Boy who saw heaven and returned from death shares his story!

CLEVELAND, Ohio - February 15, 2011 - Alex Marlarkey has seen heaven. Some embrace his story - presented in detail in the New York Times bestselling book, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven.

Others shrug off the boy's experience off as simply the traumatized, imagined recollections of a severely injured little boy.

People have different beliefs about life after death. Some believe in the archetype offered by the world's orthodox religions, while others hold New Age views. Then there are those that hold fast in their bleak belief that what awaits everyone after this life is nothing more than a dark, eternal nothingness - a featureless void that stretches forever beyond the end of time.

But 6-year-old Marlarkey dismisses those debates. He knows what he has experienced. He died and returned; and what he saw cannot be dismissed so easily.

Yet when pressed, Marlarkey won't go into too many details about what happened. He says he cannot even share the experience with his father. Most of his incredible experience he keeps to himself, claiming that the beings he met instructed him not to share too much with the living.

Involved in a car crash that left him paralyzed and on death's doorstep, doctors that examined the dying boy's injuries agreed it was the worst possible case. The accident caused Marlarkey to suffer what's called an "internal decapitation."

Dr. Raymond Onders, Marlarkey's primary physician, explains the terrible injury in the book. “The vertebrae were completely detached. The tendon sheath around the spinal column was severed near the base of his brain. The injury was so severe and so high on the spinal column, it is simply incredible Alex survived.”

Even though physically his head was still attached to his body, internally his skull became detached from the spinal cord. Once admitted to the emergency room, the doctors were stunned that Alex Marlarkey had not been wheeled in dead on arrival.

Beyond the horrifying decapitation, Marlarkey suffered other major injuries, including a fractured pelvis and serious brain damage.

Deciding on using heroic measures to save the little boy, the doctors opted for what they termed the “Christopher Reeve” surgery. They reattached some of the severed spinal cord - fusing enough nerve endings together to permit Marlarkey to breathe and freeing him from the ventilator.

During the two months time that Marlarkey spent in the hospital wavering back and forth on the edge of life and death, he remained in a coma. Although his wrecked body lay on the bed motionless, he says his soul soared outwards. He insists he went to heaven.

Immediately following the accident, while unconscious, he tells of being outside his body, watching angels carry his father out of the smashed car. Then the boy claims he met with Jesus while hearing the most amazing music all around him.

Marlarkey's account has many of the elements of Christianity's vision of heaven.

“When I arrived in heaven, I was inside the gate," the book recounts of Marlarkey's experience. "The gate was really tall, and it was white. It was very shiny, and it looked like it had scales like a fish. I was in the inner heaven and everything was brighter and more intense on the inside of the gate. It was perfect."

That is a word that Marlarkey always uses in describing the place. Perfect. Perfection. Flawless. Beyond anything ever made by mankind.

“Perfect is my favorite word for describing heaven,” he says about the afterlife.

In an interview from his residence in Ohio with The Daily Mercury, an Australian newspaper, Alex Marlarkey's father found his son's story disturbing. “When he first started talking about it, I thought he had brain damage,” Kevin Marlarkey told the newspaper from his Ohio home.

The senior Marlarkey, the father of four, is a highly educated man and the son of a well-respected clinical research director. He is a practical man and a common sense dad. When his son began talking about his experiences in the afterlife, Kevin Marlarkey didn't believe it.

Although Kevin Marlarkey had slipped into shock immediately following the car accident and has no recollection of the incident itself, he does remember the paramedics pulling his son Alex from the wreck.

Alex Marlarkey says he remembers the accident and that during the aftermath - as firemen and paramedics struggled to extract him from the remains of the totalled vehicle - Jesus appeared and he talked with Him as his body was transferred to a flat board.

The account in the book relates how young Marlarkey heard his father screaming his name over and over. He describes his father making a phone call and walking over to an emergency Medivac helicopter that had landed at the accident site. He distinctly remembers his father conversing with a man in a blue-colored suit.

After correcting her son and telling him all the men were wearing orange flight suits, she later followed up on his insistence that he saw what happened and discovered to her amazement that the member of the crew her husband had spoken with indeed was wearing a blue suit at the time.

During those events, Alex Marlarkey was unconscious, perhaps already in a coma, and had no physical way to perceive what was happening around him.

For a time, Kevin Marlarkey kept attempting to get the full story of his son's amazing life after death episode, but the little boy is very solemn about it and always reiterates that he was told not to divulge all of it and only feels comfortable telling part of his experience.

“We probably only know about 10% of what he knows," admits the somewhat frustrated father. "I think he is very protective about it.”

The book also details much of the family's private lives after the accident; how the events shaped and changed the dynamics of their relationships and what they once considered important.

Ironically. Kevin Marlarkey is a professional relationship counselor, yet his own relationships - including his marriage - became became very volatile during the crisis. He tells in the book how his own faith was continually tested: faith in himself, his family, the medical profession… even his faith in God.

Yet since the horrible accident in 2004, Alex Marlarkey has continued to make astonishing progress towards regaining a normal life. People of all faiths around the world who have heard his story pray for him - including in such war-torn places as the Middle East.

The little boy will soon be a teenager. His years of intense therapy have brought him to the point where he can now stand using a support frame and walk a treadmill with the aid of a special harness and his trainers.

The Daily Mercury asked his father if he believed Alex would ever again walk on his own. Reflecting on years of miracles that followed the accident, Kevin Marlarkey said that someday Alex would walk. “Absolutely. Why not?”