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Bio:
Brian is a native of Long Island, NY where he has spent most of his life taking advantage of its proximity to the ocean. He completed 10 years of private school before finishing his last two years and graduating from Bay Shore High School in 1971. He and his wife Lin met there, in high school, and married in 1984 and have travelled extensively throughout the world since. He has been in Mexico for a total of years where they learned Spanish and started learning Mayan. He was seriously injured there in 1993 and died in a hospital in Cancun, at which time he experienced what is called a “near death” event. After almost 20 years of denial he came to grips with the reality of it, and has now decided that sharing his experience might help those who thirst for the truth about what happens when you die.
He has lead an interesting, varied life through some college, many different career choices, much travelling, and a ”better than most” marriage. He considers himself “happy”, and even with the limitations that severe head trauma placed on him, he remains surprisingly approachable and engaging. He has embraced the peace and clarity gifted to him through his experience.
Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
A Flight Without Wings: My Experience with Heaven is a non-fiction memoir written by Brian McLaughlin. The author was on vacation in Mexico in 1993 when he sustained massive head trauma. He was in a comatose state as the doctors were working on him in a Cancun hospital, but he could hear them discussing his case, especially how to sew up his ruptured eye. His doctors and family were not sure that he would survive or that, if he did, he would have brain damage. While he was on the operating table, he began to feel dissociated from the event even as he continued to hear them, though more and more faintly. He began to feel a deep sense of comfort and warmth. Then he watched as a speck grew larger, and he discerned that it was a figure approaching him.
Brian McLaughlin's religious/philosophical memoir, A Flight Without Wings: My Experience with Heaven, is not filled with accounts of angelic hosts, harps and the gilded halls of Heaven. What it is, rather, is a sincere and reflective account of the author's near-death experience and how those crucial moments when he hovered between life and death transformed his outlook on life. McLaughlin speaks directly to the reader, and I quickly became involved with what he had to say. His story, while indelibly altered by his injuries and his after-life experience, is filled with life, resilience and enthusiasm, even as it reflects the peace and comfort -- and certainty -- he feels about what happens next, and shares his thoughts on how he can best share his feelings with others. He does so admirably in this well-written and moving memoir that neither delves into the fanciful or dogmatic, nor descends into anger and recriminations over the events that so changed his life. A Flight Without Wings: My Experience with Heaven is a remarkable work that's well worth reading, and it's highly recommended.
