“It’s amazing, Molly… the love that’s inside, you take it with you.”
– From Patrick Swayze’s character Sam to Demi Moore’s character Molly in Ghost
Do you believe in some kind of life after death?
CS Lewis once said that he never had any doubts about people who survive death, but when his wife died, he was no longer sure. Because? Because it was so important to him that she was still alive.
When it comes to the belief in the possibility of some kind of afterlife, that is, the soul/spirit/essence/consciousness of a deceased person somehow living after the death of their body, CS Lewis put it put it this way (as recounted by Anthony de Mello in his book, Awareness; The Perils and Opportunities of Reality):
“It’s like a rope. Someone says to you: ‘Would this support the weight of one hundred and twenty pounds?’
You answer, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, we’re going to let your best friend down on this rope.’
So you say, ‘Wait a minute, let me try that rope again.’
Now you’re not so sure.”
In other words, before we lose someone near and dear to us, the possibility of some kind of afterlife may not be that important. In theory, we can believe it or not.
Sure, it’s an interesting concept to think about, read about, watch movies and plays, and discuss, but if all of our loved ones are still here with us, then what happens after they die isn’t usually too high on our radar. of things to worry about.
But when we LOSE a loved one, boy oh boy… now we’re worried! I mean, where the hell did they go, the essence of them?
Or is he really dead… dead? When the body dies, is that really the end?
If you have experienced the loss of a loved one, then perhaps you have found yourself asking these types of questions.
I certainly did after my husband, John, died suddenly at the age of 32.
But here’s the thing: what I experienced right after he died is, in hindsight, pretty incredible in terms of evidence to support the possibility that anything lives on after our bodies die.
I was able to spend the last day of John’s life with him in the ICU, holding his hand and comforting him as best I could while the medical team prepared his body for organ harvesting.
Just after midnight, an operating room became available. I watched as a group of nurses and technicians prepared his body for the transfer. One person temporarily took him off the ventilator while another manually forced air into his lungs through a plunger-like device. He wanted to scream. He was leaving me and there was nothing I could do about it.
John was led from his room and down the hall. I followed him from behind, straight into the operating room. When I turned around and saw that several family members had followed us, I yelled at them: “Get out! Leave us alone!”
The medical staff stared at me. But my team of supporters ran out of the OR. I went over to John and leaned in and kissed him on the lips.
“I love you,” I told him.
Then I took a deep breath, gave him one last hello, turned and walked out into the hallway full of family and friends. I then returned home to start my life as a 32-year-old widow.
But then something amazing happened. I woke up the next morning at 5:30 to see a large reddish-orange light framing my entire bedroom window. When the organ removal coordinator called me a few hours later to find out which of John’s organs could be donated (heart, kidneys, and pancreatic islets), I asked her if she knew what time John’s heart was removed.
I could hear her flipping through her notes on the other end of the line.
“Here it is,” she said. “Her heart from hers was removed at 5:30 this morning.”
Wow!
In fact, I saw that red light twice more in the months after John died: once again in my bedroom, but floating on the nightstand right next to my head, which freaked me out.
But then, as the years went by, I no longer saw the red light. Rather, I saw a white light.
In fact, it wasn’t even me who saw the white light one night over my head about three years after John’s death. I was a rustic lodge in Bragg Creek and there were several women in a bunk room. I had slept in a top bunk and when I woke up the next morning the woman in the bottom bunk diagonally from me asked me how I slept.
“Fine,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the reading light above your head was on, so I figured you couldn’t sleep.”
Puzzled, I looked over my head and then back at the woman.
“There’s no reading light up here,” I told him.
“Well,” was his reply, “there was some kind of white light over your head in the middle of the night.”
In light of everything I’ve experienced since John’s death, I strongly suspect that something lives on after the death of our bodies. The fact that some kind of light is often seen after the death of a person is interesting.
In John’s case, it makes sense that his light was red at first because I highly doubt his soul was at peace, having been taken so suddenly in the prime of life.
Whereas, as time went on, I think her soul found peace with her sudden death, which perhaps explains why she later appeared as a white light.
“Your soul is that part of you that is immortal,” writes Gary Zukov, in his book, The Seat of the Soul. “Love is the energy of the soul… but love is not a passive state. It is an active force. It is the force of the soul. Love does more than bring peace where there is conflict… it brings Light.”
I saw the movie, Ghost, the other night. I hadn’t seen him in years. This time, however, I didn’t find it heartbreakingly sad.
Rather, I was intrigued by the film’s approach to the afterlife…and found much of what the characters experienced uncannily similar to what I personally experienced over the years, including the white light at the end, when Patrick Swayze’s soul was finally at peace and he could move on.