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 27^th 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.