Proof of Heaven (19 page)

I never heard Om’s voice directly, nor saw Om’s face. It was as if Om spoke to me through thoughts that were like wave-walls rolling through me, rocking everything around me and showing
that there is a deeper fabric of existence—a fabric that all of us are always part of, but which we’re generally not conscious of.

So I was communicating directly with God? Absolutely. Expressed that way, it sounds grandiose. But when it was happening, it didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt like I was doing what every soul is able to do when they leave their bodies, and what we can all do right now through various methods of prayer or deep meditation. Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it’s the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal—and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link with God.

I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
(1879–1955)

E
instein was one of my early scientific idols and the above quote of his had always been one of my favorites. But I now understood what those words actually meant. Crazy as I knew it sounded every time I told my story to one of my scientific colleagues—as I could see in their glazed or perturbed expressions—I knew I was telling them something that had genuine scientific validity. And that it opened the door to a whole new world—a whole new universe—of scientific comprehension. Observation that honored consciousness itself as the single greatest entity in all of existence.

But one common event in NDEs had not happened with me. Or, more accurately, there was a small group of experiences I had not undergone, and all of these clustered around one fact:

While out, I had not remembered my earthly identity.

Though no two NDEs are exactly alike, I’d discovered early on in my reading that there is a very consistent list of typical features that many contain. One of these is a meeting with one or more deceased people that the NDE subject had known in
life. I had met no one I’d known in life. But that part didn’t bother me so much, as I’d already discovered that my forgetting of my earthly identity had allowed me to move further “in” than many NDE subjects do. There was certainly nothing to complain about in that. What did bother me was that there was one person I would have deeply loved to have met. My dad had died four years before I entered coma. Given that he knew how I felt I had failed to measure up to his standards during those lost years of mine, why had he not been there to tell me it was okay? For comfort was, indeed, what the NDE subject’s friends or family who greeted them were most often intent on conveying. I longed for that comfort. And yet I hadn’t received it.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t received any words of comfort at all, of course. I had, from the Girl on the Butterfly Wing. But wonderful and angelic as this girl was, she was
no one I knew
. Having seen her every time I entered that idyllic valley on the wing of a butterfly, I remembered her face perfectly—so much so that I knew I had never met her in my life, at least my life on earth. And in NDEs it was often the meeting with a known earthly friend or relation that sealed the deal for the people who had undergone these experiences.

Try as I did to brush it off, this fact introduced an element of doubt into my thoughts on what it all meant. It wasn’t that I doubted what had happened to me. That was impossible, and I’d have just as soon doubted my marriage to Holley or my love for my kids. But the fact that I had traveled to the beyond without meeting my father, and met my beautiful companion on the butterfly wing, whom I didn’t know, still troubled me. Given the intensely emotional nature of my relationship to my family, my feelings of lack of worth because I had been given away,
why hadn’t that all-important message—that I was loved, that I would never be thrown away—been delivered by someone I knew? Someone like . . . my dad?

For in fact, “thrown away” was, on a deep level, how I had indeed felt all through my life—in spite of all the best efforts of my family to heal that feeling through their love. My Dad had often told me not to be overly concerned about whatever had happened to me before he and Mom had picked me up at the children’s home. “You wouldn’t remember anything that happened to you that early anyhow,” he’d said. And in that he’d been wrong. My NDE had convinced me that there is a secret part of ourselves that is recording every last aspect of our earthly lives, and that this recording process commences at the very, very beginning. So on a precognitive, preverbal level, I’d known all through my life that I’d been given away, and on a deep level I was still struggling to forgive that fact.

As long as this question remained open, there would remain a dismissive voice. One that told me, insistently and even deviously, that for all the perfection and wonder of my NDE, something had been missing, had been “off” about it.

In essence, a part of me still doubted the authenticity of my astonishingly real deep-coma experience, and thus of the true existence of that entire realm. To that part of me, it continued to “not make sense” from a scientific standpoint. And that small but insistent voice of doubt began to threaten the whole new worldview I was slowly building.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

—C
ICERO
(106–43
BCE
)

F
our months after my departure from the hospital, my birth family sister Kathy finally got around to sending me a photo of my birth sister Betsy. I was up in our bedroom, where my odyssey all began, when I opened the oversized envelope and pulled out a framed glossy color photo of the sister I had never known. She was standing, I would later find out, near the docking pier of the Balboa Island Ferry near her home in Southern California, a beautiful West Coast sunset in the background. She had long brown hair and deep blue eyes, and her smile, radiating love and kindness, seemed to go right through me, making my heart both swell and ache at the same time.

Kathy had affixed a poem over the photo. It was written by David M. Romano in 1993, and was called “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me.”

When tomorrow starts without me,

And I’m not there to see,

If the sun should rise and find your eyes

All filled with tears for me;

I wish so much you wouldn’t cry

The way you did today,

While thinking of the many things,

We didn’t get to say.

I know how much you love me,

As much as I love you,

And each time you think of me,

I know you’ll miss me too;

But when tomorrow starts without me,

Please try to understand,

That an angel came and called my name,

And took me by the hand,

And said my place was ready,

In heaven far above

And that I’d have to leave behind

All those I dearly love.

But as I turned to walk away,

A tear fell from my eye

For all my life, I’d always thought,

I didn’t want to die.

I had so much to live for,

So much left yet to do,

It seemed almost impossible,

That I was leaving you.

I thought of all the yesterdays,

The good ones and the bad,

The thought of all the love we shared,

And all the fun we had.

If I could relive yesterday

Just even for a while,

I’d say good-bye and kiss you

And maybe see you smile.

But then I fully realized

That this could never be,

For emptiness and memories,

Would take the place of me.

And when I thought of worldly things

I might miss come tomorrow,

I thought of you, and when I did

My heart was filled with sorrow.

But when I walked through heaven’s gates

I felt so much at home

When God looked down and smiled at me,

From His great golden throne,

He said, “This is eternity,

And all I’ve promised you.

Today your life on earth is past

But here it starts anew.

I promise no tomorrow,

But today will always last,

And since each day’s the same way,

There’s no longing for the past.

You have been so faithful,

So trusting and so true.

Though there were times

You did some things

You knew you shouldn’t do.

But you have been forgiven

And now at last you’re free.

So won’t you come and take my hand

And share my life with me?”

So when tomorrow starts without me,

Don’t think we’re far apart,

For every time you think of me,

I’m right here, in your heart.

My eyes were misting as I put the picture carefully up on the dresser and continued to stare at it. She looked so strangely, hauntingly familiar. But of course, she
would
look that way. We were blood relations and had shared more DNA than any other people on the planet with the exception of my other two biological siblings. Whether we’d ever met or not, Betsy and I were deeply connected.

The next morning, I was in our bedroom reading more of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross book
On Life After Death
when I came to a story about a twelve-year-old girl who underwent an NDE and at first didn’t tell her parents about it. Finally, however, she could no longer keep it to herself and confided in her father. She told him about traveling to an incredible landscape full of love and beauty, and how she met and was comforted by her brother.

“The only problem,” the girl told her father, “is that I don’t have a brother.”

Tears filled her father’s eyes. He told the girl about the brother she did indeed have, but who had died just three months before she was born.

I stopped reading. For a moment I went into a strange, dazed space, not really thinking or not thinking, just . . . absorbing something. Some thought that was right on the edge of my consciousness but hadn’t quite broken through.

Then my eyes traveled over to the bureau, and the photo that Kathy had sent me. The photo of the sister I had never known. Whom I knew only through the stories that my birth family
had related of what a hugely kind, wonderfully caring person she had been. A person, they had often said, who was so kind she was practically an angel.

Without the powder blue and indigo dress, without the heavenly light of the Gateway around her as she sat on the beautiful butterfly wing, she wasn’t easy to recognize at first. But that was only natural. I had seen her heavenly self—the one that lived above and beyond this earthly realm, with all its tragedies and cares.