Actually, I died in November, 1998.
I remember it vividly. My heart was racing and I heard it in my ears, and then it stopped. It was stopped a long time – it felt like several minutes but I don't know how long it really was.
I experienced the "seeing the white light up a tunnel," but even as it was happening I felt that I understood it scientifically, and so I contemplated its neurophysiology: the back of my brain was losing oxygen and shutting down first, and that is the center of the visual field, hence as the neurons shut off the visual field percept shifts to "nothing" – i.e. whiteness – and this whiteness spreads as the area of oxygen-deprived neurons expands.
I thought about many things. I considered becoming religious and rejected it, in that moment. I replayed memories, bits of my life. I had a sort of debate with myself – I can't say if I won or lost that debate. Both, maybe.
And then I heard a voice – my own voice – which said: "you're not done yet." My heart started again. I had the distinct impression that I had become a ghost – an idea which recurs to me occasionally even through the present day.
This episode is not invented or fictionalized in any way. There are a lot of surrounding circumstances that I'm less willing to share so transparently about that point in my life, but the core near-death experience was real and transformational.
From that time until now I have been living on borrowed time: "my bonus round."