Oct 7, 2015 By Suzanne Elliott 3 min read

Dr. Eben Alexander III’s message to a packed auditorium at Upper St. Clair High School on Oct. 6 was simple: We will be taken care of.

Alexander, the first speaker of this year’s Town Hall South Lecture Series, is a teaching neurosurgeon and the author of “Proof of Heaven,” an autobiographical account of his 2008 near-death experience from meningitis, a subsequent coma and his conclusion heaven exists. The book was a best-seller.

“It has been seven years since my coma,” said Alexander, now 61. “I have grown tremendously since then. I am more of a scientist now than ever before.”

His bacterial meningitis-encephalitis struck without warning. He said he woke up in the early morning hours of Nov. 10, 2008, in severe pain. Hours later, he was in a coma and on a ventilator with the chances of survival decreasing with each passing hour.

“I have no memories of seven days in the earthly realm,” he said. “I was 54 at the time and had the worst kind of bacterial meningitis that you can have. I was put on a ventilator. I got worse throughout the week and had severe damage to the neocortex … All eight lobes of my brain were impacted.”

It was on the seventh day of his coma that doctors approached Alexander’s family about stopping antibiotics. During that very conference, Alexander said his youngest son, then 10, ran back to the intensive care unit and literally lifted up his eyelids demanding that he live.

“He said, ‘Dad, you are going to be OK.'” Alexander said. “I had to come back to the world and that’s why I came back, but I had no memories of being Eben Alexander.”

What he did remember was where he had been. He recalled riding on a butterfly wing with a beautiful woman to a beautiful, lush valley. People, dressed in comfortable and colorful clothing, were dancing. Music was playing and there were swooping golden orbs of light.

Alexander said the woman said to him during the journey that he was deeply loved and would be cherished forever.

“We reunite with souls at the time of death,” said Alexander, whose new book, “The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife,” relates stories of others who have also had near-death experiences.

“We must rise above the dogma of separation,” he said.

Alexander, who is completely recovered from his bout of meningitis, said all healing is really about spiritual healing.

“Prayer has a tremendous power to heal,” he said.

Alexander, who was adopted at four months of age, said over the years he made attempts to reunite with his birth parents only to be rebuffed. Seven years ago he tried again and was successful.

He learned his birth father and mother eventually got married and had three children.

“It was both beautiful and bittersweet,” he said. “My youngest sister, Betsy, died in 1998.”

Four months after he had awakened from his coma, he placed a picture of Betsy on his dresser in his bedroom at home. And after looking at the picture for a while, it came to him: the woman on the butterfly with him during his journey was Betsy.