A new friend and I had a breakfast date a few weeks ago. Vicky picked me up in her red Subaru and we drove to a local diner. But, as it turns out, we never left the car.
As we pulled into the parking spot, Vicky asked, “What are you working on at Guideposts?”
“A book called Glimpses of Eternity by Raymond Moody,” I answered. Raymond Moody wrote the bestseller Life After Life years ago, about what people experience when they clinically die and come back to life.
“His new book is about shared death experiences,” I continued. “Dr. Moody found that family and friends are often swept into the first moments of their loved one’s journey from this life to the next. Some people say they travel partway to heaven with their child or husband.”
I stopped abruptly because I remembered that Vicky’s husband had died suddenly this past winter. Her loss must be too raw to hear about this book, I thought. I looked up. Vicky was staring intently at me.
“You know, the night Bob died, I had gone out with friends,” she said. “I thought he had the flu and I didn’t want to catch it. But then he called and asked for me to come home, that he needed me. When I got there, I could tell his heart was failing. He was only 52, but he’d lived through several heart attacks already and we both knew the signs. By the time the ambulance came, Bob was gone.”
Vicky was looking straight at me but I knew she was seeing something else. “This is something I haven’t told anyone: when Bob died, I left my body. I was looking down on both of us from above. When I returned to myself, I was tingling.”
Now I was staring at her. Vicky’s experience was just like those recounted in Glimpses of Eternity.
Vicky told me another story that amazed me. Of sleeping with her two little girls a month later, and feeling a surge of energy in her room that literally blew the screen out of the window frame. “I knew it was Bob visiting us,” she said.
Before we knew it, an hour had passed, and we were still in the parking lot.
As she drove me back home, I promised to send her a copy of Glimpses of Eternity. Its stories will confirm what she has already discovered—that our relationships with those we love live forever.
Lenore Person
GuidepostsBooks
