Lost Girl: A Spiritual Autobiography of an Encounter with Death

By Natalie Harte

Do you believe in life after death? Is there a heaven? And if so, is there a place called hell? Most people only want to talk about a nice, happy ending to their existence here on earth. But what if we are actually and truly accountable for our actions after we leave this world? Would that scare you? In my opinion, it should. I should know. There was a time that I was wild and crazy and lived life without concern. I lived a life filled with longing, torment, and despair. One day I died and left my body. For three days, I was taken on a horrific and terrifying journey. What I learned I hope to share with others so they, too, can feel sure of their ultimate resting place. There is a life after death. We are all accountable. The very good news is each one of us can make a conscious decision as to where we go when we die. It’s not easy to get there, to that beautiful place called heaven. But it is in reach for those who love God with all their heart and live a godly life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532040092

Natalie Harte

NATALIE HARTE today is a very strong woman who has suffered multiple traumatic events. It is only through her faith in God that she has been able to recover and heal spiritually, emotionally and physically. As a child of divorce, Natalie lived with a broken heart. As a young mother and college drop-out Natalie struggled with her own identity. While trying to raise two children, she threw herself into several marriages and careers. She learned to survive any way possible. Finding herself lost and feeling abandoned she wrestled with death many times. Natalie was constantly looking for love and security, and living with low self-esteem. No one could see her pain as she suffered in silence. Finally, after a spiritual awakening, she would strive to overcome many obstacles and ultimately find the peace and love she was looking for. It is through telling her story she hope to help others find healing.

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Copyright © 2018 Natalie Harte.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-4008-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-4009-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018901948

iUniverse rev. date: 11/15/2018

Contents

Author’s Note

Preface

Chapter 1 Hell Is for Real

Chapter 2 Early Years

Chapter 3 Broken Childhood

Chapter 4 College Dropout

Chapter 5 Californication

Chapter 6 Hells Angels

Chapter 7 Beaten While Pregnant

Chapter 8 Death of My Mother

Chapter 9 Moving On

Chapter 10 Malibu

Chapter 11 Hollywood

Chapter 12 Jerry and Montecito

Chapter 13 Candice

Chapter 14 Restaurants

Chapter 15 The Dentist

Chapter 16 Death Comes for Me

Chapter 17 Angels from Heaven

Chapter 18 The Aftermath

Chapter 19 Holmby Hills

Chapter 20 Day Trader and Miscarriage

Chapter 21 The Crash

Chapter 22 Manhattan Beach

Chapter 23 Dazed and Confused

Chapter 24 Plastic Surgery Nightmare

Chapter 25 Shark Bite

Chapter 26 Searching for my Purpose

Chapter 27 Africa

Chapter 28 God’s Blessing

Chapter 29 Transformation

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK IS FOR ALL those who have suffered with emotional and physical pain. It is dedicated to those who have found themselves lost. I hope they can find the truth within themselves and follow the light out of the darkness. It is through healing of the spiritual kind that transformation is possible and a new life begins.

This story is about the ongoing struggle that has existed since the beginning of time, the struggle between good and evil that occurs within all of us—because, after all, we are only human. Life is full of deception. Once we are healed, our eyes are opened, and our hearts are full, we can be our best and make a difference in the world. It is in writing this book that I hope to help others. Life on this planet can be a very beautiful existence. Peace on earth, my friends.

Love,

Natalie

PREFACE

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

—Ephesians 6:12

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SUPERNATURAL forces at work since the beginning of time. Everything that we see manifested in the physical is supported by the unseen. There are many things that we experience in life that come from a spiritual place. There is a purpose behind all things, both the good and the evil. There is always a bigger plan for our lives, one that we may not necessarily recognize. The enlightened ones understand their purpose in life on this beautiful planet.

Some people may never understand their purpose. They become overwhelmed with society’s ideas of what they should be and what the world thinks is important. They are caught up in superficiality. They never feel whole or complete. They are never satisfied and always want more. Everyone is looking for love and peace of mind, but sadly most are looking in all the wrong places.

Everyone wants to feel important, but most do not know how. I wish people knew that they are all part of God’s plan and they are all important to him. Little do they know they’ve always had the love that they were looking for. Let God love you and enhance your life by making you the best you can be so you too can fulfill your purpose.

I had to experience a lot of hardship and pain in my life to finally understand my purpose. Parts of my story may come across as unbelievable. They are the truth. The truth has set me free from past suffering. Until I was inspired by God, I didn’t want to write this story about my life. Why would anyone expose him- or herself in this way?

I need to let the world know not only about God but also about the devil. The devil is extremely powerful and rules many individuals whether they realize it or not. A lot of people, just as I did, live in the dark. I want to help these people see the light, feel the love, and find peace as I have.

Many of us have overcome enemies and obstacles to survive. We live in a pagan society in which materialism, narcissism, and egotism rule. We are surrounded by darkness. But we can find peace and understanding and even grow to fulfill great destinies. We must be the warriors who try to heal others and the planet. It is possible to defeat the devil.

CHAPTER 1

HELL IS FOR REAL

IT WAS EARLY ON THE morning of December 10, 1995, when I awoke to go to the bathroom. I had spent the night out in Beverly Hills with my friend Jay, who had made me dinner the night before at his home. When I tried to speak to him, it was apparent that something was terribly wrong. Upon looking in the mirror, I was horrified to see that my tongue was the size of a lemon. I knew right away that this was a life-threatening situation. I got a piece of paper and wrote on it Take me to the hospital.

I went back into the bedroom and started to shake Jay awake. I handed him the note. He woke up with a start and noticed the swelling. He immediately got up to take me to the hospital.

We both knew that very soon I would not be able to breathe. It felt as if there was a tennis ball in my mouth and I was slowly being suffocated. After calling several hospitals to see which one was less crowded, Jay put me in the car and started to drive me to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California. I lay down in the back seat of the car, trying to keep myself as calm as possible and hoping I could make it there without suffocating.

As we were approaching the hospital, Jay overshot a turn and made an illegal U-turn. Immediately, we were stopped by the police. I couldn’t believe it! I was literally going to die in the back seat of the car. Here we had been stopped, and every second was crucial to save my life. But instead of being of service, these officers of the law harassed my friend. I remember them pulling him out of the driver’s seat of the car and giving him a drunk test. I could hear him telling them that he was taking me to the hospital, and he was asking them to help us.

A policeman looked in the back seat of the car where I was lying down, most assuredly looking something awful. He did not try to ascertain my true condition, so I got out of the car. I walked up to one of the three officers standing there. I then put my head on his shoulder since of course I could not talk. He was very rough with me and unsympathetic in manner and basically pushed me back into the back seat of the car.

We were only two blocks from the hospital when they opened the trunk of the car and searched Jay’s briefcase. They did not care about me, and as a matter fact, I remember them slamming the trunk of the car. Then they told my friend he could proceed to the hospital.

I remember walking into the emergency room and being taken immediately to the triage unit. I don’t really know at this point whether I was passing out. What I do remember is this: My neck was swelling, and I could feel intense pain. The swelling of my neck was so severe that it felt like I was being stretched apart, and the pain was like no other.

I had known pain before, as I had given birth to two children in a very difficult manner. This pain, I can only explain, might’ve been similar to a person being put on a rack and stretched apart—just like the kind of torture you hear about that took place in the Dark Ages. Then some of the swelling spread to my chest.

My chest felt like a bomb had gone off in it, and I had to be hooked up to an IV of morphine. I’d been on morphine twice before in my life. Even through the morphine, I could feel the pain—and in the most intense way a person might ever be able to imagine.

I was given all kinds of medications to bring the swelling down. Cedars-Sinai Hospital had never seen a case like mine before. The swelling was not getting any better but was continuing to worsen.

The hospital brought in the doctor who was on call in the emergency room that night. His name was Dr. James Montagano. This is a man I will never forget. He saved my life. He took one look at me and started treatment immediately. I was his last patient for the evening, and shortly after seeing me, he went home for the night.

Dr. Montagano was a tall, slender, handsome man with dark hair and appeared to be in his early fifties. But it was his eyes that I will always remember. They were so intense and very serious. I felt he could see right through me to a place only he knew existed. You could tell by looking at him that he had fought hard for many a soul—a warrior in the right place at the right time.

He would leave the hospital that night to work in his garden. Apparently, this was something he would do when he had the feeling that he would get called back to the hospital. Sure enough, he got the call he knew would be coming. The hospital had informed him that I was in such a state of emergency that I might die.

This is what I remember. I was in intensive care with all kinds of IVs in both arms, hooked up like a Christmas tree. I was continuing to swell and suffer pain as in the depths of hell. I remember the nurses and staff all being around me. I remember not being able to breathe. My throat and tongue were too swollen to put a breathing tube in place.

Several nurses were talking to me, trying to keep me alert. They proceeded to lift me up from a reclining position to a more vertical one such as to sit. They were trying to keep precious, life-sustaining air inside my lungs.

All of a sudden, a face appeared in front of me. It was Dr. Montagano. I was blacking out because of lack of oxygen. I remember seeing him lean forward with a scalpel in his hand. It was at this exact moment that I went into cardiac arrest and died.

I believe that God had put this man right there at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, in that emergency room, just for this purpose that fateful day, just like the pilot Sully who saved all the lives aboard the plane in New York the day the birds flew into the engine. He said that very moment defined his destiny and purpose. So too was that exact moment, when my life was saved, the destiny of not just me but also of the man who saved me. I thank God for Dr. James Montagano.

I was saved when the doctor put the scalpel to my throat and made a cut into my trachea so I could breathe once again. A tremendous amount of fluid came out of me, indicating angioneurotic edema. I don’t know exactly how they revived me from cardiac arrest.

I spent the next three days in the intensive care unit at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. The swelling did not go down. I had to breathe through a hole with a tube in my throat. The pain had not changed at all, because the swelling still existed. I was surviving on a breathing tube, oxygen, morphine, antibiotics, and steroids.

I have a name for the intensive care unit. I call it the meat locker. There is a reason I call it this. I felt like a piece of meat just lying there helpless. Having my throat cut into and not finding an answer as to why the edema occurred, doctors continued to poke and prod me. They even put needles in my neck, looking for a possible tumor. There I was in a cold bed.

There was this one time I remember so well. It was when I was lying there in intensive care like a horrible experiment. With me just barely surviving, the nurses kept the curtains drawn around me. I was trying to get some sleep, and the curtain opened. There stood before me about six medical students or interns—I am not quite sure which. With curtains now wide open, I felt exposed and on display like an animal in the zoo. Even worse, was I freakish-looking?

The interns had scrubs on. The look on each face was something I will never forget. Their eyes were exceedingly wide, and their faces looked like they were watching a terrible horror movie. They were looking at me with fright. They were taking notes, I assume, but were in shock, and I could tell. What did I look like?

Most important, what kept me going was the fact that I was the single mother of two children. At home, I had two daughters, ages fourteen and three. Elise and Candice were my everything. Elise was a dark-haired teenage beauty, with eyes as deep as onyx and skin like honey. Candice was my fair-skinned, blonde baby girl with green eyes and a fiery Irish spirit. My two beautiful girls kept me going. What I didn’t know was that nobody, especially my family, expected me to live.

My children were being told that mommies sometimes go to heaven. Friends and family were preparing for my imminent death. My brother told me that my father had called him in Miami and was crying on the phone, saying he didn’t think I was going to make it. My ex-husband Jerry was also in shock and gravely concerned.

All the while, in the intensive care unit, I was visited by doctors and nurses, but I was treated at a distance emotionally, and I could feel it. It was this way because they were professionals, and they also knew what the meat locker was.

Something terrifying and horrible was happening to me while I spent those days in intensive care, something no one knew about or could see. The only way I can explain it is to say it was of a supernatural nature. I was being led through a spiritual journey. What happened to me has never really been discussed before, as far as I know. It is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I stake my life on it!

All the while that I was suffering in the hospital, there were several churches praying for me. The church that I had been attending was called the Malibu Vineyard, and they were praying for my life to be spared. My brother Charles also had Granada Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables, Florida, praying. It was in this church that I had been raised as a Christian. I think there were other friends of mine who attended other churches who also put me on their church’s prayer lists. For some reason, I seem to recall three churches were praying for my salvation.

I will try my best to describe what was happening to me. Some people to this day will blame my experience on the strong morphine that I was on. I know I will never be able to put into words just exactly how much pain I was in both physically and emotionally.

The physical was easy to see. I was this grotesque-looking thing. The swelling had turned me into a monster. I had no facial features, and no neck separated my head from my chest. I just looked like this big balloon-like blob thing. I had two small dots for eyes. My nose wasn’t distinguishable. My mouth was nothing but a small slit. Out of my throat, where the trachea tube was inserted, there was oozy discharge seeping out of an ugly red inflamed hole.

The tracheotomy slice into my throat had to be unusually large because of the unbelievable amount of swelling. In my best estimate, I think it was somewhere around three inches long. Later on, the doctor would say on record that I was the worst and the most unusual case he had ever seen. It was something that he would never forget.

The next part is so hard to explain. What happened to me was spiritual, and it was so horrifying that to this day, I have not told anyone. My family had suffered enough. What I am about to tell you seems absolutely unbelievable. But I know it was very real. It had nothing to do with the drugs that I was on in the hospital.

I know what happened to me was supposed to change my life. It must’ve been necessary for me to undergo such suffering. I was being taught a very strong, hard, crucifying, and enlightening lesson that I would never forget. It is now twenty years later, and I am finally ready to tell my story. I do so because I feel inspired and compelled by a higher power than myself. I believe in God. I am only here today because of him.

Many of us are taught at a very young age to believe in God. We’re also told to believe in the devil and the constant struggle between good and evil. We are led to believe that by performing certain rituals or saying certain prayers, we save ourselves from going to hell when we die. There is a lot of talk about heaven and what it might be like when we get there, how our loved ones are there and maybe even our pets.

No one wants to talk about the alternative route, which is a very scary place called hell. Hell is where the devil lives with his minions, those who have died and are tortured souls. I spent three long, agonizing, torturous, life-altering days and nights in hell.

Have you ever seen a terrible, deep, dark, demented horror movie? What I experienced was very similar. There are always certain factors present. While I lay there in the bed in the intensive care unit, I was spiritually experiencing hell. I have never been so scared in my life. You would think because of the emotional trauma alone that I was undergoing that my body would not be able to take it. But there I was, suffering in an indescribable manner of immense and horrific proportions.

I was absolutely helpless but not alone. There were many, an immeasurable amount of tortured souls there. Hell was filled with pain and suffering. No, it wasn’t some big party, like an ongoing orgy. Not quite, my friend. No fun there. I will try to describe what I saw.

I was surrounded by darkness. There were trails or clouds of gray and black smoke. It felt very hot, and there was the smell of fire. The smell was so rotten and disgusting that it was like burning and rotting flesh.

There were terrible sounds. The sounds were like the voices of millions of people screaming from unimaginable torture. But they weren’t quite voices that were audible. You could not hear exact words or phrases or people crying out for help. They were way beyond help, and the voices had become sounds, like the howling or the screeching of wild animals. It was the sound of those who had become monsters in strange tones. These sounds were indistinguishable one from another and created an overwhelming sense of suffering and anguish too great to describe.

I could see what looked like stretched faces being pulled in every direction with mouths open and screaming at the same time while being torn apart. Out of the black and gray smoke, I could see arms and hands reaching out and grabbing. These people were like demons, all trying to grab each other and rip each other apart, to pull flesh off the bone. It was as if their torturous suffering was so great that they had to reach out and share it, pass it on.

There was no hope. It felt eternal. There was no light. Hell was real and was worse than anyone could ever imagine. Not only did I realize hell was for real, but it was full of souls!

I did not know how my heart, after already suffering damage from the cardiac arrest, could stand it. For seventy-two hours, I would drift in and out of sleep. And when I say sleep, I mean the hell I just described. Every time I awoke, I was so frightened that I’m sure my eyes looked like they were popping out of my head. It was if I were drowning and then coming up for a breath of air and then going back down and drowning again times infinity.

CHAPTER 2

EARLY YEARS

I WAS BORN ON DECEMBER 30 at 11:38 p.m. My mother was only twenty-two at the time. I remember her telling me that she drank castor oil to induce labor before December 31, which is New Year’s Eve. She wanted to be able to have an alcoholic toast. I guess I consider myself lucky for this because at the time nobody had associated alcohol with birth defects.

My mother named me Natalie, which means child of Christmas but was also a family name. I was the fourth Natalie in my family. My mother said I was planned. My father, however, said he knew nothing about such a plan. As it turned out, my mother and father couldn’t have been any more different than night and day.

My mother’s name was Elise, but everyone called her Lisa. She was born into an Irish banking family, among the original founding families of Immigrant Savings Bank, later known as Chase Manhattan Bank. She grew up in New York in a place called Tarrytown. Her neighbors were the Rockefellers, and she often rode her horses through their property. The family’s estate was called Wodaless. My brothers and I used to always tease my mother about the name because we thought it sounded so funny.

My mother was an only child. This was because her mother almost died in labor having her. She would tell me how she missed so much having siblings. All alone in a big house, her favorite thing to do was to read. Books were her best friends.

Little Lisa, as she was called, looked like Shirley Temple as a child, with very curly blonde hair and an infectious smile. She was adorable. She also had two dogs to keep her company. One was a black Labrador and the other a golden retriever.

When the Depression hit in 1929, my mother’s family lost most of their money. Her father and grandfather were beside themselves. Many people during this period ended up homeless and committing suicide. Several members of the family hunkered down at the large estate, including my mother’s uncle and his wife.

No one wanted to go out and get jobs that they weren’t accustomed to. The male figures in my mother’s life, including her father, who was nicknamed Laddie, and her uncle, made the time pass by sitting around and drinking themselves drunk. I was not a pleasant situation at all for a young girl. My brothers and I used to think it very funny to hear the story about my grandfather and my mother’s uncle having drunken fights in the snow and trying to punch each other out.

The severely depressed family was having a hard time adjusting to their new financial situation. My mother’s aunt Lassie, who was a very strong woman, did not like what she saw going on in the house. She said, Somebody’s got to go to work, so I will. She went out and got a job at Macy’s department store in New York City. It was there that my great-aunt met her husband, Robert.

My great-uncle Bob was from a family that founded a saw and steel company, which later would merge with US Steel. My uncle Bob was quite a character, and I have fond memories of sailing with him as a child on Georgia Pond in East Hampton, Long Island, New York. Bob and Lassie had a sprawling estate on the pond with a huge flagpole and intricate gardens, including a maze made of big, tall hedges. That was where I got