[CHyLmxDr]

Thanks so much Ishtar. Your experience is a great comfort. I love you for sharing that. But I'm sure it's also a great comfort to others since everyone reading this thread has probably also lost a loved one.

Some people in my family get a lot of comfort from their religious faith. I respect their faith, though I don't share it, because I've seen how it's helped them cope with incredible suffering. I have a cousin, for example, a convert to Catholicism, who lost both of her only children, two sons who died in their teens. The Anglican priest who officiated at my father's funeral was married to another cousin of mine who died just a few weeks ago after a two year long struggle with ovarian cancer. Because he was family and had been so loving and supportive when my mother died in 2004, we wanted him to conduct the service but we hesitated to ask knowing that he was dealing with his own grieving still. But his faith gave him the strength and the desire to help us.

Most people I know though have lost their faith in traditional religion, if they ever had any so there is no real comfort for them there. However, they've all experienced death close to home so they've had to try and come to terms with it somehow. They've all at least thought about whether or not there is an after life.

Like most of the people I know, I've never had a near death experience or journeyed to other worlds in shamanic trance. I'm a pretty ordinary guy as far as that goes. i can't rely on such experiences to form my own opinions about life after death. However, when I examine my own past and when I've probed a little bit in conversation with friends and family, I've usually found that most of us have had at least one experience that can be interpreted as suggesting that consciousness survives the death of the body.

My mother died as a result of injuries she suffered in a car accident. A truck driver forced my parent's car off the road when he made an unsafe lane change. My father was not badly hurt but my mother had severe internal injuries. She was flown by air ambulance to a trauma unit in a major hospital where she underwent surgery for a ruptured bowel. After the operation, one of the surgeons spoke to us about her chances of recovery. I remember he said that he had seen many cases where the doctors had done everything they could with the expectation that the patient would not make it only to be surprised by their eventual recovery. On the other hand, he also told us that he had seen just as many cases where they expected the patient to do well only to see them succumb to their injuries or disease. His conclusion, which shocked me at the time coming from a man of science, was that a higher power determined whether or not any given individual would survive, in spite of everything the doctors could do for them.

My mother suffered terribly for two weeks in hospital. At first she rallied and we began to hope she would recover. But then a septic infection took hold and she gradually declined. The doctors couldn't find the source of the infection and the antibiotics they were giving her couldn't stop it's spread. She was conscious most of the time but on a respirator and unable to speak to us. All she could do was squeeze our hands and look into our eyes to show her fear and her love. It was agonizing for us; I can't imagine what it was like for her.

In the end, when the infection had spread to the point that the nurses had to bring in perfume to cover up the smell and their was no longer even a faint hope of recovery, we had her life support systems disconnected. We all stood around her bed led in prayer by my cousin's husband while we waited for her heart to stop beating. The nurses told us it could take some time. They said that they had found that people who had been through the depression and the war held on to life more tenaciously than younger folks. So we waited and eventually her heart stopped.

When we went home from the hospital, I feared for my father. They had been married for over 60 years. He was devastated by her death but like most men of his generation he had trouble expressing his emotions. I decided that for the first few nights that he would have been alone in his house I would stay with him. I slept in the same bedroom that I had as a child. In the middle of the second or third night, I remember waking up feeling disoriented, neither fully awake nor asleep. Suddenly I had the distinct impression that someone had sat down on the bed next to me because I felt a weight depress the mattress. Something made me think of my mother, I don't know why, and I asked if she was all right. In response I heard a whispered, "yes".

It would be easy to explain away that experience as a dream or as a hallucination, a manifestation of my own unconscious need to be comforted. Most people seem to have had similar experiences at one time or another and they usually deal with them by explaining them away or ignoring them. I can't say I "know" what my experience was. I can say that I know it made me feel better.

On another occasion, I had an experience that was even harder to explain in any way except as an indication that there is consciousness beyond death. At the invitation of a friend, and out of curiosity more than anything else, I went to a psychic a few years after my mother had died. This woman told me during the course of our session that my mother's spirit was there. She also said there was a spirit of a large brindle coloured dog, which matched the description of a dog that I had owned.

I had been single for many years at this time but she told me that my mother's spirit was trying to arrange for me to meet someone. The psychic went into great detail describing this person. She said the woman I would meet was a widow who lived in a house in Edinburgh. She had a job as a court stenographer. The foyer in her home had black and white tile and a working antique light fixture extending from the newel post on the stair case. She had a house in Spain and many friends that she visited throughout Europe.

She went on to say that this woman had a room in her house which was dedicated to the storage of her extensive collection of hats! The psychic told me that I would meet this woman while she was on a holiday visiting the town where I lived. It was all quite unbelievable.

That evening I met a friend to go to a movie. On the way, we stopped for a beer at a local pub. I told him the story about my visit to the psychic that had occurred that very afternoon and related her prediction that I would soon meet a widow from Edinburgh with a collection of hats. We were both quite amused.

As we got up to leave for the film, a group of about 7 or 8 woman walked into the pub. Each one of them was wearing a different style of hat. Woman don't normally wear hats much anymore and it wasn't a cold day so we were both a bit surprised. Just for a lark, my friend shouted out to them asking if anyone in the group was from Edinburgh. We were both flabbergasted when one of them said yes.

They sat down and we went over to their table to introduce ourselves and tell the story. They said that they were there to celebrate the birthday of one of the women in the group, the one from Edinburgh as I recall. She said she was now living in Canada and she was too young to be a widow but the coincidence was striking nonetheless. After exchanging a few pleasantries, we left. A few days later, I thought I should try to find out who they were but the staff at the pub told me they had never seen that group before nor have they since. So if you know a widow from Edinburgh with a hat collection, do tell.

But the most surprising thing the psychic told me came as the session was ending. She stopped me as I was getting up to leave and told me another spirit had arrived with a message. She said it was the spirit of a young man who had died in a single car accident. He had been thrown through the windshield. She said his name was Brian and that he wanted me to tell his sister that he loved her. Almost as an afterthought she said there was also something about "pink peonies".

The psychic asked me if I knew a woman who might be the sister in this case but no one came to mind and I left feeling a bit perplexed. Eventually I recalled that one of the women that I worked with had told me years ago that she had in fact lost her brother in a single car accident. Given the sensitivity of the subject, I didn't want to come right out and say to her that I had a message from her dead brother that he had communicated to me through a psychic. So one day when we ran into each other leaving work I just asked her if "pink peonies" meant anything to her. She was noncommittal at the time but a few days later asked me if we were going to finish the conversation I had started about the peonies. I told her the whole story at which point she gave me the following information. She said that her brother had in fact died in an accident under the circumstances that the psychic had described. But she said that her brother's name was Barrie not Brian, although he had a best friend with that name. She went on to say that on a road near their home in the country was a farm with a long lane way that they used to drive by together. She said that she and her brother would often remark on how striking the lane way was because it was lined with "red peonies"!

Red peonies, pink peonies, who cares. That detail was too hard to ignore so I delivered the message from her brother. She told me that she had just recently felt his presence while sitting in her parents' house. I could explain away the whole thing but I just don't know how to account for the peonies except to believe that the psychic really did get a message from this woman's deceased brother.

When confronted by my own skepticism I feel that I can't really know the truth about these things with certainty. My final resort in resolving this difficulty is to consider which choice, either of believing or not believing, will make my life better. I choose to believe.

These kinds of common experiences don't fit well within the context of the mainstream scientific world view that is dominant today. But in spite of that fact, they won't go away. My own feeling is that they should be studied with an open mind in an effort to understand them rather than be ignored or explained away.

I'm reminded in this of Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he describes the process of how a once dominant scientific theory is overthrown. It begins with the accumulation of anomalies that can't be explained by that theory. The anomalies are at first ignored or explained away. The people who want to investigate them are ridiculed. But the weight of the evidence eventually becomes impossible to ignore and science reaches a tipping point. At that point, the people with the least invested in maintaining the status quo begin to cast about for alternative theories that can account both for the evidence that supported the old theory and also for the multitude of anomalies. Eventually a new theory emerges that is so persuasive and effective at explaining all the evidence that it is adopted by all but the most recalcitrant.

With respect to the question of life after death, perhaps we're approaching the tipping point.