We're all scared of death but I'm somewhat of an extreme case.
Death terrifies me.
It's on my mind an unhealthy amount.
So after years of anxiety, it's time for a new approach.
Over the next few weeks, I'm getting up close to death,
to find out how we can come to terms with what's waiting for us all.
It's just a big huge mystery that none of us really understand.
Without mortality, I don't know what humanity would be.
This week I'm going to hear how near- death experiences can spark a belief in the afterlife.
The man I'm meeting was dragged under a train and his near-miss with death
completely changed his life.
There's nothing to fear at all about death.
It's not the end, it really isn't.
David Ditchfield was struggling to find work as a labourer in London
so he travelled to Huntingdon to stay with his sister.
On the day of the accident he was here, seeing off a friend.
That was a bust train.
Hello! – Hi.
So, should we just go to the platform now? – Yeah, yeah.
I had a friend, Anna, she had come to visit me,
so I was here, sending her off.
So, where was it?
Pretty much just beyond this bridge here.
Roughly around here.
We were just hanging around waiting for the train to arrive
and so I helped her on with the bags and then, you know, was just chatting to her and gave her a hug,
and then we heard the the emergency buzzers going, you know:
I jumped off the train and then she stepped forward and I just gave her another kiss goodbye,
I was wearing this coat at the time when they closed, the emergency doors,
it got trapped in there.
The two rubber sort of buttons each side, to sort of open and close doors,
and I was just like, whacking those and then I tried banging on the glass,
shouting out for help.
As the train started pulling out, I just thought this is it, I'm going to die.
For the first time in my life, I was facing death.
I was dragged quite a long way along the platform.
As I went under, it's like, it looked like the sides of the carriage, they looked like,
really high up, disappearing into the sky.
I felt like I was being thrown into a machine, like into a mincer.
I was just tossed around like a ragdoll.
I just thrown all over the place and the train was still going and it seemed like it was going on forever.
Then it disappeared.
All I can remember was just lying down face down
and just the smell of like, the oil and I just kind of looked up
and it was this beautiful blue sky and it was just such a pleasure to go from all that darkness
and just see that sky.
Then the paramedics arrived and they jumped down on the track …
What injuries did you sustain?
My arm had been ripped wide open and I suffered some internal injuries,
post-traumatic stress disorder and issues …
And then, I went for an awful lot of therapy to get me back to this platform.
To me that sounds like your worst nightmare. – Yeah.
And the kind of thing that you think I don't know if I could actually be OK after that,
even if I recovered physically.
I really wanted to not let this beat me, you know …
It felt … it's really odd when it happened the train, the whole incident felt like,
if the actual train sort of felt like this huge beast, you know?
And I was just kind of like a David and Goliath scenario, I was just like,
I'm not going to let this beast beat me and completely destroy my life, you know?
So, I decided not to let that happen.
As somebody who imagines stuff like this happening to them all the time
in quite an unhealthy way, what I want to know is like,
was it worse than you would have anticipated something like that being or not as bad?
For me it's all about the anticipation,
you know, facing death was not as frightening as I thought it was,
and it's made me kind of like, you know, I don't know, I feel differently about about it all, yeah.
Definitely.
Every year, on the anniversary of his accident, David comes here to reflect.
So, what do you do when he come here?
I say a prayer, say a thanks to the universe
for saving me that day.
Before your accident, what did you think happened when you die?
Or just before you die.
I don't know, I hardly thought about it,
I didn't really think about death that much.
That all changed literally on the day of my accident.
I had what's called a near-death experience and I'd known nothing about it
until I had mine but basically what happened was I had gone from the hospital
A&E with all the doctors running around to a very peaceful place
and I was there on my own.
I looked down at my body to see how my wounds were,
and everything had healed, my arm was completely intact.
I felt like I was lying in a darkened room almost the size of this.
At that point, I thought I was dead, I thought this is it,
this is what happens, this is where you go to,
this is the next stage.
Suddenly I felt this energy that was coming stronger and more powerful at my feet,
so I looked up again.
What I could see was like this tunnel of white light, pure white light.
At that point, I thought, this is creation, this is God, this is not like this kind of like,
guy up in the sky with a beard and whatever, this is the energy of all creation.
And then I just laid my head back and embraced it
and at that point I was suddenly back in the hospital.
All my senses were on overdrive, I couldn't handle it.
My ears, I just wanted to cover my ears, you know, and then and close my eyes
and it was just too much to deal with coming back.
But this energy was still with me, I could feel it and I just felt like that was like,
that I've still got an attachment to where I'd just been.
What would you say to somebody who said this isn't a real thing that happened?
You didn't go to a real place, you just nearly died and so you had a hallucination.
Well, ultimately, one thing is I'm not here to preach to anybody,
you know, if people want to listen to my story and take it in, that's fine,
and if they don't that's equally fine.
I want to be able to tell people that there's nothing to fear at all about death, you know …
It's not the end, it really isn't, you know, I can say that hand on heart.
You said you didn't think about death that much before, now looking forward to the time
when you do die, how does that make you feel?
One thing I know from that incident, you know, that when my number's up,
is just, I have no control over it, I know it and I don't want to control it.
I have no fear of death at all …
It sounds like it but do you think you're different from what you were before
because of this near-death experience?
Yeah. It was almost like that happened to sort of literally guide me forward, you know?
My life is a lot more three dimensional, I guess, now than what it was then.
When David woke up in hospital, he wanted to record his near-death experience
and though he wasn't an artist, he decided to paint what he'd seen.
Did you paint at all before your near-death experience?
No, nothing like this at all.
So what was it? When you woke up you just sort of
had an urge to … ?
Yeah, I had an urge to record what happened to me in a painting.
Do you understand why people are scared of dying?
All you know is that we're alive now,
we're walking around this planet and then suddenly the lights are just going to go off
and that's it.
But there's something more out there, there is more out there,
there's a bigger story, there's a bigger story
and I'm still trying to learn it as well but I feel like I was given a massive whole load of science
that I was dragged under a train, survived it, went up and saw …
We shouldn't be so scared.
The thing is, you've had to go through something awful to gain this knowledge that you have.
It's hard for me to take as much comfort from
it as you have because I didn't go through it.
If we don't have all the answers then how can we suddenly say,
OK, well death is frightening because when it actually happens, that's the end.
In my near-death experience, all I could feel was love and that love is waiting for us.
I'm still not sure what I think about near-death experiences
but there is something compelling about David's story.
You'd think going through something as scary as he did, would leave you full of fear
but for him it had the opposite effect.
And being able to take something positive from that kind of experience
is good, no matter what you believe in.
Next week, I'm tackling my death anxiety head on
and trying to cure it with a slightly morbid meditation.
Your physical body is dying, you hear the blood pumping,
you'll feel it start to slow down a little bit …
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