Man says Jesus sent him 'back to Earth' after cardiac arrest at church

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Friday, April 10, 2026

A 90-year-old man who suffered a “massive” cardiac episode and collapsed at First Congregational Church in Branford, Connecticut, says Jesus told him it wasn’t his time and sent him "back to Earth" as church members stepped in to keep him alive on Easter Sunday.

“The best way to remember is I go up into Heaven and Jesus looks at me and says, ‘Hey, Walter, it is not your time, back to Earth,’ and that’s when I ended up waking up,” Walter Gay told WTNH.

First Congregational Church Pastor Joseph Perdue told CT Insider he was outside the church saying goodbye to people around 11:15 a.m. when Gay “collapsed” in the main foyer.

“The condition he was in when we started CPR, he wasn’t breathing, he was turning blue, there was no pulse,” Perdue recalled. “None of us expected him to make it.”

A nurse, two nurse midwives and a physician assistant who were at the church when Gay collapsed all jumped in to administer CPR. Perdue also sent a teen church employee to grab an automated external defibrillator (AED), which the church received in January, according to WTNH.

“Within just 30 seconds or so of his collapse, medical personnel had started CPR, and within one minute, they had hooked up the AED, and the AED immediately said to shock him,” Perdue explained.

Members called 911, and first responders took about 10 minutes to arrive. Laurie MacLeod, a certified nurse midwife at Yale New Haven Hospital who was walking out of church at the time Gay collapsed, told CT Insider she believes it was the AED that “made all the difference” in keeping him alive.

Gay’s daughter, Carolyn Claussen, a medical doctor in New Hampshire, told the publication that her father and his wife, Betsy, are very active and independent. When she got the call from the emergency room about her father’s cardiac arrest, however, she did not expect him to survive.

“No offense, Dad, I really thought 100% I was coming to say goodbye to you. I was not expecting to walk into the emergency room and see you ask me what I was doing there, so that was a nice surprise,” Claussen told her father.

Claussen said her father has underlying congestive heart failure and had lost his short-term memory. For about the first day after the cardiac episode, she had to repeat what happened to him.

Dr. Tamara Samardzic, co-director of the Stepdown Unit at Yale New Haven Hospital, told WTNH that Gay’s recovery since his cardiac emergency has been “incredible.”

“His mental status is at baseline, which is incredible. I know the family is super happy, and everyone is amazed that this is how it turned out,” she said. “This is certainly not what we see, especially on this unit.”

Both Perdue and Claussen suggested that Gay’s recovery may be an Easter miracle.

“We cannot escape the metaphor,” Perdue said. “The whole point of the Easter homily was looking for evidence of the small resurrections all around us, the way that God is helping our community in the ways that we can participate in what God is doing in order to make the lives of our neighbors better.”