Pass It On

April 30, 2010 — -- It seems an odd thing to me that so many people who otherwise speak openly about their spiritual path are silent when the subject turns to life after death, as if the elephant in everyone's living room weren't quite an acceptable topic of social conversation.

These days in my own small way I am trying to speak less shyly about the afterlife … because it introduced itself to me quite boldly and unexpectedly four years ago.

In November 2006 my sisters and I faced a challenging scenario. Our father, at the age of 87, died peacefully in his sleep, leaving his bed-ridden widow alone and isolated in her California retirement cottage. Angelika had few friends and no other family, and as my sisters and I flew from Boston to California, grief over our father's sudden passing was mingled with anxiety: How would we oversee our stepmother's care from such a distance? And, more importantly, how could we help and share with this woman whose personality we had struggled with for 40 years? Each of us had her own special story of bruised feelings. … No warmth was lost between us. Our father, whose diplomatic skills had sharpened over 40 years, would no longer be present to soften the edges of our misunderstandings.

I had carried on a bicoastal spiritual discussion with my father for many years: He shared with me the Course in Miracles, and I sent him the writing of Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh. He had encouraged the inspiring messages, which I'd often recorded out of periods of contemplative meditation. We had discussed the afterlife and he had comforted me with his assurance of it, but as I dozed off on the trans-Atlantic flight the day after his death, the last thing I expected was to hear my father's voice in my head.

It is an odd thing to describe, and requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

How did my father's thoughts and feelings find their way into my mind, articulated with his speech patterns, his choice of words? I still cannot explain it. I did the thing I was used to doing in my solitary meditation: I took up pen and journal and wrote the words as they came to me, unedited by my own thoughts.