Story of Near Death Tops Bestseller List

Story of Near-Death Experience Tops Bestseller List
By Elisabeth Dunham - Associated Press Writer
The Daily Herald

Betty Eadie met Jesus Christ on Nov. 18, 1973, earth time.

She had died after a hysterectomy and left her body. Guardian angels took her to heaven, where the Son of God explained the meaning of life.

But after what seemed like months, Jesus told Eadie she must go back to her husband and children. Relucatantly, she returned to life.

"Embraced by the Light," Eadie's 147-page, simply written chronicle of her near-death experience nearly 20 years ago, reached No. 1 on the New York Times list of nonfiction best sellers, and has remained in the Top 10.

The 51-year-old housewife-turned-hypnotherapist doesn't seem surprised by the response to her book.

"It just seems to touch a variety of people's spirits. I suppose it at least gives hope to most of them by answering their questions," she said ina telephone interview from her home in Burien, Wash., about 15 miles south of Seattle.

Eadie has been going nonstop since sales of the book took off this spring, busy with speaking engagements, national television talk shows, numerous interviews.

The book is the first published by tiny Gold Leaf Publishing in Placerville, Calif. More than 417,600 copies have sold, said Mitch Pogue, Gold Leaf's head of marketing. Paperback rights have been sold to Bantam for $1.5 million.

Response was almost immediate after the book's December release, Pogue said.

"People would read it and they would come back in and buy a dozen. It was the most amazing thing I'd seen in books, period," he said.

"I never ran an ad on it, never pushed it. It was just, 'I've got to have that book!' People would stand in the store, clutch it and cry."

He said Eadie receives about 100 letters a week from readers.

For years, Eadie shared her experience only with family, friends and those she believed needed to hear it: terminally ill people and their families.

"I was wearing myself out going from one person to another. . . It was time to write this in a book," she said.

Her message, Eadie said, always has been the same: "Be the most wonderful person you can be and move on. We do have a God."

Born in Nebraska to a Scotch-Irish father and a Sioux Indian mother, Eadie was raised a Methodist but attended a Roman Catholic boarding school where she said she learned to fear God and death.

She married at 15 and had four children, one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. She was divorced at 21. Soon after, she met her current husband, Joe, with whom she had four children and recently adopted an eighth child.

At 31, after giving birth for the last time, Eadie had a hysterectomy at a Seattle hospital. In the hours after the procedure, she writes, she died while lying in a hospital bed with no one around.

"Then I felt a surge of energy," Eadie writes. "It was almost as if I felt a pop or release inside me, and my spirit was suddenly drawn out through my chest and pulled upward, as if by a giant magnet."

"My first impression was that I was free."

Three robed men came to her as she hovered over her own body and accompanied her into the darkness, according to the book.

As in other accounts of near-death experiences, Eadie says she followed a bright light. But instead of a reunion with deceased relatives, she writes, she came face to face with Jesus.

When Jesus told her she had to return to her life on Earth, Eadie said she was crushed. When she awoke in the hospital room, only four hours had passed. She sank into a deep depression that lasted months.

It wasn't until five years after her "journey" that her doctor confirmed they had "lost her of awhile" after the hysterectomy, she said.

The doctor has since died, she said.