Without warning, my head started spinning and everything got blurry. Although I’ve never done hallucinogenic drugs, this is what I imagined tripping is like. An out-of-body experience.

“Something’s happening,” I said to my boyfriend of eight months. We were having dinner at a restaurant in a seaside village near Merida, Mexico at the end of August 2025.

“Sara, what’s going on?” I heard him say as my surroundings started to dim. “Sara, talk to me.”

I passed out. 

When I came to, I was sitting in a chair, sweating profusely through the cute white, low-cut, sundress I’d bought on the beach that morning. 

My boyfriend was holding on to me. “Sara, breathe,” he said. “Sit up and breathe.”

I slumped over. All I wanted to do was throw up. Which I did. 

I wondered if I was still modestly covered. I could hear the voices of the restaurant employees who had rushed to my boyfriend’s aid and called the ambulance

“I can come to the hospital and translate for you if you need,” a woman said in English, breaking through the fast, fluid Spanish swirling around me. I only wanted to hear my boyfriend’s voice.

“Thank you very much, but that won’t be necessary,” a familiar deep voice replied. While not fluent, my boyfriend could speak and understand Spanish.

A policeman arrived and announced in perfect English that the ambulance was on its way. 

After an eventful trip to the bathroom where my body expelled the rest of what was in it, my boyfriend asked me if I thought I could walk.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Then let’s get out of here and get a taxi back to the Airbnb and I can take care of you,” he said. That sounded so good.

As we walked out into the early darkness of the night, the policeman caught up to us.

“The ambulance is almost here,” he said. “She needs to go to the hospital. You should wait for the ambulance. It’s free.”

My boyfriend looked at me. “You want to go to the hospital?”

“I don’t know…Maybe…I think so…Yes.” I said, as my knees crumbled and he caught me — again.

Can A Person Die for 90 Secconds?

“You were dead,” my boyfriend said the next day on our way back to the Airbnb from the hospital. I’d elected not to stay another day.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean dead. You turned ashen gray and your breath got very shallow. Then it stopped. For about a minute and a half,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘this woman is dead.’ I gave you CPR and you started breathing again. But you were dead.”

I believed him. And wondered if a person could really die for 90 seconds.

But I didn’t really process right then that this man had saved my life and I was lucky to be alive. I was worried I’d ruined our long romantic weekend. His first vacation in nine months. Our first trip together. 

It was one of the reasons I’d not wanted to stay in the hospital another day, even though I didn’t feel totally fine. I didn’t want him to spend what was left of the weekend going back and forth to the hospital. 

I just needed him to hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay. Even thought I’d told him to go back to the Airbnb, I’d been so scared when he’d left me at the hospital the night before.

I wasn’t really myself. 

My brain was still fuzzy and I was in shock, a little weak. 

At that moment, I couldn’t fully comprehend what he had done, much less express my gratitude in the way he wanted. I was still trying to understand what had happened inside my own body. 

He needed acknowledgment. I needed comfort. Neither of us quite knew how to give the other what we needed.

Resurrected

“You’re probably never going to know exactly what happened to you,” my boyfriend said the next evening after I’d recovered enough to spend the day touring the Mayan ruins of Uxtmal and Kabah. “But you were dead.”

“I believe you,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around the concept. “But I can’t quite comprehend it.”

“Have you ever seen anyone die before?” he asked. “When their breath gets shallow and then they stop breathing.”

My mother. 

I was in her hospice room when she took her last breath at age 88 after complications from a fall and Alzheimer’s disease.

Now I understood.

“In the biblical sense, you’ve been resurrected,” my boyfriend deadpanned. “But the Heavenly Father was not ready to receive you. Perhaps you have sinned too much.”

Perhaps. I didn’t see any white flashes or heaven’s gate beckoning while I was out, though.

Still Alive

When I returned home, I spent months undergoing tests and seeing specialists, trying to understand what had happened. Everything came back normal except for a small blockage in one of my carotid arteries. My brain scan showed no evidence of a stroke.

The most likely explanation was dehydration, perhaps compounded by food poisoning. But no doctor could tell me for certain why I had stopped breathing—or whether it might ever happen again.

Here I am a year later, still alive.

And no longer with the man who saved my life.

So what do I owe him?

Gratitude, certainly. What he did was real and consequential. He recognized that I wasn’t breathing, performed CPR, and brought me back. I will always be thankful for that.

But gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. 

Saving someone’s life does not give you ownership of the life you saved. Nor does it require that person—terrified, sick, and in shock—to perform gratitude on demand.

Perhaps the only way to honor what he did is to live the life I still have as fully as I can. To be kind and generous. To carry more gratitude and grace than fear.

And to remember that every breath, every laugh, and every ordinary passing day is nothing less than extraordinary.