Passings: Death, Dying, and Unexplained Phenomena by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff

I found myself moving down a very black passage.  Many people define it as a tunnel, but I had no concept of walls, just inky blackness within the boundaries of my peripheral vision . . .

 
Among the occurrences described by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff in the new nonfiction Passings are a near-death experience at the age of 11 and an out-of-body experience as an adult.  There are anecdotes about prescient knowledge and prophetic dreams.  Carole also related her sighting of a “thin crackling rod of shimmering white light” several nights after her daughter Kim’s death.  Carole is a scholar specializing in paleoanthropology.
 
Carole wrote that before the conclusion of her NDE, she was aware of vague people telling her that she had to go back.  “Eventually, reluctantly, I gave into the realization that I was not going to be allowed access to the light.  The instant I accepted the fact that I had to go back, everything stopped.  The memory ends.”
 
She explained in Passings, “The vignettes of death that follow are presented here as each one affected me and touched me during my years of physical and mental growth.”  Passings is dedicated “For Kim”.  Carole observed, “I believe as my entire life was changed by Kim’s dream.”  Carole pondered the circumstances of Kim’s dream of dying, and other precognitive dreams Kim had experienced in the past, along with Carole’s own premonitions.
  
It was after her daughter died that Carole began to study, read, travel and discuss her experiences with the heads of foreign museums, professors, doctors, psychiatrists and others she chanced to meet.  Many of them told her about the anomalous occurrences that they’d experienced.
 
Her out-of-body experience occurred during a contentious discussion with her husband, whose anger derived from his predicament of being a cancer patient facing imminent death.  Carole suddenly found herself standing 20 feet away in an opposite corner of the room as she looked back at the two of them.
 
A source of commentary for the book derived from Carole having served as a hospice board member for many years.  One hospice account is that of a dying woman who attested she was talking to a sister who’d died years earlier although her daughters and the nurse present couldn’t see her.  The nurse who told Carole about this incident said that the story was one of hundreds, that many dying patients talk about seeing a departed relative or about someone visiting them in a dream.