He didn't die twice; he didn't die once. And you can only die once. Near death is not death. But glad he made it.
I guess they mean, “clinically dead.”
Actually, if a person has ceased breathing and no longer has a pulse, they are dead.
In emergency medicine, we can argue about it with a defibrillator and a box of drugs and if not too much cellular destruction has occurred, we sometimes win that argument.