NYTimes writer Jessica Grose visits an unusual conference.
Near-death experiencers are the best dancers. I could identify which attendees at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies have been to the brink, because they moved their bodies with un-self-conscious abandon, ripping up the floor of a tent on the grounds of a suburban Chicago Hilton.
Also:
In the weeks since I returned* from the conference, my mind has kept drifting back to a woman I spoke to, Hailey Georgia Harris…. [She was] striking and poised. She had a shaved head and a bright pink backpack. She told me she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 and had been getting treatment ever since, though the disease has progressed from Stage 1 to Stage 4. She is 44 years old and has two sons.
As she began to process her mortality, Harris started listening to people recounting their near-death experiences. “I didn’t have the right words for it at the time, but I would find myself listening to them in the car, and then it became like a nighttime ritual, where I would put them on and I would go to sleep, and I didn’t really share that with anybody, but it just brought me profound peace,” she said.
She felt that after her diagnosis, she hit what she called an edge, “where you can’t go back, but people expect you to go back to your normal life within your circle, your tribe, but you also have one foot into the other side.”