The Healing Journey

July 28, 2024

Dr. Mary Neal drowned in a kayaking accident in 1999 on a waterfall in Chile’s Fuy River. But that wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning.

While her friends rushed to save her as she was trapped underwater 30 minutes, Neal visited Heaven. She recorded her near-death experience in a 2011 bestseller, “To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels and Life Again.”

“It felt as if I had finally shaken off my heavy outer layer, freeing my soul,” she wrote. “I rose up and out of the river, and when my soul broke through the surface of the water, I encountered a group of fifteen to twenty souls (human spirits sent by God), who greeted me with the most overwhelming joy I have ever experienced and could ever imagine….I experienced Heaven first-hand after my kayaking accident. The Heaven I witnessed was so pure, love-filled, and magnificent that I did not want to return to Earth.”

A UCLA-trained orthopedic surgeon, Neal said, “I believe Jesus was holding me, comforting me, and reassuring me when I was drowning,” But it was not her time and she was sent back. However, she was told her oldest son, Willie, would die in ten years. Just as she was completing her book, Willie, 20, was hit by a car and killed in Maine while he was roller-skiing. She anticipated it, but she couldn’t understand it and had a hard time accepting it.

Her second book, “7 Lessons from Heaven: How Dying Taught Me How to Live a Joy-Filled Life,” offers hope for those of us who fear death … and for those of us suffering the loss of a loved one. It talks about how she endured her son’s death and the grief that accompanied it.

During that time, she wrote a “Daily Creed,” which she taped to the refrigerator:

I believe God’s promises are true.
I believe Heaven is real.
I believe nothing can separate me from God’s love.
I believe God has work for me to do.
I believe God will see me through and carry me when I cannot walk.

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