Like drinking 12 beers and falling into a dreamless slumber, but even better.

Since dying at a truckstop in the middle of one night last December, the 59-year-old has no longer been afraid or worried about death.

He is one of the few people who walk the streets of Canberra and the city's surrounds who can tell you what it's like to kick the bucket. The number of these people might be small but it is growing because of advancements in medical technology and each has their own story of death. Numerous people have been brought back to life after cardiac arrests.

What makes Organ's story a rarity is that he was driving a B-double at the time his heart started failing and a sharp pain twisted in his neck. And he probably only lived to tell the tale because of a cup of coffee and the day he died: December 28, 2012.

''Are you having a coffee, Garry?'' asked the console operator when he walked in that night to the truckstop at Marulan, a small Southern Tablelands town north of Goulburn on the Hume Highway.

''No, I think I'm having a heart attack,'' was Organ's reply.

He did sip a coffee and get some gear from his truck parked out the front while the console operator called an ambulance.

Apart from the swift actions of the ambulance officers, he believes it was this activity - drinking the coffee and walking to his truck and back again - that did a lot to save his life.

Because as soon as he lay down, he died.

''It was the most comfortable I'd ever been,'' he says, describing the seconds before his death.

The grandfather woke up in the ambulance after being dead for a few minutes but not long enough for brain damage to set in.

He had been shocked back to life before being put in the vehicle. The ambulance and the people inside were speeding past Lake George, he was told.

The fact the ambulance was heading south to Canberra Hospital and not north to a Sydney hospital is important.

For if he had died the day before - or mere hours earlier - he would have been taken to Sydney and the drive would have been longer.

Instead, he died at 2am and by 5am was sitting in a bed at Canberra Hospital with a stent in one of his arteries.

''I've got to try to spend the kids' inheritance before I tail it,'' he jokes when asked how long he plans to live.

More seriously he adds: ''I'm not afraid of death any more. It's given me a broader outlook on life.''

The Goulburn truckie exercises more but does not worry about his health. And he maintains there is no heaven or hell or anything on the other side.

He cannot recall anything about being dead, only the moments immediately before and after he was revived.

There were no bright lights or tunnels of light for him in the 180 seconds or so he spent as an expired human body. He can only repeat the famous words of Kerry Packer: ''There's nothing there.''

Although he did report one common description of a deathly experience: peacefulness.

These moments, called near-death experiences even when the person technically dies, have been labelled by some, such as researcher Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University, who studied critically ill men and women, as a final electrical storm in the brain.

Others, including author Dr Jeffrey Long featured in Time magazine in 2010, argue scientific evidence is unequivocally strong. Medicine, he argued, could not account for the consistencies in the testimonies of those across the world who had had near-death experiences. These included descriptions of light and serenity as well as feelings of detachment from the body or levitation.

Steve Williams is one man who remembers floating above and looking down at his body.

At age 26, the Canberra public servant was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and informed he would die without a transplant.

He says he did not get a lung transplant until the age of 33 and the last three years of that time were spent on an oxygen tank and in a wheelchair.

It was during these tough days he says - when death loomed so close he was almost taken off the transplant waiting list - that he had the near-death experience of being detached from his body.

Organ donation is one of the many advances in medical science that enables people to skirt closer to death but survive and talk about the experiences it brings.

For people with serious or life-threatening illnesses, an organ or tissue transplant could mean a second chance at life. About 1700 people are on Australian organ transplant waiting lists at any one time, according to the federal government.

A donor could save the lives of up to 10 people and improve the lives of dozens more.

For Williams, 50, his out-of-body experience was a turning point in his life. ''I'm not scared of death after experiencing that,'' he says.

''I remember how nice it was.

''It was a weightless feeling. A very light, beautiful, peaceful state and stark white all around me. It wasn't until it sank in that it was my body I was looking down upon that I was startled and awoke, so to speak, once again feeling the heaviness of my body.''

These days, Williams encourages people to become registered organ donors, although he finds himself needing to destroy people's superstitions about organ donation.

Vast numbers of people believe, for some reason, they will die as soon as they put their names down on any organ donors' list.

Williams' first set of lungs lasted 13 years and he was fortunate enough to get a second pair donated, which should last him the rest of his life.

The woman who encouraged him to go on the donor list, his dietitian, later became his wife. And when he survived and married her, they had twin boys.

His out-of-body experience may have changed his perspective about dying, but his story of life after near-death is perhaps an even better testimony about another topic: the joys of living.