27-05-2025
I drowned for 30 minutes and suffered a near-death experience... I saw God and didn't want to return
Lisa Bliss was 10 when she fell into an icy river while playing by a river near her grandparents' cabin and remained unconscious for more than 30 minutes.
But while her body lay lifeless, her spirit, she says, was journeying elsewhere.
Instead of fear or confusion, the New Yorker describes an overwhelming sense of peace.
A path appeared before her, lined with trees and blossoms in 'beautiful vibrant colors.'
'I was in this huge field of flowers and a meadow opened up before me,' she recalls. 'All of a sudden, everything blasted into this bright light everywhere.'
'Anytime I would walk by a flower, I would see these levels and layers of color to each petal of the flower,' she says.
'It was as if I could dive into the colors or dive into the flowers and all of me would just go right into it.'
She wandered the field, drawn deeper by a sensation she describes as a 'magnetic pull' — something invisible but irresistible, tugging her forward along the path.
'I kept getting distracted by all the beautiful colors,' she says. 'And then I would pull myself back out and look around, and I started to feel this magnetic pull down through the path that split the meadow in half.'
Talking to Utah-based psychologist and filmmaker, Wesly Lapioli, Ms Bliss can still recall the visions with perfect clarity decades on — as if the event happened yesterday.
As she moved forward through the field, she saw something breathtaking: a pair of 'absolutely gorgeous' gates in the distance.
Though only a child, Lisa instantly understood what she was seeing.
'As a kid, I thought: these must be the 'pearly gates'—the ones I'd heard my family talk about in church,' she says.
Standing in front of the gates was a single figure. The gates were open, the figure still.
'I had to stop and I was so blown away,' she says. 'I just had to take a moment and then I noticed that there was a figure standing in front of the gates.'
Though she couldn't see the figure's face clearly, Lisa says she felt an instant recognition.
'I knew who he was,' she says. 'But I couldn't get close enough to see his face clearly.'
She now believes that the figure was God.
The path was also lined with 'long lines of people dressed in white,' she recalls, but she couldn't make out their faces.
She didn't speak to them. She didn't need to. Everything felt calm and silent.
Desperate to reach the gates before they closed, she began 'running and running.' But just as she neared the threshold — she was pulled back.
The colors, the peace, the presence — all of it vanished.
Lisa woke to find herself lying on cold rocks beside the river. Her cousin had dragged her out and she had been resuscitated after being clinically lifeless for more than half an hour.
'I knew instantly I was back in my body and it felt horrible... absolutely horrible,' she says.
'My body felt like 10 times heavier than it was and it was the middle of the day on a bright sunny day and the light just seemed dim and dark.
'It was horrible feeling, the worst depression I have ever felt.'
After being resuscitated, Bliss was taken back to her grandparents' cabin.
They told her that she had been under the water 'for a good half hour.'
The family suspect she didn't perish because the water was 'so freezing cold' it helped preserve her brain and she didn't suffer any brain damage.
She slept for two to three days straight, running a fever and slipping in and out of consciousness.
Studies have shown that humans exposed to cold temperatures for long periods of time can survive and show normal brain activity despite being apparently 'dead' to others.
After her near death experience, Bliss remembers 'sleeping for two or three days without waking up' and running a fever.
She says the sleep was 'so strange' and it felt like she was 'almost in a coma' as she doesn't remember anything from that period of time.
When she was finally better, Bliss says her family never talked about her brush with death until almost two decades later.
That course of events went on to change the course of her life and encouraged her to pursue a career as a therapist, helping others deal with death and 'what lies beyond'.
