Dad was a lefty

Sammie Settlemire

Sammie didn’t expect to watch her own death from above her body. But when her heart stopped, reality split open. In the chaos of an operating room, she became both witness and patient — hovering outside her own shell while surgeons fought to pull her back from the edge.She saw everything: the wires, the screens, the frantic hands working inside her. She heard the words no living person should ever hear spoken about themselves — time of death. And she felt the terrifying truth of being conscious, aware, and unable to make anyone understand she was still there.This is not fiction. This is not embellished. This is a true story based on real events — the moment Sammie slipped out of her body and into the space between life and whatever waits beyond it.As she drifted through darkness, tunnel vision, and the suffocating weight of her final breath, she discovered a clarity that only comes when everything is stripped away. And when she fought her way back into her body, she carried with her the knowledge that every second matters — because once it’s gone, it never returns.Between Breath and Darkness is the raw, unfiltered opening to Sammie’s memoir: a visceral descent into near‑death awareness, dissociation, and the fragile boundary between existence and oblivion. It is a story of survival told by the only person who lived it.