How a near-death experience could change the way you live
Randy Schiefer remembers being woken up by his mother's screams at four in the morning.
He was 16 years old at the time. It was 1969, and his family was staying at a hotel while on vacation in New Jersey.
He ran toward the screams and found his father having a heart attack. He had some CPR training so he began some mouth-to-mouth resuscitations. But it wasn't working.
He ran out into the hallway, pounding on doors trying to get somebody to come out and help.
"But nobody did," Schiefer says.
Schiefer's father died that night. He was devastated. What's worse is that every time he thought about his father, he would be consumed with feelings of guilt and fear. He'd think about him on that hotel floor and then inevitably he'd think about his own eventual death.
"I would go into panic attacks," Schiefer says. "I'd get real tight in my chest and the only way that I could control it is just try to settle myself down and say, 'Okay, get it out of your head, get it out of your head.'"
For Schiefer, death was a black wall, a question mark. That is, until he
