*spoiler warning for Last Breathe
In 2018, a British documentary titled Last Breathe, directed by Richard da Costa and Alex Parkinson, detailed the story of diver Chris Lemons, one of a series of workers occupying what has been stated as “one of the most dangerous occupations in the world”, saturation diving with the task of repairing pipelines over 300 feet deep in the North Sea.
Long story short- a storm causes the primary vessel’s important positioning system to fail (the thing that keeps the ship anchored in place so as to ensure the divers below can stay tethered and connected to the main vessel above water). A failed system means the anchor vessel drifts, and the drifting causes the submerged vessel’s underneath to be carried with it. Which becomes an even greater problem when divers are actively outside of the submerged vessels attending to the pipes.
Lemons got caught in the pull, and as he was being dragged, the umbilical chord that maintains temperature (the water is cold enough to send one into immediate hypothermic shock) and oxygen get severed, leaving him lost on the floor of the sea without a sense of direction and his emergency backup oxygen source affording him five minutes to find his way back or be rescued.
The documentary is of course telling the unbelievable story of Lemon’s eventual rescue and survival, with the most striking point being that he was stranded unconconscious in the freezing waters without oxygen for over 30 minutes. That he recovered without brain damage or other physical issues is part of the puzzle left to be reckoned with by theorists on the other side.
This weekend (February 28th, 2025) marks the release of the feature length dramatization, likewise directed by Alex Parkinson. It’s his first feature, and for a film I had very low expectations for (it felt like a throw away, late February mid budget failure meant to buffer the bigger tentpoles and releases on either side of the equation), it proved surprisingly effective in creating a white knuckle experience with legitimate emotional depth and high stakes. It’s a tight script that keeps us focused on the small crew (one of a collection of vessels) and the extraordinary events that transpired, disciplining itself against the need to pad it with any unennecesary third act theatrics or embellishments. What we get on film is what happened in the true to life story, which proves to be a great strength of the film’s translation of the story to the big screen.
All of that though is not what I left pondering after my viewing. Anyone aware of Lemon’s post experience life will know that he has turned the experience into inspirational talks, particularly with the aim of speaking to people wrestling with tragic events. We get these thoughts in the film (and documentary), but he uses his near death experience, which interestingly enough he had other NDE’s previous to this event as well, to encourage and bring comfort to those wrestling with the hard questions.
With this one caveat- he is an atheist. He believes in the finiteness of existence. Thus his encouragement flows from his assertation that, from his vantage point, death is not something to fear because it is in fact a peaceful endeavor that finds reconciliation in the moment of its happening, as your brain shifts from resistance to acceptance.
I found this interesting, given NDE’s are often occupying the realm of those whom reemerge into this life with a renewed or new sense of life being more than what we see and understand from our finite perspective. So I went on a deep dive, looking into some of the online conversation surrounding his story. One point became startling clear to me- for a segment of athiests, his story was essentially functioning as an anti-NDE treaties. Instead of proof of the afterlife, its being touted as proof of the finite. Proof that NDE’s have their needed explanation in the function of the dying brain. This despite the fact that there is no concrete theory yet for exactly what happened to Lemon (as in, did he actually die at all).
These same people, however, respond emotionally to Lemon’s description of dying, comparing it to the peaceful act of falling asleep. They find his sentimentalizing of the act not only comforting, but inspirational. Which again, is super interesting to me, as the common dismissives of NDE’s tends to go after the intellectual credibility of such accounts. And yet, here we have someone recounting a single experience that may or may not corelate with an NDE, a story that also has to grapple with the wider body of science telling us that death might not be the rose coloured glasses he is seeing it through in every case, or even the majority of cases.
In fact, many of the studies I have encountered theorizing about the actual experience of the moment of death from a purely materialist vantage point are importing observations about living memory into the equation. The portion of the brain that gets supercharged in the moment of dying is the part that relates to and governs memory processes. Therefore it is believed that the experience reflects being disconnected from the physical senses (the peacefulness) and a heightened awareness of those detached memories being formed into a concrete narrative designed to partion out the inconsistencies reality otherwsiwe holds and represents.
Yet, stories of less than peaceful deaths abound, typically dictated by how one wrestles with the reality of that less than desirable narrative memory leading up to death. The science that sugggests heightened and elevated brain activity also suggests that we just might be aware that we are dead, stuck with whatever mental state our brains force us to endure.
Hardly the assurance that the supposed intellectual acceptance of this peaceful endeavor promises to offer. So why is it the case that I’m encountering so many atheists, supposely committed to rational thought, ready and willing to accept this explanation of an NDE and not the myriad of others, particularly when a purely materialistic approach to death binds us to certain conclusions that would challenge the reliability of such beliefs on a broader scale?
No matter where one lands on NDE’s, the lenghty history of its study and interest within the scientific community, leading back to the 70’s with Greyson and Moody and Saborn, and the re-emergence in the 80’s with the increased support and funding (Peter Fenwick, Jeffrey Long), offers us plenty of theoretical positions based on the data that is hard to ignore. One of the biggest things pushing back on Lemon’s sweeping generalization of the experience of dying is the fact that so many NDE accounts are not contained to the brain, but actively reporting things external to that narrative memory process. What’s a bit ironic is that a purely materialist approach would be forced to compare the experience of dying to a robust hallucination, effectively bending those final moments towards an illusion, something the atheists I am reading sort of glide past without actually attending for the larger and necessary implications. After all, if this is the case in death, this must be the case in life as well. If this is what we mean by peace, this is how we seek and find happiness in the present. Yet, one of the primary findings of NDE research is that they do not contain the markings of hallucinations. They expressely witness to something categorically different. Certainly when it comes to one of their key components (life transformation, something its worth noting that Lemon admits did not happen for him- his life remained the same, and in fact he was back out doing the same thing shortly after, unchanged).
This brings me to a key observation. So often atheists make something like religious convinction to be about life after death. They are seen as beliefs born out of fear of death, and constructed in order to deal with death. This, I think, miscaricaturizes what religion is actually about- life, not death. I think the hand that wants to play such things as escaping the here and now grossly overplay how much religion actually focuses on the “afterlife”. This is underscored by the fact that NDE’s tend to involve not an absolution of fear, but a heightened sense of the revelation that they afford, gaining a greater awareness of the meaning of ones existence. The transformation applies to how one sees the world they occupy differently, not into a hope that one needs to escape it. Further, how much difference is there in the atheist leaning on the myth of a “peaceful” death to deal with their fears than the hope of an afterlife they categorize as “superficial”? Does one have more integrity than the other?
One last thought. I get this from Dale Alison and Craig Keener, the former which has done his own work in the area of NDE’s, and the latter whom has done what might be the most definitive work to date on the question of miracles and spiritual experiences. Often an athiest (and I am speaking of a segment, not the whole) will question the reliability of religious belief/spirititual experience, which reflects the majority of people in history, by theorizing delusion and influence as a wholesale explanation. The problem with this is, and this is something I have become convinced of, when you actually do the research, and when you actually get out and talk with people across comparitive relgions, the vast majority of cases do not have these markers. They express themselves very differently, often appealing to real, measurable and tangible external factors. And perhaps the most compleling aspect of these beliefs/experiences, including NDE’s, is the transformed lives they leave in their wake.
The Stories of my Life 