to five secretary and hated it.  One day, she fell into a diabetic coma and died.  I would guess from her age that this happened in the 1930s when treatment for diabetes was not as efficient as it is now. 

Gladys felt her ‘self’ as she put it, leaving her body, and then she was looking down on it, lying still on the bed with a doctor and two nurses fussing over her.  “I wasn’t afraid at all.  Not a bit!” she told me.

 

She then seemed to be drawn in some way along a dark tunnel at the end of which was a beautiful light.  With all her heart, she longed for the light.  When she reached it, she seemed to be standing in an extraordinarily beautiful garden.  She looked around and saw a magnificent gate.  Gladys tried to describe it to me, its great height and width, and its colouring resembling the sheen and appearance of a pearl, but “not like a earthly pearl, not like that, I dunno how to describe it properly but pearl is the closest I can get to it.”  She said she ran to the gate and hammered on it excitedly.  “Lord Jesus, let me in!  Let me in, Lord Jesus, through your pearly gate of ‘Heaven!” 

 

Her old hand tapped my knee again and she leaned forward, serious, searching my face as if to look for disbelief, but I believed her completely and I smiled at her to continue.  

 

 “He refused.  He refused.”  She was nodding her head as she remembered, still looking at me with a serious expression.   “A very beautiful voice, a man’s voice”, spoke to her from behind the gate.  She thought it must be Saint Peter but he announced himself, “I am Jesus.” She wished everyone could hear the voice, so manly - as she put it - “and posh, you know, but not snobby.  The most beautiful man’s voice you can imagine.”  And the voice was sad.  “I gave you a work to do, and you have not done it.  You allowed respect for your parents to mean more than I mean to you.” Gladys understood immediately and was filled with remorse.  Her delighted joy evaporated. “Do what I asked of you.” 

 

She then found herself drawn back into the tunnel and back into her body.  She returned to consciousness to the great surprise and relief of the doctor and her parents who were already grieving.

When she had recovered, Gladys told her parents she would be training to work with disabled children, that it was God’s will for her, and she hoped they would accept it.  This time they did, and she worked for nearly 40 years with them.  She never married, because the only children she wanted were “those precious ones whom no one else really cared about most of the time.”  As Gladys finished her story, the train arrived at Berkhamsted Station and I had to get off.  I scribbled the story down hastily when I got home in order to impress it on my memory and had it for years but somewhere along the line after several moves it has been lost.

 

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