Do you believe in some sort of life after death?
C.S. Lewis once said that he never had any doubts about people surviving death…but then when his wife died, he was no longer certain. Why? Because it was SO important to him that her spirit lived on.
In other words, before we lose someone near and dear to us, the idea that the soul/spirit/essence/consciousness of a deceased person lives on in some capacity after the death of their body, may not be that important. In theory, we may or may not believe it.
Sure, it’s an interesting concept to think about, read about, watch movies and plays about, and discuss—but if all our loved ones are still right here with us, then what happens after they die isn’t usually too high on our radar of stuff to worry about.
But then when we do LOSE a loved one, boy oh boy…now we’re concerned! I mean, where the heck did they—the essence of them—go?
Or is dead really…dead? When the body dies, is that really the end?
If you have experienced the loss of a loved one, then perhaps you may have found yourself asking these types of questions.
I certainly did after my 32-year-old husband, John, died suddenly.
But what I experienced right after his death is, in retrospect, rather incredible in terms of evidence to support the possibility that something lives on after the death of our bodies.
Because John suffered a massive brain injury, he was kept on life support for a day while preparations were made for organ transplant. I was able to spend that last day of John’s life with him in the ICU, holding his hand and comforting him as best I could as the medical team prepared his body for organ removal.
As for what happened after that oh-so-difficult day ended, here’s an excerpt from my book, A Widow’s Awakening (I am “Adri” and John is “Sam”):
Just after midnight, an operating room becomes available. I watch as a group of nurses and technicians prepare Sam’s body for the transfer. One person temporarily detaches him from the respirator while another manually forces air into his lungs though a device that looks like a plunger. I want to scream. He’s leaving me and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it.
They wheel Sam out of his room and down the hall. I follow behind, right into the OR. When I turn around and see that several family members have followed us in, I scream at them instead: “Get out! Leave us alone!”
The medical personnel stare at me. But my crew of supporters high-tail it out of the operating room. I walk up to Sam, lean over and kiss him on the lips. “I love you.”
Then I take a deep breath, give him one last wave, turn around and walk out into the hallway full of family and friends.
But then an amazing thing happened. I awoke the next morning at 5:30 to see a large reddish orange light framing my entire bedroom window. When the organ removal coordinator called me a few hours later to update me on which of John’s organs were able to be donated (heart, kidneys and pancreatic islets), I asked her if she knew what time John’s heart was removed.
I could hear her flipping through her notes on the other end of the line.
“Here it is,” she says. “His heart was removed at 5:30 this morning.”
Wow!
I actually saw that red light two more times in the months following John’s death: once in my bedroom again—but hovering on the nightstand right beside my head, which freaked me out.
But then, as the years passed, I no longer saw the light as red. Rather, I saw a white light.
In fact, it wasn’t even me who saw the white light one night above my head about three years after John’s death. I was at a rustic retreat in the mountains and there were several women staying in a room with bunk beds. I had slept in a top bunk bed and when I woke up the next morning, the woman in the lower bunk bed, diagonal to me, asked me how I’d slept.
“Fine,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the reading light above your head was on, so I figured you couldn’t sleep.”
Puzzled, I looked above my head then back at the woman.
“There’s no reading light up here,” I said.
“Well,” was her reply, “there was some sort of white light above your head in the middle of the night.”
Based on my personal experience, I suspect that something does live on after the death of our bodies.
But I won’t know for sure, of course, until…well, until I get there myself.
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Originally Published on Pink Gazelle
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