There Is Life After Death. Tom Harpur
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the safest place in a house. During this raid, my mother, father, two brothers and myself, heard my sister Rita’s voice say: ‘Mum, the blanket on the window is down at the corner, quick— the planes are coming.’ Sure enough, the blanket had fallen away, leaving an area where light would have shone through.”
• S.B. describes a time she was on a bus with some friends in London, England: “A woman opened a car door on the wrong side and a man on a bicycle swerved violently to avoid a collision. So did the bus driver. The bus hit the cyclist and dragged him some distance before coming to a stop on the sidewalk. We were all pretty shaken and everybody was staring, not doing anything. I got off the bus and tried to help the young man. Someone ran to call an ambulance and I covered him with my coat. He was fully conscious, so I sat on the curb amid all the glass and the blood and tried to console him. Later that night I was in bed reading—at about 2 A.M.—when this man appeared. I was scared at first, but all he did was to mouth ‘Thank you.’ There was no sound. I was still shaking the next day when the papers reported the accident and said he had died at 2 A.M.”
• M.F-E. writes: “A few nights after my father died, I was awakened by a brilliant golden light coming in under the curtain. It moved across the floor and up the wall and became a glowing oval. Inside this shape a door frame appeared and a dark silhouette moved from a great distance beyond and, on reaching the frame, waved, and then receded. Then the mandala shape moved down the wall, across the floor, and out under the curtain. To be sure I wasn’t dreaming, I turned on the light and checked the time—4:15 A.M., twenty-four hours after his death. I had definitely felt his presence.”
• A.G. wrote to tell of an unexplained happening just after his wife died on July 15, 1986. Attached to his letter is a sworn affidavit signed by the nurse who was in attendance at the time of his wife’s death. A.G.’s wife fell ill with cancer in January 1986. During her illness he took care of her and, although they had been childhood sweethearts, marrying soon after leaving school, they became even closer as they discussed every aspect of dying. “My wife helped me plan the life I would lead after she died and I asked her to try to find a way of letting me know if there was indeed a life after death and if there was, was she happy.” Sometime between one and three hours after his wife ceased breathing and had been pronounced dead by the coroner, “she closed her mouth and smiled with unmistakable bliss. Her face that was so drawn and haggard due to the stress leading to her death became once again full and happy in appearance. Her colour returned and her countenance took on a look that I can only describe as the appearance I remember when she was about fifteen to twenty years younger. I felt I was witnessing a miracle.” The nurse confirms the “miracle” in her statement, noting that the woman was indeed smiling and that she “looked twenty years younger.” A.G. discussed the case with the undertaker and two attending physicians. “They know that it actually happened but they stated that it is impossible. For the body’s mouth to close and for a smile to appear, the brain would have to be alive. This, of course, is not possible after hours of not breathing.” As far as A.G. is concerned, what happened was his wife’s way of assuring him she was still alive, although in a new mode, and that she was happy. He concludes: “I have written to you because I feel that not to record this event in some form is wrong. It did happen.”
• M.M. says that her husband, who was a “total disbeliever in God,” died in 1982 after being ill for some time. She says they both knew he was leaving her but that they never spoke of this. When she reached her doorstep, still stunned and in shock after coming from the hospital and seeing his dead body, M.M. felt a sudden sense of desolation. “Where is this Comforter Jesus spoke of?” she asked herself. Immediately she felt a powerful presence at her left shoulder. “It was so strong that I even turned to see who it was; and my heart was touched by something which seemed to say ‘You will be alright!’” She was able to carry through all the arrangements for the funeral and to care for the needs of her family “almost as though someone were guiding me.” About a week later, she accidentally locked herself out of the house. (She could see her keys inside on the kitchen table.) It took her about forty-five minutes to open a basement window that her husband had previously nailed shut. “And I would take an oath he was there watching me and laughing, his presence was so strong.” M.M. goes on to say that the whole experience has taught her there is a “centre where we can ‘radio’ for help when we get beyond our depth in this life.” She admits her friends wouldn’t understand her if she related any of this to them, “but I felt compelled to pass this along to you.”
• A.M. writes that fifteen years ago she was very ill at home. One day she awoke to find a tall, well-dressed man standing just outside her bedroom door. When she looked at him, he asked, “Are you ready?” “I quickly said ‘No,’” she relates. For many years, she supposed she had dreamed this odd incident. Seven years ago, her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Near the end, she brought him home from hospital, as he had expressed a deep wish to die at home. “As our two sons helped the ambulance men carry my husband to the bedroom, my husband pointed to the same spot where I had seen the stranger and asked me, ‘Who is he?’ When I asked him later who was who, he described the same well-dressed man I had seen years before. I have never told anyone about this, but felt I had to write. No, I do not know who this man was, and as we bought the house new thirty years ago no one else had lived here. I still wonder who this stranger was.” (This theme of a friendly stranger, sometimes male, sometimes female, who comes at the hour of approaching death and in some way helps the dying person, appeared in several of the responses I received.)
• B.Y., who says he was raised in the United Church of Canada but always felt very skeptical about such beliefs as those concerning life after death, had been very close to his grandmother as a boy. He was in his early twenties and recently married, when he learned that she was quite ill in hospital in a northern town many miles away. One morning, he awoke very early and saw his grandmother standing at the entrance to his bedroom. “She was wearing the mauve suit that I always recognized as one of her favourites. Her face was very taut and sunken and would have looked terrible had it not been for the fact that she looked joyful at the same time. She just stood there silently. I closed my eyes before taking another look. She was gone but the phone began to ring. It woke my wife— it was on her side of the bed—and as she reached for it, I told her ‘Grandma is dead.’ She picked the phone up and my aunt told her what I already knew.” (I received several other letters corroborating this kind of telepathic awareness, sometimes with apparitions, sometimes not, communicating the fact of a loved one’s demise.)
• R.H. of Toronto had never given much thought to what happens at or after death. Her mother, to whom she was devoted, had once told her, “When we die, that’s the end,” and she had mentally agreed. Mother and daughter had been through great times of crisis and difficulty together, first as refugees in Europe and then as immigrants in Canada. Her mother died during the night of June 25, 1977, and was buried on Monday, June 27. A few weeks later, in obedience to something her mother had said a few days before she died—“When this is all over, you must take a holiday”—R.H. and her husband were travelling by train down the beautiful Agawa Canyon in northwestern Ontario. She was thinking how sad it was that her mother wouldn’t be able to see “all this” anymore when, “Suddenly, she spoke to me, but not with a voice one hears with one’s ears. It came right through my heart some way and Mother had reverted to her native tongue, German. Translated, what she said went like this: You can’t do anything for me anymore. Don’t grieve so. We will be together again. Please look after yourself!” All the words, she says, seemed underlined as though to emphasize their importance. As the train moved on, “It was not as though we were moving from her, but as if she was moving away from me as she seemed to float away, unable to stay. This experience gave me strength. My plucky, courageous mother . . . had to let me know that we will be together again one day.” She concludes that while skeptics may not see this as “solid evidence” of anything, it was “proof enough” for her.
• The final example in this mini-review of phenomena is perhaps the strangest of all. E.M. of Oakville, Ontario, had lost her son some years before she wrote me her story: “We were a young family that had just moved into our new home in Oakville. Our street was the last one bordering farmland between Oakville and Bronte. We drove past these old farms on our way to church each Sunday. In one field we passed, an