Stories of the spirit

A forensic pathologist and curious investigator, Dr. Janis Amatuzio marvels at death’s mysteries.

Once she solves the medical puzzle of a death, she calls the surviving family. Sometimes those people tell her astonishing tales that elude scientific explanation — stories of the afterlife.

Amatuzio will recount some of those stories today at the 14th annual Celebrating Body, Mind & Spirit Expo at the Spokane Convention Center. She’ll be one of dozens of speakers and exhibitors at the weekend event.

The Minnesota coroner has been collecting extraordinary accounts for more than two decades, jotting down notes and placing them in her “Experience” file.

Like this one, which a patient named Mr. Stein told her late one night during her internal medicine internship:

He explained that three years earlier he had died of a heart attack in the recovery room after surgery, left his body and watched from the ceiling as doctors and nurses worked to resuscitate him. He could read their minds, including the nurse who worried about missing a date that night.

The patient in the next bed also suffered cardiac arrest, and he, too, floated out of his body up to the ceiling — and was shocked to find someone else up there. They talked by just thinking and floated out of the hospital, where, off in the distance, they spotted a beautiful, bright light.

Mr. Stein said he felt incredible joy and remembered the purpose of life. But he realized he had to return to his body. The team of doctors and nurses had resuscitated him after 15 minutes. Once back, he remembered incredible peacefulness.

When he described the harried resuscitation scene in great detail to his doctor the next day, the physician expressed disbelief, saying there was no way he could know all that information. Yet he did.

That’s one of the 31 real-life stories Amatuzio recounts in her self-published book, “Forever Ours.” As the subtitle explains, the book is “A Forensic Pathologist’s Perspective on Immortality and Living.”

“This has been a little hard for me,” she said by phone Tuesday from her office. “We are supposed to prove things to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. And there’s nothing I can prove about any of this. It’s just what is.”

Amatuzio, a pathologist since 1984, operates Midwest Forensic Pathology in Coon Rapids, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb. She’s been the Anoka County coroner since 1993 and investigates deaths in four other Minnesota counties. She also works on cases from several Wisconsin counties. She oversees upwards of 500 autopsies a year.

Unlike most forensic pathologists, Amatuzio contacts survivors in noncriminal cases to explain how their loved one died. She began her medical career as an internist, shifting to pathology at the encouragement of her father.

“I found that I loved it,” she said. “It is truly the basis of medicine.”

But as a pathologist, she missed the connection with patients and families that internal medicine provided.

“So even though I was fascinated by the mystery of what happened, figuring out what happened and speaking for the dead, I really missed talking with patients,” she said. “I think that longing found its way out of me by my calling family members after the death of a loved one.”

During some of those calls, Amatuzio heard stories of loved ones contacted by the deceased and other afterlife stories. She began jotting them down on bits of paper.

“The thing that has astonished me is the people who have had these connections with their loved ones … seem very comforted by them. One lady said to me, ‘It didn’t take away my grief, but it eased the pain,’ ” Amatuzio said.

“I collected them in the hopes that they would comfort others as they had comforted these families, and in many ways comforted me.”

A friend and colleague, Lori Allert, discovered Amatuzio’s “Experience” file tucked away in a drawer three years ago. She began typing up the notes. During their morning walks, Allert, now Amatuzio’s chief investigator, encouraged her to publish the stories, telling her that health care professionals should read them.

“I wasn’t convinced that anybody would want to hear them,” Amatuzio said. “For me, it felt like a huge professional risk. Would I get laughed out of the medical community?”

But, after getting permission from the storytellers, she published “Forever Ours” in 2002.

Since then, she said, “I’ve been greeted so warmly by my colleagues. Some of them don’t believe it or agree with it, but they haven’t reprimanded me for writing.”

Even without a big publishing house behind the project, the paperback has sold more than 12,000 copies.

“It’s sort of taken on a life of its own,” she said. “As a result, I’ve had so many people tell me of their experiences.”

Like recently, when she went on a radio talk show and the host mentioned a good friend who had lost a son and had read “Forever Ours.”

The mother told Amatuzio her story. Her long, blond-haired son Danny had told his mother that when he renewed his driver’s license, he decided to become an organ donor. Weeks later, driving while intoxicated, Danny rolled his car and was killed.

At the hospital, the mother allowed doctors to declare him brain dead and harvest his organs in order to comply with his wishes.

“The man who received his heart had an out-of-body experience and saw the team come into the operating room with the cooler containing the donated heart,” Amatuzio said. “At that moment, he said, from somewhere up by the ceiling lights, ‘I’d like to see my donor. I’d like to know who my donor is.’ ”

At that moment, his spirit was whisked into another room. He said he just moved like magic. He saw the body of a young man with long blond hair.Then in the next moment, he was taken to another place and saw his deceased aunt. He also met another being filled with light and was told that his donor’s name was Danny, whose body he had just seen.

When he awakened in the presence of his wife after the transplant, he turned to her and said, “I love you, dear. … My donor’s name is Danny.”

“There’s no way he could have known that,” Amatuzio said.

The organ recipient’s wife tracked down the donor’s family by looking back in newspaper obituaries for a Danny who had died soon before her husband’s transplant. That’s how Danny’s mother learned about the heart recipient’s experience.

“One of the things that struck me about that story was the recipient was so overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of the gift,” Amatuzio said. “As a result, he’s been able to live and live well, raising a family.

“How do you measure the gift of life?”

That story will appear in Amatuzio’s next book. And just like a forensic pathologist, she’ll also write about the patterns she sees in the stories, such as searching for your own truth and following that path, and being content with not knowing all the answers about death.

But first, come this September, “Forever Ours” will appear in hardback. The author finally hooked up with a big publishing house, New World Library Publishers.

When people volunteer afterlife stories, Amatuzio asks how the experience changed their lives.

“It’s made an enormous difference,” she said. “As one woman said to me, ‘It has been life itself. It was the only way I could get through the loss of a son in a car accident.’ ”

Amatuzio takes her own life lessons from the many stories.

“I’ve learned that dying is easy, it’s living that counts,” she said. “I’ve learned that perhaps the truest words I’ve ever heard are ‘Life goes on.’ That wisdom has always been with us.”

The afterlife stories, she said, “are really an invitation to live well, to love fully, to have no fear. … It’s who we’re being, not what we’re doing that counts. … They’ve made me realize that just maybe we’re more than our bodies.”

Amatuzio even has her own story.

“I saw my grandmother after she died in 1973. It was as real as me talking to you. There was no doubt in my mind. It was very comforting for me.

“I was so filled with a sense of joy and peacefulness that I fell back asleep.”