Reclaiming the Spirit: A Memoir of Two Near-Death Experiences and the Fifty-Nine Years Between Them - Hardcover

Twice, Emanuel Perlman crossed the threshold between life and death and came back changed each time. Reclaiming the Spirit is a memoir of fifty-nine years lived at the edge of ordinary experience. At his mother's bedside, in her last lucid moment, she looked past him and spoke four words no child forgets, a moment that crystallized a lifetime spent seeking what lies beneath the surface of belief, grief, and mortality. Across those decades, Perlman's path took him into places most people never see: preparing the dead with his own hands according to Jewish burial tradition; standing inches from the funeral pyres of Varanasi, where he captured one of the only existing photographs of the reclusive Aghori sect; laying his palm against ancient stone beneath Jerusalem and feeling it soften beneath his touch; and being named Chief Udochukwu in Nigeria, consecrated as a living emblem of peace. Woven throughout is a second near-death experience and a lifelong question the book keeps returning to: what does it mean to be a witness rather than a spectator to your own life, and to the suffering of others? With a foreword by Dr. Everett R. Siegel, retired Johns Hopkins physician in neuropsychiatry, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, this is a book for readers drawn to memoirs of faith, mortality, and the hidden architecture of existence itself.