The Ascent chronicles my near death experience at the age of twenty-four. Thirty-two days in the ICU for a ruptured appendix led to two clinical deaths on the operating table. The spiritual people that I saw and the gift they gave me that would continue to haunt me for years. The experience would forever change my view on religion and death. I died in the month of May. Twenty-four years old and it was my favorite month of the year. Flowers were in full bloom while dusty rains covered the desert sky. Stretched naked on the operating table with deep incisions splitting my entire abdominal cavity returning in death via the same manner as my birth. Life is always morphing rapidly from one moment to the next. Sometimes so quickly that you don't even notice how everyday activities are taken for granted. Death changed my notion of time and I would never be the same again.