Wednesday 23 November 2011

AFTER DEATH EXPERIENCES


Have you had any after death experiences?  If you have, I’d love to hear from you about them!

I said the other day that I’d tell you about my grandmother’s unexpected visit, years after her death.  It happened after I’d accompanied a close friend – Yvonne - to a medium.  To my surprise, both the medium and Yvonne wanted me to stay in the room with them while Yvonne had her reading – that is to say, my friend wanted me to stay and the medium had no objection!

So I heard all that was said, including the fact that Yvonne had a guardian angel in the form of a plump white-haired woman carrying a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley.  This was supposed to be someone my friend had known well before her death – yet Yvonne could make no sense of it, despite making absolute sense of the rest of her reading.

That afternoon, Yvonne invited me round to her house so that we could discuss the morning’s events.  Her daughter answered the door to my ring and, as I crossed the threshold, said: “I really like your lily-of-the-valley perfume.  Is it new?” 

As it happened, I wasn’t wearing any perfume – but now all three of us were conscious of a strong lily-of-the-valley scent.

Well, that night I awoke to find my grandmother standing at the foot of my bed.  I was definitely awake – and she was definitely cross with me!  “That woman got it all wrong,” she said, “and you should have known that that message was meant for you, not your friend.  I’m nearby all the time.  You’re just not looking at me right!”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, remembering all too vividly how each year on 31st May (grandma’s birthday) my mother went into the garden to pick a bunch of her favorite flowers – lilies-of-the-valley!  “I’ll try harder in future.”  And I added: “I’m glad to have you as my guardian angel.”

She smiled … and melted into the night.  In her apparent absence I cried – both from gladness and sadness.  Since then there have been other after death experiences – but none more awesome than that one.             
 


Monday 21 November 2011

BEYOND DEATH

I've always loved the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox that I first learned at my grandmother's knee - long before I questioned what lay beyond death.  Grandma was an actress who could invariably be relied upon to dramatize life as well as theatrical lines and poetry.  Listening to her used to enthrall me.

Here's a poem entitled BEYOND:

'It seemeth such a little way to me
Across to that strange country - the Beyond;
And yet, not strange, for it has grown to be 
The home of those of whom I am so fond.
They make it seem familiar and most dear,
As journeying friends bring distant regions near.

So close it lies, that when my sight is clear
I think I almost see the gleaming strand.
I know I feel those who have gone from here
Come near enough sometimes, to touch my hand.
I often think, but for our veiled eyes,
We should find heaven right round about us lies.

I cannot make it seem a day to dread,
When from this dear earth I shall journey out
To that still dearer country of the dead,
And join the lost ones, so long dreamed about.
I love this world, yet shall I love to go
And meet the friends who wait for me, I know.

I never stand above a bier and see
The seal of death set on some well-loved face
But that I think, "One more to welcome me,
When I shall cross the intervening space 
Between this land and that one 'over there';
One more to make the strange Beyond seem fair."'

I hope that Ella, now long dead herself, is happy for me to quote her here.  I believe she is.  Why wouldn't she be, to see her words living on from beyond death?  As for Grandma - I'll soon be sharing some stories about her, not least one about a visit she paid me unexpectedly years after she died!  

Thursday 17 November 2011

PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

Have I given you any proof of life after death yet? Over the years I’ve certainly proved it for myself (or had it proved for me, to put it more accurately!) but whether I’ve even come close to proving it for you is altogether another matter.

Let’s look together at some wise words from Bishop Brent, who – answering the question ‘What is Dying?’ says:

“A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says ‘she is gone’.  Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her.  The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says ‘she is gone’, there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, ‘There she comes!’  And that is dying.”

Aren’t his words beautiful in their simplicity?  They are for me – and maybe for you, too.  If you read the story a few days ago of my mother and the rubber plant, you might agree that she had only gone from my sight – not from my side.

Should you be teetering on the edge of agreeing, perhaps my next story will help.

While alive (and still in her body) Mother, when visiting us, would always go upstairs to kiss our two young daughters ‘goodnight’ around 8 pm – soon after they had gone up to bed.

Well, at 8.10 pm on the night after she died I thought I saw someone pass the glass-paned door of the room in which my husband and I were sitting.  This was odd as we were alone in the house with our children, who never normally came downstairs again after they’d been tucked into bed.

Thinking I must have imagined the ‘shadow’ outside the door, I nevertheless went to investigate in case one of the girls – perhaps feeling distressed over her grandma’s death – was indeed up and about.

But no, all was quiet and there was no sign of a child moving around.

The next night, at precisely the same time, the same thing happened – and now I was sure I’d seen someone pass by.  My husband glanced up and asked:  “What was that?”

“What was what?” I responded, not wanting to voice my growing suspicion just yet – probably from fear of ridicule, Jack being an agnostic and often scornful of my ‘tin-pot theories’.

On the third night, without discussion, we were both watching the door from eight onwards.  Sure enough, there was a passer-by, right on time!

More or less simultaneously we leaped to our feet and went to check the hallway, kitchen and dining room.  Finding no body there, Jack looked hard at me and asked: “It couldn’t have been … her … could it?”

“If by ‘her’ you mean Mother,” I answered, “I wouldn’t be too sure it couldn’t.  Unless you can think of a better explanation for what we both saw?”

He couldn’t and nor could I – and the ‘visits’ continued at the same time nightly until my mother’s funeral.  After that, they ceased – but I’d seen enough to know that she was watching over me and my family.

Whether my husband saw it (and the saga of the rubber plant leaves) as proof of life after death he never told me!

 


Tuesday 15 November 2011

LIFE AFTER DEATH

So what did you make of my story yesterday? Did it suggest life after death, or didn’t you believe that my mother could have been behind the rubber plant’s strange behaviour?  Maybe you have some other explanation for what happened. 

All I know is that if mother wished to draw my attention to her ongoing presence in my life she hit on the perfect method!  How could I not notice leaves wafting uncharacteristically across my line of vision, given that I was a captive audience while 'attached' to the telephone?

It would be typical of mother to think that through while alive – so why not once she had died?

What is death, anyway?  I expect you are already familiar with these words from Henry Scott Holland, former Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London:

“Death is nothing at all.  I have only slipped away into the next room.  I am I, and you are you.  Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.  Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used.  Put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.  Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.  Let my name be ever the household word that it always was, let it be spoken without effort, without the trace of a shadow on it.  Life means all that it ever meant.  It is the same as it ever was; there is unbroken continuity.  Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?  I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner.  All is well.”

For me, everything he says makes perfect sense. I seem to feel the truth of his words.  Do you feel it too – or do you want to feel and believe, without success as yet?

As well as looking at life after death, it might help to look at life before life.  Where were we, after all, before we were born?  Well, we were conceived of course.  An act of love created us.  But is that act enough?  Is that truly all it took to put us on our path to birth?

Can a man and a woman together, without help, bring a baby into the world?  Maybe they can, or think they can, but did they alone breathe the breath of life into their child?
I can’t answer that question for you.  I can suggest, though, that we question where our souls come from.  Do they come from the same source as our bodies – or from altogether another dimension?

I have some thoughts on this that I really look forward to sharing with you a little into the future.  They can wait for the right time, which I’m sure we’ll jointly recognise!

Let’s revert back to Henry Scott Holland’s thought that ‘death is nothing at all’.  My mother effectively demonstrated that for me.  She was still there, same as ever, except without her body.

Her essence lived on.  She had not gone anywhere.  My limited sight simply prevented me from seeing her.

A big sigh as I accept this as my truth.  Is it your truth, too?  I’d love to hear from you!  And soon I’ll be sharing another story – relating to my mother again!  Between her death and her funeral she seemed to do her utmost to give me proof of life after death

Monday 14 November 2011

LOVE BEYOND DEATH

Do you believe in love beyond death?  I certainly do – with good reason.  So perhaps this is where to begin finding answers to our question ‘what is after death?’

Love doesn’t end when we die.  At the very least we live on in the memories of those we love and are loved by.  They remember us – therefore we survive!  But what about us, once we reach ‘the other side’?  Are we still who we were – or are we now an entity without form, without memory?  Do we, indeed, exist or have we been extinguished?

Questions, questions … so many questions!  It’s time to find out whether love lives on in a more tangible form than that of memory.  So does it?  Have you come across any ‘evidence’ that it does?

When we die, leaving our body behind, our unclothed spirit cannot be seen.  So it is assumed that we have ceased to be.  But have we?

Not according to my mother, who died when she was fifty-five.  In the considerable gap between her death on 18 December and her cremation on the 27th I was often on the telephone.  This was situated next to a rubber plant that, from its pot on the floor of my hall, reached right up to the ceiling.

As well as being very tall, the plant was healthy with innumerable shiny green leaves which, in the normal course of events, were shed very seldom – and always from the bottom, one at a time after first turning brown and ‘dying’.

It needs mentioning here that Mother had given me the rubber plant years earlier, when it was small and portable.  She had often commented, when visiting, that for it to have flourished so in my care I must have green fingers.

Be that as it may, from the day of her death I was impressed by ‘her’ plant’s behavior.  This was odd, to say the very least.  Each time I sat on the hall seat to take or make a phone call, the plant shed a leaf.

Not from the bottom – and not after turning brown.  It seemed to be a random shedding of perfectly healthy green leaves.  And they didn’t simply fall to the ground.  I would have thought they were caught on the breeze but for the fact I was sitting in a centrally heated hallway with no doors or windows open, it being an exceptionally cold December.

One leaf in particular wafted across the hall in front of my startled eyes before landing eventually on a settee several feet away from me.

I knew then that Mother had kept her promise to demonstrate that life didn’t end with death.  And by the day of her cremation, when all that was left of the rubber plant was a bare stem, even my husband (a life-long agnostic) had cause for thought when, clearly puzzled, he asked: “Didn’t your mother give you that plant?”

Since then I haven’t needed to ask myself questions about love beyond death.  If you are still questioning, do please open your mind to the possibility that, far from being an end, death is a new beginning.


Sunday 13 November 2011

WHAT IS AFTER DEATH - WELCOME!

The warmest of welcomes to my What Is After Death? blog!

Let's, together, explore this question and find answers.  There are answers, of course, and as we look at these we'll feel their validity - or lack of value to us personally.  Life is all about feelings, isn't it?  To live is to look within and listen to that little voice telling us whether the path we're on is right or wrong.

Often, it's easier not to listen - especially when we don't want to hear something.  But for me such deafness usually ends in tears.  Is that how it is for you, too?


Okay, so if life is about feelings - what is after death?  Let our joint exploration into this begin from tomorrow on ...