“It was kind of shocking to open your eyes and see that. Everybody was around me, and they said: ‘He’s back. He’s here,’” Pacino recalled to the Times.
“Everybody thought I was dead,” he told People Magazine. “The nurse that was taking care of me said, ‘I don’t feel a pulse on this guy.’”
“I thought I experienced death. I might not have. I don’t think I have, really. I know I made it.”
Many people who have had near-death experiences like this have reported sensations resembling an afterlife: visions of deceased relatives, beckoning them to “come to the light,” etc.
But Pacino says he did not have any such visions of a great beyond — in fact, his brush with death affirmed to him that the end really is the end.
“I didn’t see the white light or anything. There’s nothing there,” he told the New York Times.