From episode: Artist & Author Marie Antoinette Kelley of Danny's Day in Heaven
I'm excited to talk to my guest today, Marie Antoinette Kelly. So she is an award -winning artist who has done hundreds of commissioned portraits, as well as the art for the Angel Quest Oracle. She has appeared on dozens of TV, radio, and podcast shows, and has been published in such magazines as Edge and Authority. Danny's Day in Heaven is a wonderful gift for anyone who has ever asked or had to answer the all -important question, what happens when we die? This illustrated beautifully children's book follows a young boy through his near -death experience to heaven and back. A happy ending helps to open the conversation between children and adults about what happens when we die.
Danny is like any other kid on the beach. He wants to have fun, though he's a bit of a bully. While he's surfing the waves one day, a storm rolls in, catching him by surprise. The water pulls him under, and Danny finds himself going through a tunnel of colors and light, appearing in a radiant world with unexpected friends. What he discovers, who he meets, and the lessons he learns before returning to earth will ease children's fears and give hope to readers both young and old about life after death. So if you want to find out more about it, you can check out Marie Antoinette's website and more about Danny's Day in Heaven. And then go to MakeMAKFineArt .com. It's M -A -K -F -I -N -E -A -R -T dot com.
Welcome Marie Antoinette, thanks for joining me. Hi, Melisa, thank you for the introduction, I'm so happy to be here. Oh my God, I love the book so much, and I love your artwork as a fellow artist. I love the drawings, they're just beautiful, and it really helps tell the story. And I think it's, yeah, I really think it's a great book for kids because it leaves you feeling very comforted after the story, right, about what does happen when we die. So okay, you're the author and the illustrator, and it's just amazing that you put it together and you're talking about an NDE experience, which is near death experience. And so what made you interested in creating the story and writing the story? Well, I suppose there's a lot of ways to answer that because there's so many angles of my life that feed into the story. I'm sure there are, right? The main drive for it is that, you know, I was a child who was really afraid of death, and so that stuck with me all through my life. And over the years after I grew up as an adult, I started to find answers, you know, near death stories and what really happens when we die.
And I kept thinking, you know, I have my own kids along the way, and I kept thinking, we need to share this information with kids so they don't have to have that fear that I had and be left in the dark because I felt as a child, you know, earlier, and now there's a lot of information out there, and probably there are quite a few parents who share the information that they've learned as grown -ups with their kids. But there isn't anything official for children that really helps them face the questions that are on their minds that I had as a kid, and that was one of my passions, to get that out. Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, there are many books out there for adults on NDEs, and I know this book is loosely adapted from another author, and this person actually experienced an NDE, what is it? Is it Dannion Brinkley? Dannion. Yeah, Dannion Brinkley. Mm -hmm. He's Yeah. one of, of course, one of the most complete near -death experiences on record. He himself was dead for 32 minutes, and that was in 1975, I believe, so it was in the early days of when this phenomenon was first documented, and people would actually begin telling these stories. And, of course, with all the medical advances, more people have had the chance to, you know, die and be resuscitated, and in fact, I was also in that situation later on in my life, but that doesn't really come into play in this story.
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