Zach Tavcar's NDE: The Grandfather in the Trench Coat

The Medication That Breaks Bones

Zach Tavcar was in the middle of the fight of his young life. At 14, he'd just been diagnosed with leukemia. The treatment protocol required a steroid called Prednisone, which helped battle the cancer but came with a brutal side effect. "Prednisone is a bone demineralizer," Zach explains. "It's helpful for treatment but it causes the bones to become a little bit brittle."

The brittleness wasn't theoretical. While Zach was in the hospital, his spine developed small fractures at the vertebrae. He needed a back brace. So there he was with his dad and his four-year-old brother, standing in a medical facility, holding onto parallel bars to keep himself upright while a technician took measurements of his chest.

That's when the fuzziness started.

"I started to feel a little fuzzy," Zach recalls. "I was probably there about 15 minutes and this fuzziness just started getting heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier."

They finished the fitting. Zach walked out of the building, down the steps, in front of his dad and little brother. His father was still talking to the technician, saying goodbye. The truck was 50 or 60 yards away. Zach was rushing now, trying to get there before whatever was happening got worse.

"I finally take a seat," he says. "I'm like okay just calm down calm down you know just relax you're gonna be okay you're gonna be okay." He sat on the lip of his dad's truck bed. His father was still about 30 or 40 meters away.

Zach looked at him and said, "Dad, I'm going to..."

Then he went black.

The Tunnel of Liquid Love

"All of a sudden I opened my eyes and I was in a tunnel," Zach describes. Not the parking lot. Not lying on the ground. A tunnel.

There was a shadow figure standing there, wearing a trench coat.

The light in this space wasn't like any light Zach had ever seen. "It was the most luminescent Goldy silvery white glowing energy," he says, "and it was like moving around me and through me."

He struggled to find words for what this energy felt like. "The only thing I think I attributed to was feeling like liquid love," he explains. "I was enamored in this space like whoa what is this."

There was no panic. No concern. No worry. "I didn't even think of my body," Zach remembers. "I was just one minute I was there and the next minute I was in this beautiful tunnel."

He looked forward at the shadow figure waiting for him. The recognition was immediate. "I thought to myself, that's Grandpa," Zach says. His dad's father. The man who had died seven years earlier, when Zach was only seven years old.

They had a conversation, but not with words. "We had this inaudible conversation," Zach describes. His grandfather told him "everything's gonna be okay, you're gonna get through everything, you just have to keep going."

Keep going. That phrase stuck with Zach, even as other parts of the conversation faded. "When I came back it was like a dream where I don't remember the extra stuff that we talked about," he explains. They had other exchanges, he's certain of that, but they slipped away like dreams do upon waking.

Time felt different there. "I felt like we just were in this space for forever," Zach says.

Then, without warning, without choice, he felt himself being pulled back.

The Vacuum Pull

"I felt stuffed back like I was getting pulled back through a vacuum through this black tunnel," Zach describes. "Boom, hit, and was back in my body."

But he couldn't move. "My nervous system was still jacked from the passing out and so it was still coming online," he explains.

He heard his father's voice, panicked. "Zach, Zach, are you okay, are you okay, Zach, are you okay." Another voice asked if they should call an ambulance. His dad said no, just kept asking if Zach was okay.

"I felt him touching me and I couldn't open my eyes," Zach recalls, "so I just I kind of was able to utter I'm okay I just can't move yet."

It took maybe 30 seconds to a minute. The tingles came. His nervous system started coming back online. He opened his eyes. There was his dad's face, terrified. His four-year-old brother stood there, equally scared.

Zach's father helped him into the truck. As they drove, Zach sat there mulling over what had just happened. "At 14 you know I never had anything happen like that yet," he says, "so I'm thinking okay I just sensationalized this in my brain."

But he couldn't shake it. He wanted to tell his dad, but he waited. Days passed. Maybe a week, maybe two. Finally, he worked up the courage.

The Conversation With Dad

"I said hey Dad you know when I passed out I had this experience," Zach recalls. He told him not to worry. His dad was a worrywart, and Zach didn't want to add to his stress. Then he said it: "I saw grandpa in this tunnel of light."

His father's eyes widened. Here was his son, just diagnosed with leukemia, going through intense treatment, now talking about seeing his dead father in a tunnel of light. "He's thinking my son who just got diagnosed with leukemia is going through this serious treatment, is he dying?" Zach explains. His dad asked urgently, "What did he tell you, what did he tell you, what did he say?"

Zach reassured him. "I said you know nothing he didn't say anything bad, he said everything was gonna be okay but I just had to keep going," Zach remembers. "I just I had to keep moving through this."

His father relaxed a bit. Then he asked what his grandfather looked like.

"I go I don't know, but he was wearing a trench coat," Zach says. "I was like this is weird, I've never seen Grandpa wear a trench coat before because I only knew him for about seven years."

A few months passed.

The Photograph

One day, Zach's father found a picture. An old photograph from decades earlier. He came to Zach and asked, "Is this what Grandpa looked like?"

It was his grandfather as a young man in his late 20s, standing in Prague. He was wearing a trench coat. Not just any trench coat. "The exact same length trench coat in the exact same figure that I had seen him," Zach describes.

Zach had never seen this photograph before. He'd only known his grandfather as an older man, a professional chemist and business owner who wore suits, not trench coats. "I don't think he really was a trench coat wearer," Zach explains. "He was a professional man, he was a chemist and stuff like that, business owner and different things, so I think he wore more professional suits not a trench coat."

But in his younger years, in Prague, as a dapper man in his late 20s, he wore that coat.

"That was my validation that what I did experience was very real," Zach says.

The Geometry of Love

When you ask people to describe the tunnel, they often struggle. Zach is no exception, but his attempt is worth sitting with because it captures something about the nature of that space that transcends our usual categories of solid and fluid, bounded and infinite.

The tunnel, he says, "seemed like it went on for eternity lengthwise." But width-wise, it was different. "It was malleable," he explains. "It was flowies."

It wasn't a tangible tunnel like a steel tube. "It felt like if I just... it seemed like it had faint curtains," Zach describes, "but you could just push the curtains and keep expanding out." The curtains were "really really faint curtains that were easily manipulated."

The tunnel itself was emanating light, not just reflecting it from some distant source. The color was consistent throughout: "a golden silvery white."

Zach reaches for an analogy. Think of oil and water, he suggests. "Imagine it that way, the fluid I was seeing was oil and water," he explains. "I'm in this oil, this love of oil, and I could have continually put more oil in to expand out, but it was still fluid."

Except the colors were switched. The oil, the denser substance, was more clear. "Looking at my grandpa I could feel the energy but it wasn't as thick," Zach says, "and then as you went out it felt like it became oil, and then it went on for forever but it was just kind of giving me this tunnelly feel."

This isn't confusion. This is someone trying to describe a space where our normal rules don't apply. A place where boundaries are suggestions, where density and clarity trade places, where love is a substance you move through.

What Fourteen Knows

Zach has shared his story with other interviewers over the years, and he's discussed aspects of the experience that science struggles to explain. But the core of his account remains consistent: the tunnel, the figure, the trench coat, the photograph.

What strikes me about Zach's case is the validation. Not just internal validation, the subjective certainty that what happened was real, but external, objective confirmation. A photograph of a man in a coat that Zach had never seen, showing his grandfather exactly as he appeared in the tunnel.

This is one of the recurring patterns in veridical NDEs: experiencers encounter deceased relatives at ages they never knew them. A grandmother appears young and vibrant. A grandfather wears clothes from decades before the experiencer was born. These aren't memories being dredged up from the brain. They're encounters with people as they actually were, in forms the experiencer had no way of knowing.

The skeptical explanation would be that Zach somehow saw this photograph as a young child and forgot about it, then his dying brain reconstructed the image. But this requires us to believe that his brain, in the midst of syncope, with compromised blood flow and oxygen, became more capable, not less. That it accessed forgotten memories with perfect clarity and wove them into a coherent narrative, all while Zach was unconscious in a parking lot.

The simpler explanation, the one that doesn't require the brain to become a supercomputer at the moment of its greatest distress, is that Zach went somewhere. He saw his grandfather. His grandfather was wearing the coat he wore as a young man in Prague.

Keep Going

Zach survived his leukemia treatment. He's an adult now, sharing his story, helping others understand what he learned at 14: that death isn't the end, that love is the substance of the universe, that our departed loved ones are not gone.

The message his grandfather gave him, "you just have to keep going," wasn't just about surviving cancer. It was about life itself. The curriculum we're all enrolled in, whether we signed up for it or not.

Zach kept going. He came back from that tunnel of liquid love, back into a body wracked by leukemia and bone fractures and the terror of a four-year-old brother watching his older sibling collapse. He came back and he kept going.

The photograph his father found wasn't proof that Zach's brain malfunctioned. It was proof that his brain got out of the way long enough for him to see what's always been true: we're known, we're loved, we're guided. Even when we're 14 and scared and collapsing in a parking lot.

Especially then.

Our Reflection

Zach's account sits in a category of NDEs that researchers call "veridical," meaning they contain information the experiencer couldn't have known through normal means. The trench coat is a perfect example. Zach was seven when his grandfather died. He knew him as an older professional man who wore suits. The photograph of his grandfather as a young man in Prague, wearing that specific coat, was not part of Zach's conscious or even unconscious memory. Yet he described it accurately after his NDE.

This pattern appears again and again in the literature. Children meet great-grandparents they never knew and describe them accurately. Adults encounter relatives at ages they never witnessed. The deceased appear not as the experiencer remembers them, but as they actually were at some point in their lives.

What's happening here? If the brain is generating these experiences from memory, why would it age-regress deceased relatives to periods the experiencer never witnessed? Why would it dress them in clothes the experiencer never saw? The conventional explanation requires increasingly elaborate gymnastics: perhaps Zach glimpsed the photo as a toddler, perhaps his father described it, perhaps he overheard a conversation.

Or perhaps the simpler explanation is true. Perhaps Zach's grandfather met him in that tunnel, appeared as he wished to appear, wore the coat he wore when he was young and strong and standing in Prague. Perhaps consciousness doesn't end. Perhaps love is the fabric of reality, and when our brains get out of the way, we can feel it moving through us like liquid.

Zach's description of the tunnel's geometry is worth sitting with. The faint curtains that could be pushed outward. The oil-and-water density that somehow reversed itself. The sense of infinite expansion within a bounded space. This isn't the language of hallucination. This is the language of someone who went somewhere our physics doesn't describe well, a place where space is malleable and consciousness shapes reality.

The message Zach's grandfather gave him, "keep going," is the message at the heart of almost every NDE. Life is hard. The curriculum is demanding. But it's worth it. You're not alone. Love is real. Death is not the end.

Zach was 14, fighting leukemia, his bones fracturing from the medication meant to save him. He collapsed in a parking lot and his grandfather met him in a tunnel of light and told him to keep going. Then a photograph proved it wasn't a dream.

That's not a malfunction. That's grace.