Do we go on After Death?

CH was already with TH when I met her, and they had plans to get married. I had not really known her long when she invited me to their wedding. The night before the wedding, I had a dream in which I had arrived at the wedding a bit early, and had gone into a café near the church to kill some time. Suddenly, CH came in, and sat across from me. We had coffee, and talked about the wedding. Then she said she had to go, and started crying. I asked what was wrong, and she said was crying because she did not have much time left.

The next day when I actually drove to the wedding, there were a couple of restaurants in sight of the church. I am not sure I found the one that might have matched the dream, but I thought about that dream as I sipped a cup of coffee waiting for it to be time to go across to the wedding. CH did not come by this time.

In the receiving line after the ceremony, she introduced me to her friends as her soul mate, or the one she would have had one last fling with before getting married, or the one she would have married if she had not met TH. This is getting way too sad to write about now. Even after almost twenty years.

TH and CH were building a life together. Part of it included me, for a while. I helped them put in their orchard, and they invited me to dinners on many special occasions, and sometimes just because I was a friend. CH was teaching horse riding, and trying to finish school so she could become a veterinarian, plus her part time job downtown. JG and I ran into her downtown one afternoon. CH told us she planned to get together with us soon, just in case something happened and we never saw each other again. As it turned out, we never did see her again.

CH was killed by a drunk driver a short time later. Thinking about the dream, and her feeling that something might happen before we saw each other again, well, what can I say? Sometimes life is very sad. And sometimes it almost seems that we know in advance that certain things might happen.

After CH died, I had dreams at times that involved her. Mostly, I would dream I was visiting at her house. Her husband was there in the dreams, but not CH. It was not like I knew she was dead in those dreams. She just was not at home.

Then, one time she interrupted a dream I had been having of my days back in college. I was about to leave the main building for my major, and there she was walking towards me, coming up the stairs, opening the main doors as I was headed out. I sort of did a double take, in the dream. Suddenly I was very aware of things, where I was, who she was. None of it jived in my head, since I knew two things. If I was really in college, she should not be there because I did not know her back then. And the big kicker; I knew that she had died. Sometimes things in dreams do not jive, and you just go on knowing that it is only a dream, and then it all changes. This time, it occurred to me that this must be a dream, but when I realized that, the only thing that changed was the outward setting. The building, the outside- it all faded into nothingness. But, CH was still there and still walking towards me. There I was, stammering, ‘why are you here, how are you here, are you really here?’ She came up face to face with me, grabbed my arms just below my shoulders, and said firmly, ‘I want you to know that am OK. There is something I have wanted to do for you.’ And then, without saying anything else that I remember anyway, she pulled me towards her. We were already about as close as we could be, but she pulled me closer, and then we merged together. What followed was warmth, tingling, swirling flashes of light, a feeling of floating, of being- me, her, us together as one. Then it was over.

Whether there is anything to the belief some have in an afterlife, who knows? If there is no afterlife, then this was just a very beautiful dream. If there is an afterlife, maybe she really came to me to tell me things were OK with her. One thing though, I had been having trouble dealing with her loss before that time, and it was easier after that experience. I have had no further dreams. Assuming there is no afterlife, maybe the way this works is that at some point, your subconscious mind literally merges the known memories and feelings for the deceased person into your own mind. Maybe this dream was a representation of that merger. I can accept that from a scientific viewpoint. But part of me still wants to believe that it was really CH who visited me that night, and that she is really OK.

Now you know for sure. Past life awareness, Out-of-body experiences, clairvoyant dreams, spirits, and raising tables and life after death. Now you know I am nuts. But, this is just another aspect of what has shaped me and my life. If it means I am nuts, at this point I really do not have anything to say in my defense. It is part of me.