I died and was sent back to deliver an urgent message. Here's what heaven looks like... and the daunting decision I had to make before I returned

When Amber Cavanagh woke on the morning of December 23, 2021, she knew something was very wrong with her normally healthy body.

The sense that her head was wrapped in a thick haze, the inability to speak beyond muffles, and the feeling that her limbs were dead weights - all were the symptoms of a catastrophic stroke that had attacked while she slept.

By the time she got to hospital, she was in the throes of a second stroke - the damage to her brain already irreversible.

But as her husband Mike and children, Grace and Wyatt, aged just 14 and 12 at the time, prepared to say their goodbyes, a last-ditch attempt to save Amber's life was proposed.

Medics evacuated her by helicopter to another more specialized hospital two hours away, unsure if she would even survive the journey.

And it was while in the helicopter that, she claims, she went to heaven, where she was faced with a life and death decision.

Talking exclusively to the Daily Mail, she describes how the sun was rising, and as it hit her face, she closed her eyes.

'Then I woke up and I was on the other side,' she says. 'It was that quick.' 

The Canadian-based psychic recounts her story in her book At The Stroke of Eternity, describing how one minute she was in the helicopter, slipping out of consciousness, before being instantly transported to a beautiful garden, surrounded by flowers, a gazebo, and all her loved ones.

Even her pets - both past and present - were there to greet her, she claims.

Much of what she describes of this place will be familiar from depictions of heaven on film or in books: the pastoral scene, the overwhelming sense of peace, and being reunited with family and friends who have died.

In 1998's Oscar-winning What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams, the central character is reunited at death with his dead children in a mountainous landscape filled with beautiful wild flowers.

And in the movie Contact, Jodie Foster attempts to communicate with alien beings and is transported to another dimension where she meets her father on her favorite childhood beach. 

'I was barefoot, with my feet in the grass,' says Amber, 'and I looked kind of like my 25-year-old self, with no scars or signs of aging.

'Everything that is hard about being human - I didn't feel any of that discomfort... There were no misunderstandings. I kind of knew everything, and I knew that, no matter what, everything was going to be okay.'

She adds: 'Everything there sort of vibrates or glows with the most loving light you've ever seen, and everything is connected.

'Standing on the grass, I could feel everything, each plant, each blade of grass, each water, molecule; everything kind of glowed with the light of God, or whatever that highest source is.'

However, Amber's version of heaven differs from the traditional picture in one key way.

'There is no judgment,' she reports. 'No reward. No punishment. No "You should have done this." Or "You should have done that" Nothing like that at all. Not even a hint.

'Pass/fail and reward/punishment are a human construct. It doesn't belong to your soul.

'Everything is fully accepted, and we just learn from it and try to understand and grow and be loving about everything we've ever done.'

Also present in her remarkable welcoming committee were what she describes as her 'spirit guides' who told her - via telepathy - that she could decide whether to stay in this idyllic place filled with love and beauty, or go back to Earth - where she would face months of agonizing recovery.

If she chose to go back, they told her, it would be a decision she would live to regret more than once.

However, if she stayed, her family would be devastated by the loss - and she says she saw a vision of what would happen to them should she chose to die: her husband descending into alcoholism, finding comfort in the arms of a much younger, blonde woman.

Her son, too, would struggle with addiction, leaving her daughter to take on the mothering role in the family, giving up her dreams of becoming a nurse.

Strange as it may sound, however, none of this information was what brought Amber back from the brink.

'It sounds awful,' she acknowledges, 'and… obviously any mother would be like, "No, I don't want that to happen".'

But she says: 'You're kind of detached. You see it for what it is. It's just a different branch of your path that you know you can choose to take or not take… there's no judgment at all about our decisions or what we do. And so it was like watching a movie.'

The choice she was presented with, she stresses, is not offered to everyone who dies. Instead, Amber was experiencing what she calls an 'exit point'.

'We are not conscious of [...] exit points,' she claims, adding that every human can have anywhere between two and 10 'exit points' in their life.

They could be the day you decide not to go to your usual coffee place, and avoid a fatal car accident. Or when you miss the flight that ends up crashing.

'A lot of the time we don't realize the exit points are there. This, for me, was not my end. It was an exit point.'

And what did bring her back from the brink, she now says, was the assurance from her spirit guides that she would share her story with the world: 'They said I would write books. They said I would gain back most of what I lost. They did say my right arm would never work again, which is true.

'They said I would speak to world leaders. I don't know what that means, and it has yet to come to fruition, but they did say […] I would be able to help the world understand our place here and the purpose of it all.

'They said, also, if I didn't come back, it would be 10 to 15 years or more before another person just like me would be born to do the exact same things that I'm doing.'

And so she made the decision to live. She claims she was then transported from the garden to a 'light-filled waiting room', floating above her body as she watched herself convulse in a grand mal seizure.

'I watched my body seize. It took them a while to get it to stop, because my brain was swelling so quickly, and the second the seizure was done, I closed my eyes, and I was back in my body, and then I remember nothing, until I woke up a couple days later.

'It took me a bit until I could use any type of words to explain anything,' she says.

But when she was finally able to communicate with loved ones, they could hardly believe the things she had 'seen' while unconscious

'I told my family, "I saw you guys leave the house and pack and panic".'

She also saw her parents stop at a fast food place, 'and it made my kids really mad because they felt sick and didn't want to eat and they just wanted to get to the hospital.'

Since going public with her near death experience, several people have got in touch to tell her they recognize the heavenly place she describes - while others say they have seen something different.

'I think, as humans… we manifest or create what we're going to see,' she reasons, 'because it has to make sense for us and our faith in each life. But I do know a lot of people have said, "Yeah, what you said just resonates" because it's exactly what they went through.'

And while it might be tempting to dismiss what Amber experienced with a logical, scientific explanation, she is adamant that she saw heaven.

Even her neurosurgeon was at a loss to explain what happened to her.

'He introduced me as his miracle patient, because he cannot understand or explain how or why I can do the things I can do,' she says.

'I'm missing the entire middle section on the left side of my brain and most of my frontal lobe on the left side as well, and I shouldn't be able to talk. I shouldn't be able to walk. They were telling my husband, you need to get long-term care lined up. If she survives, she's never going to be able to do anything at all.

'There's always going to be people who will say, you know, your brain can do amazing things when it's dying. There's a lot of hormones and chemicals that go to your brain when you're dying, and you can create these sort of dream worlds. And who am I to say?

'I have nothing but my word and my experience to say that it's happened, but it was more real than this life. It made more sense.'

At the Stroke of Eternity: One Woman's Remarkable Near-Death Experience and the Divine Messages Received by Amber Cavanagh is out now