What happens after we die remains one of life’s biggest unanswered questions.
Do we move on to heaven or hell, drift into a brilliant light, or does consciousness simply stop?
Only a small number of people have reported coming back after being declared clinically dead, offering accounts of what they experienced on the edge of life.
One of them is Canadian nurse Julia Evans.
In a striking twist, Julia’s near-death experience (NDE) happened just as she was getting ready to begin a hospital shift caring for others.
People who describe NDEs often talk about intense visions, vivid sensations, or even feeling as though they’ve left their bodies entirely.
Julia says her experience didn’t follow the typical pattern—raising the question: what did she actually perceive when she “died”?
From a medical standpoint, an NDE is generally used to describe accounts from someone who was considered clinically dead and then successfully revived.
Speaking with podcaster Jeff Mara, Julia recounted the day in 2018 that reshaped how she sees life and death.
She said it began normally: she said goodbye to her children, went for a run at her local gym, and then headed in for work.
At the hospital, she felt an itchy, scratchy sensation in her throat—an alarming warning for her, since she has severe allergies, especially to lilies. She soon noticed a bunch of the flowers sitting at the nurses’ station.
Normally, she would have stepped away immediately, but she said that for reasons she still can’t explain, she felt drawn toward them.
Her reaction escalated quickly. The allergy was so intense that she became hypoxic, prompting colleagues to remove the flowers and search for her medication.
But when physicians arrived to administer treatment, Julia says a devastating mistake occurred: she was given the wrong drug.
She said: “In that instant, everything in my world vanished, except for the physician, and we both locked eyes with each other, we both realized it was the wrong drug.”
Julia explained she was administered the wrong epinephrine, and it was delivered into her veins rather than into her muscle, where it should have gone.
She continued: “Once he gave me that, I felt it was completely my last breath.
“There was this flash. And there was this play on being in this existence and being somewhere else. And I remember opening my mouth, and being a nurse I knew they were going to intubate me.”
Those responding to the emergency believed she may have been suffering a heart attack.
Julia added: “My heart, I know to this day, needed to explode – and that’s what it did.”
She described feeling as if she were reliving the ways close family members had died—including her mother, who passed from a brain aneurysm, and her stepmother, who died from a heart attack.
“Then that’s when they lost me. I went into something called pulseless VTAC, so I had no pulse. I hit such a frequency in my heart…when I say my heart exploded, I don’t mean like a grenade but there was so much medication that it just stopped. I went from blue to pale to grey, the colour of death and I was flaccid on the bed.”
She said she found herself in a place she could only describe as “blacker than black,” but she didn’t interpret it as hell. To her, it felt like a void—an empty awareness where nothing existed, except the certainty that she was no longer in ordinary reality.
Julia said she wanted to cry but had no eyes, and the only sensation that remained was pain in her heart.
She also felt she wasn’t alone. She believed her mother, who died in 1983, was there, and said: “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s here, don’t cry.
“I heard her like actually hearing her as if she was standing right beside me, I heard ‘clear’ and was back into this world, but I wasn’t fully back into this world.”
She then described an out-of-body experience, saying she hovered about two feet away from her body while people around her urgently tried to bring her back.
She recalled hearing: ‘We lost her again’.
After that, Julia said she was surrounded by a radiant light—alive with intense color.
“There is no human word to describe it fully, the only way I know how to describe it was there was so much love within that moment that I was gifted the greatest gift and that’s self-love.
“The light was so peaceful and felt like home and I could sense every single person that had passed and who passed away before me standing there… I could see their essence…and I was with everyone, like my mum and my best friends, and my dog and my aunts and all the people who have passed.”
She said she was then pulled back into her body again. At that point, she described seeing a tunnel and a figure she thought resembled Jesus—with long hair—though she acknowledged it also could have been a nurse working to revive her.
She said she asked herself: “Is that Jesus? Do I follow him? Is he going to save me? Do I instinctively go that way to salvation? Another part of me was like is that Buddha? Who is this, do I get to decide? Have I reached Nirvana?”
Julia added that when she looked down, she appeared completely naked—“like a brand new baby”—and that’s when she took a breath.
She said she regained awareness in the ICU, and the first thing she perceived was what she called ‘a beautiful purity being.’
In a moment she found especially emotional, Julia said she felt her mother’s touch through the nurse caring for her—who happened to share her mother’s name.
Julia continued: “I felt like I had this light, not just within me but surrounding me, and these beams of light was this awareness of all these other levels and all these other worlds, all these other things outside this conscious world we live. And I saw these rays…I could see the physical person in this realm, but I could also see their lineage; I could see what is connected to them”
In the minutes after waking, she says she could perceive not only the clinicians around her, but also a kind of “lineage” and the invisible connections tied to each person.
It’s an extraordinary story—one that left her with a radically different understanding of life, death, and everything in between.