I don’t claim to understand it all but I do believe when we die our spirit leaves our body. Many humans can only fully understand things that are physical and material. Things that they can touch, smell, see, taste or hear. But you can’t see radio waves – don’t you know that they are there? Cell phone conversations that pass from one phone to the next without a cord. Isn’t that an energy wave that we can’t see? Many people just don’t trust  that there’s life after death (and I don’t blame them for it at all. Why would you? What kind of evidence do you have that says otherwise? I often wonder if we can continue having a conversation of some sort with people who have passed away. I am constantly in motion to find new ways of staying connected in some way.

I went to sleep on October 13th in my dad’s hospital room and when I woke up the next day, I knew that I was the only one of us left in the room. There was an empty feeling. I did wake to find him to be no longer breathing, one of the scariest moments of my life. Although I knew death was coming, nothing could prepare me for what that really meant. When my dad died, I didn’t know what to believe, but I couldn’t just believe he was “dead” and that was it. I just couldn’t. Too many “strange coincidences” happened after he died. My cat Bastian, a quiet guy, meowing for a half hour staring at the corner of the room, the lights on my keyboard blinking on and off (CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK are either ON or OFF, these were blinking without me touching it) and the lights going out that day he died.

My favorite author in the next months became, P.M.H. Atwater, a specialist on human near death experiences who died 3 times and then came back to interview over 3,000 people over different religions, ages, sexes, and countries. I found this book, “The Real Truth About Death“. She learned that a significant amount of other people also had died and come back to tell. This is known as a near death experience or NDE.

The people she interviewed had very similar stories when they came back after their heart stopped and they physically died; all left their body, many of them could see their body and whatever accident happened, they saw people they knew who had previously died. The famous “light” was seen by many, even at times through a tunnel, where after arriving they understood that they were no longer in their body, but they were somehow still “alive”. One of the interesting things I learned is that with each different religion, many people saw their religious figure. If it was Buddha it was Buddha, if it was Allah they worshiped it was Allah they saw, if they supported Jesus, they saw Jesus. Some people who didn’t believe in anything didn’t see a religious figure but experienced all the same things happening to them. And in almost all instances, there was someone who told them it wasn’t their time, which is when they came back.

This book opened my eyes to the fact that there is life after death. It isn’t always what other people / religions believe it is.