It was just like any normal Monday, Brian told Phoenix’s American Heart Association that day. The couple had been out for a hike before Jeff called in to see them. Then, shortly after, the Heins’ friend had arrived at their home. Disaster struck when I got to the Hindes’ place. Tina and I were standing shoulder-to-shoulder one second, Jeff later recalled. The next second, Tina had fallen virtually straight face forward onto the rocks. Realizing that something was seriously wrong, he thus yelled out to Brian to call 911.
Given that Tina had appeared in good health mere moments earlier, Brian was at first confused by Jeff’s demand. When the dad of four saw his wife on the ground, though, he knew that her condition had taken a serious nosedive. With Tina’s life seemingly hanging in the balance, Brian duly called for the Emergency Services. From what he could see, moreover, Brian believed that Tina was having a heart attack. More worryingly still, she’d passed out, while her breathing appeared to have stopped.
Then, Brian was instructed to lie Tina on her back so that he or Jeff could carry out CPR. Together, the two men battled to keep Tina alive until First Responders arrived to take over. But while Tina would survive her ordeal, things seemed touch and go for a while. By the time she was loaded onto an ambulance, in fact, she still hadn’t responded, meaning Brian had to come to terms with the fact that his beloved wife might not make it.
In that desperate moment, the husband and father turned to God, recalling his prayers. Brian claimed that he tried to make a deal with God. “I told God if he gave me Tina back, then he could take anything else,” Brian said. “He can take all our cars, he can take all my stuff, I don’t need that stuff, I needed Tina.” And it seems that Brian’s prayers may have paid off. After he had arrived at the hospital, a doctor told him that his wife was alive. For Brian, then, Tina’s survival was nothing short of a miracle. Indeed, he truly believed that God had granted him his wish.
But while his wife was unconscious, she had apparently witnessed something that she went on to report to her spouse. As Tina laid lifeless for 27 minutes, she believes that she had a so-called afterlife experience. And the Arizona Mom isn’t the first person to claim to have seen something beyond this realm while on the cusp of death. Some individuals who’ve been brought back to life have reported observing bright lights or frightening creatures during their periods of unconsciousness.
Given that no one knows what happens to us when we leave this world, afterlife experiences are understandably the subject of much fascination. In fact, there’s even a Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. This organization gathers testimonies from people around the globe who’ve all been brought back from the brink in a bid to understand more about what might happen to us when we die. Similarly, heart attack survivor Heidi C describes seeing the most beautiful white golden light. She added, “There were no words to really express or articulate how I felt or to describe the beautiful light and warmth that I was bathed in. The color and feelings were a million times magnified.”
So, as Tina was revived time and again by Emergency Services, little did her distraught husband Brian know that she too was having one of these afterlife experiences. The first he would learn of the matter, in fact, was when Tina came around and was seemingly in a hurry to pass on a message to her surrounding family members. Incapable of being able to voice her thoughts out loud, an intubated Tina was handed a pen and paper to help her communicate. Then, in an almost unintelligible scrawl, she simply wrote, “It’s real.”
Confused, her family members asked Tina what she was referring to. And in response, she pointed upwards, signifying Heaven. As the emotion of the occasion overcame her, Tina later divulged more details of her afterlife experience in a 2018 interview with Good Morning Arizona. There, she claimed that she’d seen Jesus next to some black gates that themselves led to a beaming yellow light. Tina added of the vision, “It was so real, the colors were so vibrant.” And for Tina, there’s little doubt that what she saw that day was a little piece of Heaven.
Referring to the number of times she was resuscitated following her heart attack, she continued, “From what the paramedics shared with us, truly I died five times and came back.” Furthermore, Tina’s vision had made both her and Brian convinced that it was God’s will to save her life. And the couple have discovered a new appreciation of life as a result. “I’m just so thankful that he didn’t take you right then, right now, and that you got to stay and still be my wife,” Brian told Tina during the Good Morning Arizona interview. “So, I celebrate you every day.”
Tina and Brian’s story hit social media after their niece, Maddie Johnson, had a copy of Tina’s “It’s real” scribbled tattoo on her wrist. Then, in June 2019, Maddie posted a picture of the spiritual inking on Instagram. And alongside the snap, she revealed the meaning behind the tattoo in the accompanying caption on Instagram. Maddie wrote, “Tina’s story is too real not to share and has given me a stronger confidence in a faith that so often goes unseen. It’s given me a tangible to an internal hope that’s not too far away. I love you, Tina Hinds. The way you boldly love Jesus and others has changed the way I hope to live and love.”
Yet, for Tina at least, there was one more person to whom she had to pay tribute for saving her life: her husband of three decades. After all, it was Brian who had administered the CPR that kept Tina’s heart moving. His grateful wife told Phoenix’s American Heart Association, “In those few moments if I was on my own, everything could have been different.”
