Miles To Go Before I Sleep (34 page)

There were other challenges to telling my story.

After one talk show appearance in which I talked about the bitter feelings I had after the hijacking—how I'd felt abandoned by the U.S. government—I got an angry phone call at home.

“What right do you have to be bitter!” the woman practically screamed in my ear. “You have no right to complain or whine about what happened to you. You knew it was dangerous to be in the Middle East when all that terrorism was going on. And you chose to be there. So stop complaining!”

My God!
I thought.
All I'd done was to express my feelings honestly.
I explained how owning my own bitter feelings was an important part of my healing process, how getting these painful feelings out and accepting them allowed me to move past them. But the caller couldn't understand. She hung up in the middle of my sentence.

I called the phone company and got an unlisted number. From then on, I never discussed my angry feelings in public.

Sometimes people challenged me when I talked about the lessons I'd learned through the hijacking. “I believe we live forever,” I said in one of my speeches. “I also believe in reincarnation. This is not the only body that I've been in. My spirit is learning lessons, and each time that I come back, I come to a higher level of understanding. I get excited about traveling, doing new things, following what my heart needs. That's something I don't ignore anymore. I made a commitment that I won't stuff God anymore. I'll let God come out in me.”

I was often challenged when I talked about what I believed—especially when I spoke at some churches. If I didn't say what they believed, I wasn't right—or people would think I was in la-la land.

After the question and answer period, some people would come up and try to push the Bible on me. They quoted different biblical verses to prove that I was wrong about the lessons I'd learned through my own experience! I could tell they were angry about some of the things I said.

I was very puzzled about how to communicate my beliefs and experiences to people who felt threatened by me. I kept trying to think,
How can I convince them that I'm on their side? That we believe the same thing but we're saying it in different ways?
I looked for language that could bring us together.

I found a wonderful meditation guide called
The Daily Word.
It contained thoughts such as “I walk in the newness of life for God is my life and I am well” and “Whenever a friend or loved one experiences a health challenge, I continue to hold that dear one in thoughts of wholeness and wellness.” I read that quote at a time when one of my girlfriends was having problems with her child. Each day during my prayer and meditation time, I held her in the light.

I started reading
The Daily Word
along with my goals and affirmations every day. I found a lot in the guide that I could read in my speech that would make sense to churchgoers and to me. I also drew strength and inspiration from other readings by many different authors. A whole new world was opening up to me as I searched for answers to help me make sense of my new life—and attempted to share the meaning of my experience with others.

Along the way, I felt affirmed many times by the books I read and by the many people in my life who loved and supported me unconditionally. Slowly, I gained more confidence in my ability to talk about my journey in a way that was both meaningful to me and to the audiences I wanted to reach.

I felt honored when a friend asked me to be a reader at his wedding. Not only that, but he trusted me to select the reading myself. I chose this beautiful passage from Kahlil Gibran's book
The Prophet
, an inspiring collection of poems that meant a lot to me.

THOUGH I WAS CONSTANTLY BEING INVITED to share my story with large and small groups across the country, I still hadn't quit teaching. Mostly, I spoke during my time off—on weekends or evenings during the week.

As more and more speaking requests continued to pour in, however, I began to seriously think about becoming a full-time speaker. The tremendous response I received after appearing on the television show in Philadelphia gave me hope that I could do it.

Scott supported the idea. “I think you can do this,” he said. “Don't worry about it. We can get by.” His early encouragement and reassurance were so important to me. I knew that, even if things didn't work out with my speaking career, he would be there to back me up. Though our marriage wasn't going well, I never even considered that we wouldn't work things out.

Still, I was worried about whether I could make enough for us to live on. I was making twenty-seven thousand dollars a year as a teacher, and it would be tough to give up my steady paycheck.

I'd also have to give up the medical benefits I received as a full-time teacher. I called several private insurance companies to ask about individual coverage for Scott and me. I was eventually turned down by every single one: none would cover me due to my “preexisting condition”—the gunshot wound in my head from the hijacking.

Finally, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota agreed to write a policy for me, if I agreed to two major conditions: 1. None of my treatments relating to wounds suffered in the hijacking (neurological exams, x-rays, physical or emotional therapy, seizure medication, and so on) would be covered—I'd have to pay all of these expenses out of pocket; and 2. My policy would have a thousand dollar deductible.

I wrestled with other fears about my future too. I'd spent a lot of time and money earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in education. Though the link seems obvious to me now, I asked myself,
What does public speaking have to do with my training as a teacher? If I quit teaching, wasn't I throwing all that hard work away?

Yet my Inner Voice kept talking to me. I heard,
Trust and it will be okay.
And I also heard,
I have taken you this far—share your story.

One morning. I shared my goal of speaking full time with my teaching partner, Marcia Behring. Marcia was very supportive. She said she would talk to her husband, Bill, about my idea. He was a director of marketing and sales for a local corporation and might give me some support. He eventually offered to help me polish my existing speech, and both he and Marcia acted as my agents in booking speaking engagements.

In March 1988, I went in and talked to Louis Benko, the principal at Greenwood Elementary School, the man who had taken a chance in hiring me. I told him that I was interested in taking a two-year leave of absence. I didn't want to quit my job outright because it seemed smarter to give myself some flexibility. I still didn't totally trust the messages I'd been hearing.

I had one or two speaking contracts lined up, paying about one hundred dollars each. It wasn't much. And I had three more months of pay coming in from my teaching job.

Not long after I went on the show in Philadelphia, while I was still teaching, I got a phone call from the producers of the
Donahue
show. Phil Donahue was planning a show about people with near death experiences (NDE) and wanted me to share my story with his audience of three million viewers. Impressed with the uniqueness of my story, Donahue asked me to be the lead guest on the program.

A few years earlier I would have been reluctant to appear. For more than a year after the hijacking, I was afraid to tell people what happened to me on the tarmac. I was afraid they'd think I was crazy, making up the story, or hallucinating. I waited several years before going public with my story, telling only a few close friends about my near death experience.

People often asked, “Are you sure that really happened? Could you have been dreaming?”

It happened.

I was excited—and a bit scared—to appear on the show.

“May I bring a companion?” I asked the producer.

“Yes. Uh, who did you have in mind?” he inquired.

“My mother,” I said.

I asked my mother because she had always wanted to meet Donahue. She flew from Houston and I from Minneapolis, and we met in New York City. We stayed at a hotel in the city. In the morning,
Donahue
sent a limousine to pick us up.

Unfortunately, Mom wasn't allowed to be in the audience of the show.
Donahue
has a policy of not allowing relatives of guests to sit in the audience; it can be too distracting. So Mom watched the show on a television screen backstage. She was so disappointed.

Before going on the show, I got a chance to talk with the show's six other guests. I felt a strong connection with several of the people. Their stories sounded a lot like mine. I felt a bit nervous as the makeup people primped my hair and face before we went out on stage. But I really got a kick out of being inside the glamorous world of big-time television.

One of the show's producers showed us where to sit and gave us a brief idea of what the broadcast would be like.

I had a good feeling about Phil Donahue, the man. He seemed to have a genuine personal interest in the show's topic and was well-prepared to ask questions about our near death experiences.

Phil opened up the show by talking to me about my experience. I was impressed that he'd read up on my story and had good questions to ask. After briefly going through the hijacking, I gave a detailed description of what I thought and felt during the precious moments I spent with my grandmother in the light.

I was fascinated by the stories of the other guests and the many similarities between their stories of being in the light and my own.

Melissa, one of three women on the show, “died” on an operating table during surgery to remove a diseased kidney. Her heart stopped beating for twenty minutes, and the doctors declared her legally dead. During her twenty-minute trip to the other side, Melissa had the wonderful experience of being in the light. In the white light, she saw several relatives who had died, including a brother. “That part didn't make sense,” Melissa reported. “I didn't have a baby brother on earth. Yet I
had
seen him.”

Melissa eventually returned to her body and made a full recovery. She started telling people about the experience, including the encounter with a baby brother. She got a lot of flak from family members and friends. “But you don't have a baby brother,” they challenged.

One day, Melissa's father took her aside. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Your mother and I never told you this, but she had a baby boy who died during a miscarriage.”