This Man Died Twice In One Year And He Knows What Death Is Really Like

Source: Imgur

This 22-year-old Swede named Sasha Eliasson found himself on a hospital bed twice in one year after one particularly nasty motorcycle crash, where his body shut down from “the pain and physical damages on my body. No pulse, no breathing and no consciousness…” and again after surgery, where “the pain, coupled with an immense amount of painkillers, caused [the] pulse to drop to around 10 bpm and [the] respiratory system shut down.”

Source: Imgur

He says he was clinically “dead” for about two minutes.

He describes the “other side” here:

…it was just black emptiness. No thoughts, no consciousness, nothing.

The only reason I know is because the doctors were obligated to share the information with me. “So yeah, you were dead for a couple of minutes, just FYI!”

Much like a dreamless nap, you don’t just wake up and feel like time just jumped ahead. You know that you’ve been asleep for awhile. At the same time, you can’t really remember experiencing anything at all, unless you had a dream.

So if the doctors wouldn’t have said anything [sic] I would’ve just thought that I took a dreamless nap. — r00tdude

He goes on to describe how it felt to enter death:

It’s hard to say if what I felt was fear.

Hmm… I’ll try to explain. You know that feeling when you’re about to sleep and you feel like you’re falling and you WAKE UP. That’s what it felt like right before I crashed. Just a sudden shock. I don’t think there’s enough time to process the information and connect the situation with an emotion. You just feel that something’s not right. — r00tdude

And he had this to say about religion:

I think that’s why religion is a great way to cope with [death]. But an even better way of coping with it is to just accept the fact the death is death. Once you’re dead, that’s it, it’s over. — r00tdude

And again, to sum up his experience with death:

I definitely fear it less. I know now that death is nothing worse than sleeping. When you die, you just stop existing, nothing to worry about!

Well, obviously when you’re at your final death and perhaps burning alive or something, it WILL be terrifying and painful. It will be living hell. But after a while it will all be over and you won’t even have that memory to haunt you! — r00tdude

Eliasson writes that he is less scared of dying now that he knows there is nothing on the other side, but that he’ll continue to live his life, with this new perspective, about just how mortal we all are.

“All I want to accomplish in life is to have fun and make other peoples lives better as best as I can,” he wrote in the Reddit thread. “No personal achievement will matter to me once I’m dead, the only thing that will live on after my death will be my impact on the people that are still alive. And hopefully my impact will be positive!” Incredible. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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