To say nothing of those miraculous New Zealand bushes!

Michael is truly courageous, a dedicated hero, if he returns to his job as sky-diving instructor, as he says he will, in order to teach people how to do it as safely as possible.

It is interesting, and not surprising really, that so many people have been asking Michael: What does a person experience, when he is looking his death in the face?  I suppose it would be nice if we were granted a momentary consoling revelation at the end, but I do not think there is any good reason that that should be the case.

Anyway, Michael did not die, did he.  We might speculate that if on that same dive, with the same catastrophic failures of his equipment, he were "meant" to die, i.e. if his death in that hour were fated, inescapable, "written," then perhaps God would have afforded him a different inward experience.  But of course there is no way to prove that.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

A friend of mine almost died on the highway, she narrowly missed getting sucked under a semi after slipping on ice (and ended up in the ditch instead). She said, corny and stereotypical as it sounds, that her life indeed flashed before her eyes.

All the (relatively many) times I've been thisclose to removing myself from the gene pool, I've never had any thought except "Christ, this is really going to hurt..." (except for those few occasions on which I've actually been thinking specifically about how to pull myself together and proactively not die).

It's either too late for me to do anything but be annoyed, or else it's too demanding a situation in terms of my performance in the next split second to allow life-flashing.  Either way, I seem to have survived so far, so I guess none of my experiences has been all that near to death after all.

I will say, as amazing as this guy's story is, it mostly reinforces for me the idea that you don't go around jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.  But what do I know? :)