“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. Why? Because it was so important to him that she stay alive.

When it comes to the belief in the possibility of some kind of afterlife, i.e. the soul/spirit/essence/consciousness of a deceased person living in some way after the death of their body, CS Lewis put it this way (as told 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 hold a hundred and twenty pounds?’

You reply, ‘Yes’.

‘Well, we’re going to disappoint your best friend on this rope.’

So you say, ‘Wait a minute, let me try that string 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 life after death 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 about, and discuss, but if all 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 you may have found yourself asking these kinds 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 his death is, in hindsight, pretty incredible in terms of evidence to support the possibility of anything living 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 transportation. One person temporarily took him off the ventilator while another manually forced air into his lungs through a device that looked like a plunger. He wanted to scream. He was leaving me and there was nothing I could do about it.

They took John out of his room and led him down the hall. I followed behind him, 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 operating room. I went over to John, leaned down and kissed him on the lips.

“I love you,” I told him.

Then I took a deep breath, greeted him one last time, turned around and walked out into the hallway filled with 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 huge reddish orange light framing my entire bedroom window. When the organ harvesting coordinator called me a few hours later to tell me 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 harvested.

I could hear her flipping through her notes on the other end of the line.

“Here it is,” she said. “Her heart was removed from her at 5:30 this morning.”

wow!

In fact, I saw that red light twice more in the months after John’s death: once again in my bedroom, but hovering on the nightstand right next to my head, which freaked me out.

But then, over the years, I didn’t see the red light anymore. Rather, I saw a white light.

In fact, it wasn’t even me who saw the white light overhead one night some three years after John’s death. I was a rustic lodge on Bragg Creek and there were several women in a bunk room. I had slept on a top bunk, and when I woke up the next morning, the woman on the bottom bunk, diagonally across from me, asked how I had slept.

“Fine,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw 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 a kind of white light above 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 our bodies die. 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 passed, I think his soul found peace with his sudden death, which perhaps explains why he 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, though, I didn’t find it heartbreakingly sad.

Rather, I was intrigued by the way the film dealt with the afterlife…and found much of what the characters experienced eerily 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 could move on.