Afterlife

Recently an American neurosurgeon made global news when he related what he said he experienced while comatose for seven days in 2008. Eben Alexander came out with a book on the experience, called “Proof of Heaven.”

For those of you who have not read Eben Alexander’s story, the following account is one of the most reprinted excerpts:

Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds — immeasurably higher — flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet. Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang.

For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deepblue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us —vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors — powder blue, indigo, and pastel orangepeach — had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” “You have nothing to fear.” “There is nothing you can do wrong.” The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it. “Where is this place?” “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave.

*** Skeptics may dismiss the account as the raving of someone whose brain was eaten away by e. coli (Alexander survived the bacterial meningitis) or who’s seen too many movies like Avatar. But it’s an intriguing tale as we contemplate our mortality in this season devoted to the dead.

It’s not an entirely novel story. I’ve encountered similar accounts, from people who also went into a coma and survived life-threatening ailments. We don’t know if they formed the images from concepts of Heaven and the afterlife that were developed early in their lives. We do have those ideas and images, ingrained in Catechism classes and portrayed in classical art.

But Alexander’s account is by far the most vivid. And because he is supposed to be a man of science, his story is more compelling – and controversial.

In the Philippines, there are many accounts of the elderly talking, it seems, to themselves, but telling relatives that they are talking with loved ones long dead. It happened to my father, in the month he spent in the hospital prior to his death. Bedridden in a brightly lit hospital ICU, he also talked about regular visits to a bright, clean, cool place where he moved freely and experienced no pain.

Speaking with the dead is often seen in this country as a sure sign that the person claiming to be having the conversation is himself near death, with his dearly departed beginning to usher him into the afterlife.

In assessing Eben Alexander’s story, it’s his word against those of millions of skeptics. Without the science to back it up or debunk it, the concept of an afterlife is like the concept of God: it’s a matter of faith. Alexander chooses to believe.

*** FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE: We used to say that the Catholic Church wants a say in the life of its flock (with numerous fees for blessings along the way) from cradle to grave. Then it became from womb to tomb. Our colleague Doreen says that with the debate over the Reproductive Health bill, the period has now become longer: from sperm to worm.