2:47pm

What do you do when someone you love is getting ready to drop their body (what some people call death)? Not an easy thing, my friend, for you or the one you love. But let me share a little known secret. There is no such thing as death. Death means an ending. My friend Webster calls it a permanent cessation of all vital functions. If you believe that I have some property for you to buy. (A plot maybe?)The first thing you need to remember is that you are not a body with a soul. You are a soul with a body. Webster (by now you've figured out that he's my best friend) calls the soul the "immaterial essence, animating principle or actuating cause of an individual life". That sentence says nothing about death. The soul is eternal.The only thing we can't prove (or can we?) is that there is life after death and that you bring with you all of your awareness. This may be tough to prove but I can state with total honesty that I have had at least a half dozen visits from people I loved after they dropped their bodies. Before I had these blessed experiences if you had made that statement to me I'd have thought you desperately needed to see a psychiatrist. Let me tell you the first encounter with the other side.

A few years ago a man who loved me more than I deserved and to whom I was engaged was told he had lung cancer and that it was terminal. Our terror can best be described like this. We returned home from the doctor (we had bought a home together) and I went upstairs to use the bathroom. After doing my business I walked out of the bathroom and fell to the floor. My legs had refused to work. I crawled across the room and at that moment my fiance entered the bedroom (which was dark) stumbled upon my body as I was crawling to the bed and fell to the floor. He too found that his legs would not work. We clung to each other sobbing as we dragged our bodies onto the bed. We lay there for a long time our grief and despair imbedded in our very soul. I realized we had two choices; we could fall apart emotionally, thereby having no ability to fight this fear or face the fear with courage, with an uplifted heart. We chose the latter.

For the next three months that my fiance had to live I prepared him for death. At night when I had insomnia I opened wide our bedroom window. Our house overlooked a wilderness park and the sound of crickets soothed me into sleep. I had grown up in the country and my fiance, a city boy himself, teased me about needing crickets to fall asleep.

I prepared him well for death as he told me towards the end that he didn't mind the dying. He minded leaving me. He asked me if he found a way to come back and let me know that he was okay and that there was life after death did I want him to. Of course I did.

The day of his funeral,having caught only snatches of sleep for the past several weeks, I was exhausted. After the last guest left I went upstairs to my bedroom and fell immediately into a deep sleep. My daughter and her husband slept downstairs as she didn't want me to be alone. In the morning the phone rang and it was her. When I asked her why she wasn't downstairs she said they had got up early and left but that she had something to tell me that she didn't believe but that it had happened.

After she had fallen asleep she was awakened by the feeling of a presence standing over her bed. The room was filled with a white light and the drapes that covered the closed patio window were billowing. The sound of crickets was deafening. She saw the presence leave her side and along with the white light and the crickets headed for the staircase. She was terrified and jumped up to follow it. It went up the staircase, crossed the hall and slipped into my bedroom. She saw the light under the door and heard the crickets as they gave me my last serenade from the other side.

I will never again believe there is no life after dropping your body.