I understand what you are saying, and if we strictly define "death" as someone who never returns from what is considered a "clinical death" then I agree with you. Note that NDE actually is Near Death Experience: so really, it can be argued that NDE's really are not about actual death but near death events.
I do recommend the Shared Death book by Moody if you're interested. The book is called "Glimpses of Eternity", and was co-authored with Paul Perry. Published 2010. It is not as scientific as other work in NDEs (such as Sabom or Van Lommel) but it has some of the same ground breaking ideas similar to what Moody brought forth in his first bestseller, Life after Life.
I guess what I'm trying to get at however, is that those who have an NDE and those who actually die, for all we know right now, may have identical experiences that represent the passage of dying and death - with the very last step, not being taken by the NDE'rs. Given what are the very well known common experiences of NDEs, such as conscious awareness outside of the body, relief of all pain and often overwhelming feelings of love and peace, sometimes a passage through a tunnel and bright light, sometimes a panoramic life review, often meeting with loved ones or family, and then very often: a critical point where the NDEr is told it is not their time, that they must go back and finish their life, all do seem indicative of a kind of dying process, or passage of death that lies within a realm of psychological consciousness independent of brain activity - of which scientists can only conjecture about at this time. Is consciousness some kind of quantum reality that is a priori to physical reality, much like electrons exist in a schrodinger's universal quantum wave function coming into actual existence upon observation? What are the rules of this process? There is still a lot of scientific unknowns here, waiting to be explored/studied.
It is very clear from three decades now of NDE research, that NDE experiences do and have often occurred when the body itself and most importantly the brain is considered clinically inactive or in medical terminology, clinically dead. The heart is no longer providing blood flow to the brain. All EEG activity of the brain has ceased. The patient is profoundly unconscious if not actually biologically dead. Given all the medical science we know today, there should be absolutely no possible way a person experiencing an NDE should have any kind of complex, vivid, organized psychological experiences occurring the way NDEs have been reported, and even more astonishing, reported consistently from accounts around the world from people who have never met each other, many of whom were very young children, similar in detail and scope. In addition there is the attribute of veridical knowledge that some NDE accounts provide that one would have to resort to some extremely unreasonable explanations to dismiss (which Skeptics regularly resort to).
My Best,
Bertha
