Last night Ty and I watched the movie “If I Stay”. I had started to read the book and put it down because I just couldn’t stand the writing style. Ty read the book and loved it. The subject matter of an OOBE (out of body experience) NDE (near death experience) fascinated me, so I wanted to read the book. I thought perhaps the movie would be better. In two words, “It wasn’t”. Spoiler alert- if you haven’t seen the movie and want to watch it, you might want to quit reading now. My biggest problem with the movie is it’s a romance story about an 18 year old girl who plays classical music and her rocker boyfriend. Given the premise, it could have been so much more.
The story, at least the part I was interested in, is about an 18 year old girl who is an automobile accident with her parents and 10 year old brother. She is badly injured and taken to the hospital, but at the scene of the accident she leaves her body and rides in the ambulance with her body watching as they work to revive her. She runs around the hospital from place to place checking on her parents and brother and on her own status. One of the problems I had with the movie is that in OOBEs you do not run around, you pretty much teleport. She learns her mother was brought in DOA and her father dies on the operating table. So, now she is going to try to live for her younger brother. It is just the two of them against the world now. But, lo and behold, her younger brother passes as well. Now, she must decide. “Do I stay or do I go?” In the end, she decides to stay. She has been admitted to Julliard to study cello and she has a hot boyfriend who plays in a rock band. So, she stays.
One of my knocks against the movie is it shows very little of the realm people say they enter when they are involved in an NDE or OOBE. She doesn’t know when her parents cross over. She doesn’t know when her brother crosses over. She has to hear it from other people. She has to run the corridors of the hospital to get information instead of just thinking and being where she wants to be. So, from the perspective of NDEs or OOBEs, it’s not presented the way the cases read.
As I reflect on the question “If I Stay” though, I’m far from an 18 year old girl with my whole life ahead of me. I’m a soon to be 55 year old man with my best and most productive days behind me. I had three reasons to remain tethered to this existence and one of them has moved on. I only answer the question in the affirmative now because of Ty and Kayla. No offense intended to anyone else, but they are the only two souls that keep me here. What was difficult before has become nearly impossible with the passing of Shayna. If we were in that accident and the three of them were gone, I’d be right behind them as fast as I could get there.
