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Good morning. The report this week about the woman in South Africa who woke up in the morgue probably sent shivers down many a spine. She’d been pronounced dead after a car crash but mortuary technicians noticed her chest moving. Now, she’s recovering in hospital. I’m sensitised to this story as my parents’ burial plot is in the Shankhill cemetery in Lurgan famous for the grave of Marjorie McColl with its epitaph: Lived Once Buried Twice. The history goes, that when Marjorie succumbed to a fever in 1705 and her doctor husband arranged a hurried interment. That night, two grave-robbers dug up her coffin. To get her precious wedding ring, they started to cut off her finger. At that moment, Marjorie awoke, sat bolt upright and screamed. The thieves fled. And, Marjorie trudged home to her family. Three centuries on, identifying the moment of actual death in some cases remains a challenge. It used to be simple: cardiac arrest, no breathing or response. But, from the late 60s, advances in resuscitation required a new definition based on brainstem death. Last month, I attended a lecture by Dr Pim van Lommel a cardiologist from The Netherlands who explained that, since then, such regular resuscitations have generated a new phenomenon – patients giving accounts of their experiences when supposedly dead. Although from a wide range of backgrounds, these descriptions of near-death experiences contain many common features. And, they often correspond to traditional ideas. For instance, the Vedanta texts claim that, preceding death, the soul sees its path illuminated like a tunnel and it moves towards the light assisted by loving, compassionate guides. However, the Vedas are clear that those who return from such experiences have not yet experienced death. Such souls were in a transitory state having no physical life symptoms, but from which there was still the possibility of return. Indeed, in many near-death testimonies, the subjects talk about a border, a point beyond which they intuitively know there is no coming back. The Bhagavad-gita asserts that our individual consciousness never dies. Death is not the end of personal existence, but is the moment when we, as the conscious entity, the soul, must irreversibly relinquish the physical body. Near-death experiences cannot tell us what actually exists beyond death, but as Dr van Lommel concluded from his studies, they do seem to provide those who’ve undergone them strong conviction that life of some sort may continue on the other side. And, they certainly question our current assumptions about what constitutes that vital moment of our demise. One funeral per life is enough for any of us.