Yes 35,000 feet gives you a pretty good safety margin under normal conditions, but when your nose is pointed straight at the ground... not 4 minutes worth.
Not to be overly melodramatic... but many years ago on a dark and stormy night my wife and I were returning from Southern California to the Seattle area. It was pitch black; we were hitting nasty turbulence; the rain was pounding against the wind shield; we were flying low to try and avoid the scud that we kept finding ourselves in; we were running low on fuel; there were no good places to land; we were too far into it to turn around; we had been running behind all day and no flight plan had been filed, we hadn't even called friends or family to tell them what we were up to; my wife was crying and sobbing that she would rather be giving birth again. It was at that time that it dawned on me how people crashed their perfectly good airplanes with perfectly good instruments and even GPS. If I had made one bad move, I knew that seconds later we would be dead... John Kennedy Jr. dead.
My wife of course had suggested hundreds of miles earlier when we first found ourselves flying VFR over mountains between two layers of clouds with lightning in the distance ahead of us that we should turn back. I had insisted that the forecast and the weather reporting stations ahead indicated that all was well. That was the last time that I was allowed to override her intuition.
As a private pilot myself, your story was chilling. Thanks for sharing. When I read of weather related accidents of small aircraft, I always imagine the pilot and passengers last moments. Equally chilling.