Nancy Hannan almost died while giving birth decades ago and, like many who’ve had similar experiences, remembers it vividly to this day.
She distinctly recalls gasping for breath, trying to bat away the oxygen mask doctors put on her and hearing a voice say, “We’re losing her.”
Hannan felt herself sliding off the table, then being enveloped in a brilliant but comforting light and suddenly feeling completely at peace.
“The next thing you know, my arms were free, I didn’t have any trouble breathing, I felt fine and I was floating around the room,” she said in a recent interview. “I wasn’t worried about the baby getting out of me, because she was fine.”
Hannan incorporates that episode into her second novel, “Crossing Over,” which is a sequel to “In the Light of Winter.” The first novel revolved around Kate, an older widow trying to re-enter the dating market.
Kate eventually ends up with a Georgetown University professor named Jack. When “Crossing Over” picks up the action, the couple are still together, but not yet married.
Kate espies Jack one day as he is perusing her well-worn copy of “Death Is of Vital Importance,” by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
Kate, who had a pregnancy-related brush with death, tries repeatedly to draw out her partner on the possibility of an afterlife, but he is not receptive.
By consulting with longtime friends and a prescient medium, Kate gains the courage to pursue the topic more openly with Jack. The book revolves around whether their two belief systems are irreconcilable, and if so, can they still remain a couple?
Hannan understands that discussing the possibility of an afterlife can make people uncomfortable.
“I find that it’s a topic that people still don’t want to talk about,” she said. “It’s foreign to them.”
The author, who received a strict Catholic upbringing, initially was skeptical of mediums who supposedly could connect with the deceased.
“But when I’ve had people come to me to me during my sleep, standing in my bedroom and find the next morning that they died during the night . . . I have to believe there’s something here,” she said. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”
A 25-year Great Falls resident, Hannan was raised in Greenbelt, graduated from high school in Washington, D.C., and trained in nursing at Georgetown University. She spent a quarter-century working as a nurse in an obstetrics/gynecology office before retiring five years ago.
Hannan previously wrote two memoirs: “A Mother Never Forgets,” about the search for the daughter she put up for adoption after birth, and “A Way Out,” which proffered advice to help people leave abusive relationships.
“I write about ideas, experiences I’ve had, things I believe in and things that I can just hope to plant a seed” about in readers’ minds, she said.
People are entitled to their belief systems, especially when it comes to out-of-body and afterlife experiences, Hannan said. But she feels reassured by the testimony of many people, including some medical doctors, whose accounts of what happens during death are remarkably similar.
“The idea was to get people to think a little bit and find out their own answers,” she said of the novel.
Kristin Clark Taylor, founder and facilitator of the Great Falls Writers Group, said she has loved all of Hannan’s books, including “Crossing Over.”
“Nancy’s writing pushes us, pleads with us, propels us to think beyond the here and now, and to fully embrace this impossibly messy, sometimes-painful, always-gratifying universal force called love,” Taylor said.
Hannan is a charter member of the Great Falls Writers Group and from the first meeting “filled the room with her wisdom, her wit, her tremendous writing skills and just as importantly, with her gentle humility,” Taylor said. “Our writing family would not be the same without her.”
