Kim Pierce

Kim Pierce is a former Dallas Morning News writer and editor who lost her fiancé to a heart attack in 1998. In her struggle to come to grips with his sudden death at 50, she began writing a grief journal that she eventually turned into her novel, "My Dead True Love," with the help of the Southern Methodist University Writer’s Path program. For much of her career with The News, she was a restaurant critic. She also was viewed as an expert in farmers markets and locavore trends at a time when people were seeking out more local, sustainable ways of eating. Her own experiences with the paranormal after her fiancé died became a driving force behind writing her novel – that, and a desire to help others explore what may exist beyond death. She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her partner and three cats and volunteers with the Feral Cat Group at SMU to care for the campus cats.

Articles:

Coming Back from the ‘Afterlife’

PAST THE VEIL In an earlier Open to Hope essay, I wrote about the gripping After-Death experience of a friend I call Chief. The anesthesiologist had a heart attack 60 feet underwater while scuba diving in 2007 and, by all measures, was clinically dead. (That’s why he insisted on calling it an After-Death experience.) Chief wanted to write a book about this but crossed over to stay in 2021 before he could finish. He did get as far as drafting a manuscript, which he shared with me because I also wrote a book about the Afterlife (My Dead True Love). […]

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Doctor Journeys to the Afterlife

DOCTOR ON A JOURNEY In an earlier Open to Hope essay, I wrote about the riveting After-Death experience of a friend I call Chief. The anesthesiologist had a heart attack 60 feet under water while scuba diving in 2007 and, by all measures, was clinically dead. (That’s why he insists on calling it an After-Death experience.) Chief wanted to write a book about his After-Death encounter but crossed over for good in 2021 before he could finish. He did get as far as a first draft, a manuscript he shared with me because I also wrote a book about the […]

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Doctor Recalls After-Death Experience

Doctor Recalls After-Death Experience Chief was a friend I met through Facebook, someone struggling to share his extraordinary experience of dying, then returning to life, in 2007. “I died, I lived again, and my life was forever altered,” he wrote in his book draft. He’d asked me to read it because I had written a novel that touched on the afterlife. “The experience profoundly changed my life,” he wrote. “It changed my religion (at least my spiritual views). It even changed my politics.” And Chief was adamant: This was not a near-death experience. Rather, he called it an After Death […]

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Saying Goodbye to His Body

LOSING MY FIANCE When my fiancé died suddenly in 1998, I had the heart-wrenching task of identifying him at the funeral home. Wildly, madly I wanted it not to be true and to see someone else on that gurney. But no, I didn’t even have to enter the room. I could stand in the doorway and look across and see the familiar face I loved, shattering my last hope that some sort of terrible mistake had occurred. Everything moves so fast in those first, frantic moments after a death. Consumed with grief, I leaned heavily on a friend who gently […]

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Exploring Contact Through a Medium

Death of my Partner I expected my fiancé to meet me at the airport that day in 1998. Instead, a friend was there, and he delivered the fateful words: “Kim, he died.” Phillip’s death from a sudden heart attack shattered my world. We’d met later in life, in our 40s, and knew instantly we were soulmates. We looked forward to a future together. A future that was not to be. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows the shock and pain that come next. I likened the loss to physical pain – except there seemed to be no limit […]

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