Dead Letters

 

Interesting as it might be to speculate about UFOs and alien craft, there is a far more mind-blowing issue that gets less attention: NDEs.

That is, “Near Death Experiences.” If they are real, they confirm the immortality of the soul, and make life here on earth seem relatively insignificant. We live only in the antechamber of eternity. 

An eternity that, based on our choices here, could be eternal delight or eternal suffering.

According to the researcher interviewed by Andrew Klavan, 23% of those who report near death experiences experience something hellish. But the real proportion who see an awful afterlife is probably higher than this. For this is self-reported, and reporting that one is bound for hell is not great for one’s reputation.

The researcher also reports that those who, in these circumstances, cry out to Jesus for help, find they are rescued. This, for what it is worth, is also claimed in Buddhism: one cries out to Chijiang Posal, or Amita Bitsu. 

Yet clearly many do not. Klavan tells of an acquaintance who, after a near-death experience, still insists she is an atheist

Salvation, then, just as the Catholic Church teaches, is available to all right up to the moment of death. Anyone who goes to hell does so by their own choice. 

Why do they make this choice? Because they will acknowledge only themselves as God. In modern psychiatric terms, they are narcissists. In traditional religious language, it is the sin of pride. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” as Milton has the Devil himself explain.

Not that those who submit to God at the last moment get home free. As Klavan’s interviewee reports, everyone goes through a life review, in which they experience everything they have caused anyone else to experience. This corresponds to purgatory: if you have done another harm in life, caused them physical or emotional pain, you will experience the full measure of that harm yourself. All secrets are revealed.

Hospice nurses report that most patients die happy. Usually, perhaps a week or two before the end, they start seeing visions of deceased relatives or friends welcoming them. And they die peacefully, in repose. 

It stands to reason that, while everyone may fear the pain of death, and the uncertainty, good people will, on the whole, welcome it; bad people will fear it. 

This is probably the truth of the common observation that “the good die young.” They will, on average, because they have reason to welcome death rather than fight it. And we do seem to have some control. People tend to hang on for after Christmas and New Years, or for their birthday. 

This is not to say that longevity is automatically evidence of a bad person. Or early death proof of goodness. It may be that a good person lingers because they feel some obligation to do something before they go. A bad person may get shot robbing a bank.

Depressed people become suicidal not actually out of despair. It is more often out of hope. They often kill themselves, or try to kill themselves, because they have a strong intuition that they are going to something better. Some have said so to me. And I have felt the same. The truly depressed are almost inevitably  good people, and people with special spiritual insight.

It all makes me want to ponder my own relatives and how they died.

I have litttl real information on my father’s father. He died young, at 61. I was too young to be told much. The simple fact that he died young makes me think he was a good man. Also the fact that he was apparently depressed in this life. One of his favourite sayings was “the majority of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

I remember him as a very gentle man.

Next to go was my mother’s father. I heard that he went to bed one night saying he did not feel well, and did not wake up. That struck me as a good way to go. I assume he was a good man. I remember him, too, as a gentle man.

Next, my mother’s mother. They said at the time, she had just decided it was time to go, that she had no reason to linger; and so she said her goodbyes, to me as to others, and she went. That suggests true blessedness to me. I felt she radiated calm when I went to see her. She pointed out a squirrel outside the window, nuzzling the snow. It was winter, but life went on, and new life would appear.

I remember her as a a gentle woman, and she is mentioned as generous in at least one book. She lived near the train station, and on Christmases, she would bring a special meal to the clerks who were obliged to work on that day. She was known up and down the rails for her Christmas meals.

I also remember that she loved to laugh.

Next, my father’s mother. From what I knew of her in life, she was a conspicuously good person. She volunteered much for charity, and was extravagantly generous to others. As someone used to say of her, “she was always taking in some bird with a broken wing.” She was an observant Catholic, and made a Catholic of me by her example. 

However, when in her seventies her heart was giving out, she was preoccupied with various diet and health regimens, and proposed to the doctors a heart transplant. “After all,” she said, “what have I got to lose?”

She was not looking forward to death. She was fighting it. This is not a good sign.

A few weeks before she died, she commented to me that, working on her cousin’s tax returns, she kept getting visions of an invasion by Communists. It seemed so real.

This does not sound like the expected welcoming by departed relatives. Rather, by red demons?

Soon before her own death, only weeks before, her brother died. When informed of it, she was surprised. “I thought I’d get there before he did.” 

Others on the point of death apparently get visits from relatives they did not know had died. She didn’t. This perhaps bodes ill for either her or him.

While my grandmother was a kind and generous person, she was selectively and wilfully so. She had favourites. In being overindulgent to her favourites, she was in effect downgrading the worth and needs of others, those outside her magic circle, and taking to herself godlike powers. She was like the mother of a murderer who insists “her boy” could do no wrong, and cares not a bit for the strangers he kills. In the cosmic balance, inordinate and unqualified love is just as wrong as open malice; and ultimately just as malicious. And just as selfish. Think of the relative who keeps pouring the alcoholic spouse or parent another drink. 

It grieves me to suppose so, but I fear for her fate.

Next to die was my mother. I have been told little of her last days. But I do recall hearing the doctors were surprised at how far the cancer had spread. Usually, they said, the pain would have driven someone to go to the doctor long before. 

This could mean two things. Either she in effect committed suicide, looking forward to death as an escape; or she feared death so much that she was in denial, and was avoiding hearing the fatal diagnosis.

Was my mother a good woman? Most who knew her would insist she was. She was quiet and unassertive. She publicly deferred to my father in everything. But I suspect this was only to avoid taking responsibility. I have hints that, behind the scenes, she was often strong-willed; and if she was, she did not seem to influence her spouse much for the better. She certainly showed no interest in religion, God, or morality. Or, really, in her children, or in anyone other than her husband. This sort of unqualified support is, again, immoral.

Dying out of pure denial was certainly the case with my first wife, who was an atheist and a narcissist. I could feel the lump in her breast for months, and nagged her to see a doctor. Didn’t she care about the fate of her young children? She admitted it was because she was too afraid of the diagnosis. I finally threatened to leave her, and this at last got her to go. Had she gone earlier, she might have survived. Because she stalled, the cancer killed her. At the last, when it had spread to her bone, she insisted she could not believe or accept this was happening to her.

My brother Gerry went next. 

He died on his 65th birthday. He seemed to know for months before that he was dying; knew before the doctors did; he told me so. He also said to others, I am told, that he wanted to die. He felt he had won through, and done what he needed to do. He had suffered for many years from depression. His death seems to have been his birthday present to himself.

He was not a conspicuously good person. He was nasty to me when we were both young. He stole things. In his early years, he got in trouble with the law.

In his last years, however, although he remained an adamant atheist, there was a gentleness about him, a humility. He consented to wear a green scapular I sent him. “After all, it can’t do any harm.” So at least, he was not afraid of God, and would not renounce him. I have strong hopes he was saved. I hope he will welcome me when I die.

Most recent to depart was my father. He lived a long life; I think he was 92. He almost died in the leadup to Christmas the prior year—I hear the doctors said all his systems were shutting down, and they expected him to go at any time. Yet he rallied and went home.

He was back in hospital some months later. Pneumonia, I think. Then they said again he was rallying. And then, as I recall hearing it, in the middle of the night watch, he suddenly sat up in bed, as though alarmed, and died.

That does not sound good. It sounds as though he was fighting to the last moment to live. Who dies sitting up? It sounds as if he was trying to force himself awake, awake from the sinister dream he was about to dissolve into.

It reminds me of reports of the death of Elizabeth I: “It is said that Elizabeth resisted lying down out of fear that she would never rise again. Elizabeth lay speechless on the floor for four days before her servants finally managed to settle her into bed.” She is supposed to have uttered the final words “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

To put it simply, he was not a good man. And, to all appearances, he died unrepentant.