On the morning of 2 February 2006, a woman is admitted to a Hong Kong hospital whose body is giving up: four years of Hodgkin's lymphoma, tumours from neck to abdomen, failing organs. The oncologist gives her 36 hours. Five weeks later Anita Moorjani leaves the hospital – cancer-free. What lies in between belongs among the best-known and best-documented cases of near-death research: an experience in the coma that she herself describes as the moment the healing began.
Four years of fear
Moorjani grew up in Hong Kong, the daughter of an Indian Sindhi family living between cultures: a British school, a Hindu home, later a career in business. In April 2002 came the diagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma – to her a verdict, for she had lost both a close friend and a brother-in-law to cancer and had feared the disease for years. She fought for almost four years; by the end she was in a wheelchair, on oxygen, the tumours in her neck grown to the size of eggs. In early February 2006 her organs began to fail.
Thirty hours
In the coma, Moorjani reports, her consciousness did not fade but expanded. She perceived her husband Danny beside the bed and wanted to tell him: "It's okay, darling – I'm okay!" She sensed the presence of her father, who had died ten years earlier, and of her best friend Soni, who had died of cancer three years before – surrounded by beings she describes as unconditionally loving. And she stood before a choice: to cross over or to return. With the decision to return, so her account, came an assurance: her body would heal "very quickly" – not in months, but in days.
Perceptions that could be checked
What stands out in her account is that it does not consist of inner images alone. In the report she submitted to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) in August 2006 she describes perceptions that could later be verified: she followed the conversation between her husband and the doctors taking place in the corridor some forty feet from her room – its content later confirmed. And she saw her brother in India boarding a plane to see her one last time – that too was true; he stood at her bedside shortly afterwards. Such checkable outside perceptions are what research calls veridical perceptions – the point at which a subjective experience begins to pose questions to physiology.
The healing
The medical course after she woke is the heart of the case – and it is on record. Within four days the lymph nodes shrank by roughly 70 to 80 per cent. Two weeks later the biopsy found no more cancer cells, and the bone-marrow biopsy also came back clear. After five weeks Moorjani was discharged cancer-free. Her doctors, as all involved consistently report, could not explain the recovery – a patient admitted with failing organs left the hospital with no detectable disease. It is one of the fastest documented remissions of end-stage lymphoma described in the literature.
From a web form to a world bestseller
That the world came to know of it began with a web form. In August 2006 Moorjani submitted her account to NDERF – the database of the radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long, who telephoned her within hours: an oncologically documented case of this kind was extraordinary even to him. The account went viral, forwarded hundreds of thousands of times – until it reached Wayne Dyer, one of America's best-known spiritual authors. Dyer urged his publisher Hay House to find this woman. In 2012 "Dying to Be Me" appeared and became a New York Times bestseller; "What If This Is Heaven?" and "Sensitive Is the New Strong" followed. Today Moorjani speaks worldwide – in the German-speaking world she has appeared on the speaker list of the Basler Psi-Verein, like her fellow near-death experiencer Eben Alexander.
What she herself takes from it
Moorjani's own reading is uncomfortably simple: "If I had known how to love myself, I probably never would have gotten sick." Her message revolves around self-love instead of self-sacrifice and a life without fear – fear, she says, fed her illness. That is her personal interpretation, not a medical statement, and she herself advises no one to forgo treatment because of it. The documented core of her case, however, remains untouched by it: a near-death experience with checkable outside perceptions, followed by a remission for which her treating doctors have no explanation to this day. One can interpret this case in different ways – ignoring it is hard.
Sources: Anita Moorjani's original account at NDERF (August 2006) and the interview there; her own pages "My NDE" and "About Anita"; the portrait "The startling near-death experience of author Anita Moorjani" in The National. Experiential content reports what Moorjani herself describes; the medical course follows her NDERF account.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it gathers further articles on near-death experiences and their study.