A Return to Life

Those who have been snatched from the very jaws of death, and have lived to record their sensations, have almost unanimously stated that the apparent approach of the last moment was accompanied by not only a sense of ease, but a feeling of positive happiness. Montaigne, in one of his essays, describes an accident which left him so senseless that he was taken up for dead. Upon being restored, however, he says—Methought my life only hung on my lips, and I shut my eyes to help to thrust it out, and I took a pleasure in languishing, and letting myself go. The pain in the case of Montaigne, and in that of others similarly restored, seems not to have been in apparent progress of death, but in the return to life. Cowper, when restored from his mad attempt at suicide by hanging, said in recovering that he thought he was in hell.

The Encyclopaedia of Death and Life in the Spirit World—Opinions and Experiences from Eminent Sources, J. R. Francis, Chicago, The Progressive Thinker Publishing House, 1903