It has taken many years, a lot of work, and sharing my story to fully honor the loss that transformed my living. Over the past two weeks, I have been sharing my inner thoughts on social media by participating in the 36 Questions. These questions, developed by research psychologist Arthur Aron and his team, were designed to create connection between strangers through conversation. Why did I feel inspired to do this? Because I logged into Facebook and saw the same people arguing over the same things, and saying really awful things to each other. Their focus wasn't on their shared humanity or commonality. They were speaking to each other through a limiting lens of entrenched opinion. No kindness or curiosity. No love. I sat with this and wondered where social media went wrong. How did we allow this technology to separate instead of unite? I thought about deleting my account and realized that isn't a solution so much as a reaction. How could I participate in social media and present myself as the complex human I am. I am not black or white, yes or no. I am fluid, nuanced, and dynamic. I am always changing and growing. As of this writing, I have answered 17 of the 36 questions and today, question 18, requires care. What is your most terrifle memory? I am going to answer this by sharing an excerpt from my memoir When Your Mother Calls You Home. Though the book is full of adventure, magical people, and joyful moments, it was necessary to revisit my grief along the shores of the Ganga River in India. The following excerpt is copyright protected and can not be shared without proper citation or permission. In July of 2001, I was a new mother of an eighteen-month-old son who was the light of my life. I was also five months pregnant with what would have been my second child, a baby girl who would be named Isabella. Our little family was vacationing in Florida, and two days into the trip, I fell ill. I began to run a high fever with intense pain, bleeding, and chills. I felt I was in labor. My husband, John, called my high-risk obstetrician who said, “Go immediately to the nearest hospital with an obstetrics department. Go straight to the labor and delivery floor, give the attending physician my number, and tell him to call me at once.”
We called 411 to find the closest hospital with an obstetric unit and were referred to Bon Secours-St Joseph Hospital in Port Charlotte, which was a forty-five-minute drive from where we were staying. We made the trip by car and my condition worsened with each passing minute. I was wracked with indescribable pain and began to fade in and out of consciousness. When we arrived at the hospital, my fever at intake was nearing 105 degrees and climbing. My memory is a bit spotty between arrival and being transferred to a bed, but I do remember the urgency around me and being covered with a cooling blanket, which caused me to shake uncontrollably. I was encircled by a group of people who went straight to work trying to save two lives.
Among the last few memories during the chaos was a man at my side who wasn’t dressed like the medical staff. He seemed to be wearing the jumpsuit of a pilot. I understood from the discussions over me that he was with a life flight team that was called to transfer me to another facility. He briefly held my wrist, surveyed the machines I was connected to, and then he apologized to someone and said, “Her pulse is too weak. She won’t make the trip.”
This statement seemed to create a new level of panic around me. An ultrasound was being performed, and it was then that I heard the doctor say, “There’s no heartbeat. We need to evacuate the uterus.” I was being transferred to another place, and on the way, in the elevator, I placed my hand on the forearm of the nurse by the gurney and begged her to put me out of my misery.
I was experiencing septic shock caused by an intrauterine infection and the inability to miscarry or deliver due to placenta previa. I remember reaching the other room; my vision began to dim, and all I could see were smears of light above me. I heard the doctor at the foot of the table ask, “Tracie, do you think you can push?” I remember trying to push, but I couldn’t feel my body. The only sign I was actually pushing was the doctor saying, “OK, you’re doing it. We’re halfway there.” Then, he sounded farther and farther away. The noise of the room began to fade. I quickly piled up complication after complication as my body began to shut down, and I started to bleed out. I experienced pulmonary effusion and could no longer breathe. My body was randomly clotting in a rare and serious condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation, and then, cardiac arrest.
I died. I flat-lined.
My next memory was hearing a whooshing sound, and suddenly, I was pain-free. Completely at peace. I was also over my body, watching doctors and nurses attempt to shock it back to life as nurses scrambled to intubate me and order blood.
Suddenly, I was pulled into a long space like a hall or a tunnel lined with columns or pillars that led to the brightest, warmest light I had ever experienced. Lining the hall were all the people I knew in this lifetime that had passed before me. They were so happy to see me arriving and encouraged me toward the light. I moved into the bright, blinding, absorbing light at the end of the tunnel and was consumed by Holy oneness and knowing. I intuitively understood that this Divine presence has many names: God, the Central Sun, the Creator. Whatever you call our source, it is the pure energy of unconditional Love.
There was no pain or suffering in the light. No physical form. No male or female. Only Love. Love is the energetic lifeforce. Pain, suffering, feelings, identification, and worldliness are conditions of the body, not the energy that moves it. I was home. I was eternal once more. While I was in the warmth of this love and light, I was without troubles. I remembered who I was.
I was told I had to return. I was told I still had things to accomplish in this lifetime, but I didn’t want to return. I wanted to stay there in the safety and warmth of Love. I wanted to stay there in that feeling I had always desired but never found. It was Samadhi. Bliss. Complete absorption. It’s hard to explain what I experienced, but it was as though everything was energy, and there was no separation between me and the Divine. There was no darkness. No limitations. No heaviness. I experienced everything all at once and understood how the entirety of Creation works together. I understood how one thought or action creates energetic ripples throughout the Universe, how everything is connected through this Divine energy. But our fear . . . OUR FEAR . . . blocks our heart from accessing this Love; this truth. God is the energy in everything, and that energy is Love. God is the Universe.
When it was time to return, I resisted. I wanted to remain in the loving light. I was briefly above another scene—a frustrated doctor near tears (I would later find out this was my cardiologist) was on the phone with his forehead resting in his other hand. He said, “I don’t understand why I can’t stabilize her heart.”
There was a whooshing sound, and I felt a vacuum-like pull back to my body.
Then I felt heavy, dense darkness.
I experienced occasional moments of awareness during this mostly unconscious period and thought I was in an underwater coffin. I couldn’t see because I couldn’t open my eyes for some reason. All I could hear was a sound similar to air flowing through a scuba apparatus, and my lungs were filling and exhaling mechanically to constant humming, dripping, and gurgling sounds. My mind interpreted this as being in a box under water.
When I finally regained consciousness a week later, I didn’t understand the thing I was choking on in my throat, so my first instinct was to clear my airway. I yanked the ventilator and feeding tube out with my hands, causing me to gag and gasp, and raise all kinds of alarm and panic around me. I couldn’t yet breathe on my own, so the fast-acting nurses quickly intubated me, and I was out again.
Over the next few days, I was moving between unconscious and conscious states. My arms were now restrained to my bedrails, and I allowed the machine to do the breathing for me, thanks to the sage advice my nurse Sharon whispered in my ear, “Don’t fight it honey. It’s easier if you let it do its thing.” A pacemaker controlled the ticking of my heart. My eyes were swollen and crusted shut; I could not see, and I was unable to verbally communicate due to the ventilator. I was being fed through a tube, and IVs and ports were in every available vein. My husband John was a near constant, and at one point, he explained he was camping on the floor of the waiting room. He said the hospital wouldn’t allow our son in the ICU so, initially, he was staying with our only relative in Florida, his great aunt, but our mothers and my sister had arrived and were now helping care for him.
Until that moment, I had never been apart from my son. I wanted nothing more than to hold him, but I couldn’t answer questions or express my wishes. When people communicated with me, I could only manage to send tears down my cheeks.
John played music for me through headphones, which was so calming, and my nurses Sharon and Gigi explained everything and talked to me while they did routine things around my bed, but my frustration was growing because I couldn’t respond. At some point, Gigi was changing my IV, and I started making a writing gesture with the finger and thumb of my restrained right hand.
She said, “Oh my gosh! Are you trying to tell me you want to write?”
I repeated the movement with exaggerated excitement. She understands!
This small gesture was the only way I could convey, I can hear you. I want to speak.
She moved about the room for a moment; then she returned to my side and placed a flat object on my lap. She moved my hand and placed it palm down, so I could feel the piece of paper underneath. Then, she placed a writing instrument in my hand. I didn’t know whether it was a pen or pencil. I began to write. I would write a question, and she would read it back to me in disbelief.
Can you bring me my baybee?
Please bring me my babee.
I want to see my baby.
Gigi would validate each message, “You want to see your baby?” but her validation was not followed by an answer.
I still have that piece of paper. My writing is so tiny you almost need a magnifying glass to read it. The script runs north, south, east, and west across the page. And my misspelling of baby is inexplicable.
I’m sure no one knew whether I was asking to see my eighteen-month-old son or my stillborn daughter. Truthfully, even today, I don’t know either. Perhaps both. Maybe because my tiny questions found their way to the page from my nearly lifeless body, or maybe because it was the wise thing to do, the hospital’s grief counselor suggested to my family that a funeral would provide me with the closure I needed to appropriately process this loss. Unfortunately, it was a decision that had to be made quickly because it was also necessary to handle our baby's remains.
My husband had to make many hard decisions on his own at that time, and we were still fairly young. This was one of the hardest. He later told me this decision haunted him because it was such a horrible reality for me to wake up to.
The grief counselor explained that without this closure, I might struggle with confusion later and believe my child was out there in the world. For instance, I might see a young girl playing in the park and believe it was actually my daughter. My family, not wanting me to suffer from unusual delusions, agreed. I think they made the best decision with the information they had. The problem was, this decision was being made before I was fully in this world. I didn’t understand what happened to me or my baby. I wasn’t conscious enough to understand my experience or to ask questions about it.
I gained consciousness for longer stretches; and the swelling in my eyes was receding, making it possible for me to see little flashes of my room. The first thing I could make out was the crucifix on the wall in front of me. I’m in a Catholic hospital. When it was clear I was improving and I could see, things began to move quickly. I remember the nurse telling me my family was going to visit with the priest, and she would bring my baby. I felt a mixture of gratitude, relief, and excitement, but I didn’t know if she meant I was going to see my eighteen-month-old son or my new baby. I wanted to see both. Either way, I was going to see a baby!
I remember the strange discomfort I felt being surrounded by my family. Everyone was crying and sad. My body felt stiff, uncooperative, and despondent. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t speak. My bed was moved to an upright position, which made the ventilator feel uncomfortable, and I became more aware of the sore on my mouth where the vent had been resting. I could see the faces of the people I loved, but my little boy was not with them. Somehow, in spite of miraculous advancements, modern medicine had created such an awful and lonely experience for the aged, the healing, and the dying.
The priest arrived, introduced himself, blessed me, then stationed himself near the foot of the bed. A woman entered the room holding what I assumed was my baby wrapped in a blanket. As she got closer, she held the baby close to me. I saw a tiny, dead, lifeless baby. I will spare you and me the details, and I won’t describe the horror of this reality. I didn’t realize that my baby had died until that moment. What mattered was that I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I began to cry and choke on the tubes in my throat. I clenched my eyes shut and refused to look at her. Someone, an unknown woman, leaned into my ear and said, “Tracie, if you get upset, we’ll have to take the baby away.”
No one meant to traumatize me. I know they thought they were helping, but I immediately understood why babies cry when they enter this world. I had returned to pain and suffering. I couldn’t wail. I couldn’t ask questions. I couldn’t express myself. And the idea was planted into my subconscious that if I got upset, they would take my baby away.
This was my reentry into the world.
I was traumatized and grief stricken. I was also unable to see my son. I returned to a body that had to learn to walk with a brain that suffered from PTSD and memory complications due to oxygen deprivation. I had vocal cord damage (likely because I ripped the vent from my throat), and many, many checkups because I had multiple transfusions of blood and platelets and required ongoing care. And from the day I woke up, I walked in two worlds at once. I didn’t lose the knowing or the understanding that I had accessed in the Light. Ball, Tracie. When Your Mother Calls You Home: One Woman's Healing Journey Across the Globe, One Miracle at a Time. Tracie Ball, 2025
I sat down with Nadja Haldeman of the WakeUp Protocol podcast 24 years later. You can listen to our discussion here: https://thewakeupprotocol.buzzsprout.com/2464537/episodes/18054682
