Who has ever heard a message from the dead, had a near death experience, or had vivid memories of a past life? Ever played with a Ouiji board? Consulted mediums? Joined a seance, saw a ghost?
None of these interested me other than near-death
experiences. Teen Ouiji board parties were as close as I got. But last month’sopen mic involved a graveyard and since then other datapoints made me consider links
between the living and the dead. For example, I read the book of Deuteronomy’s warning about occult practices:
You shall not learn to do like the
abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you a soothsayer,
one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer.
Well, that settles that. But at the same time I was also reading
a book from the discard pile at the Katonah Village Library, Surviving Death: A
Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, by Leslie Kean.
With its carefully documented chapters on channeling past
lives, mediumships, poltergeists, moving objects and materializations, Kean’s
book talked in terms of highly credible evidence about the reality of the World to Come and other matters. The book opens with cases of
two boys who from a very early age identified details from past lives, one from
a pilot killed in World War II, the other a Hollywood talent agent. She uses
real names and photos of the boys, and the men whose lives they channeled.
Kean also wrote about near death experiences where people saw
light, heard music and encountered loved ones.
If this wasn’t enough to stir my imagination, I saw the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s season 5, “The End.” Larry David donates a kidney to comedian Richard Lewis, then months later is dying in a hospital room. His wife, father, friends and a rabbi gather around him. As he expires, they start bickering over money owed and other matters. While comic, the scenes closely track real near-death experiences. He flatlines, then finds himself flying through light and clouds to heaven, emerging with a full head of hair. Kindly robed guides (played by Dustin Hoffman and Sasha Baron Cohen) meet him. The World to Come looks ready for him, with legendary Ben Hogan eager to play golf with him with the news that Marilyn Monroe was a big fan of Seinfeld and is eager to meet him No need for bathrooms! Then he encounters his querulous mother Adele, played perfectly by Bea Arthur.
But David’s earthly behavior patterns get the better of him.
His guides decide he’s not ready for Heaven and he reluctantly slips back into
his body. The machines start beeping with life. even as Marilyn Monroe appears
to sigh, “I really love your sense of humor.” The flatlining machines start beeping
to signal a fluttering return to life, everybody is stunned, and Larry lives to
speak his mind in many more seasons. While the intent is humor, David’s foray
into and out of the World to Come closely tracks other near-death experiences. Dialogue
with his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines a/k/a Mrs. Robert F. Kenney Jr.) shows the profound
impact of such a glimpse of the other side:
Larry: “What a thing, huh?”
Cheryl: “Yeah. How do you feel? Do
you feel different after all this?”
Larry: “Yeah, I mean, come on, I’m a
changed man. I’m a completely different person.”
[Series spoiler: He doesn’t change at
all.]
This all comes as we approach the Jewish observance of Yom
Kippur, starting on October 12. That involves the Yizkor service, remembering
those who have gone before us. I post the names of relatives in my synagogue’s
Yizkor book. Would I like to hear from them, my parents, grandparents, friends
gone too soon? Sure, but I’m not seeking them out with all the techniques so
well discussed in Surviving Death.
Instead, I’m thinking about what the 19th century
writer George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, wrote:
“Our dead are never dead to us until
we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know
all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the
kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”
I once wrote a science fiction story based on this idea. A
cop killer was sent to a penal colony on the Moon. His punishment: he wouldn’t
die until everybody forgot him. But people kept remembering him. He truly had a
life sentence.
So if the dead aren’t talking to me even in my dreams, I’ll
just talk to them. They may be there, in a realm surrounding us but beyond our reach,
glimpsed hazily in shadows and during a blink of our eyes. Or do our realms interact?
At the Yizkor service I’ll remember, I’ll tell stories and write stories, I’ll
say their names. In doing so, I keep them alive. The questions we all have
about near death, after death, the World to Come—we all discover the answers in
the end. And that may just be the beginning.
