The Beauty of Life After Death

by Richard Seifried

Signal Hill Musings

January, 2004

On rare occasions, my memory recalls my most intimate experience with death.  Dying, close friends and relatives passing on, brings me moments of deep sorrow, but I do not dwell on that portion of life’s experiences.  Death to me is something almost beautiful, the falling of a colored leaf or the immobile body of a walking stick or praying mantis, or even the shriveled body of a goldfinch.

All of those images are an integral part of Signal Hill, our mountain home.

Back in 1964, seven months after President Kennedy was assassinated, I experienced something that affected me even more than his death.

My little family, my wife, son, and three daughters, was riding with me in our beautiful very new, red VW Bug.  A young man and his fiancé (by one day) were traveling in their black Mercury, speeding down the very low slopes of Mt. Hood.  He, impatient, cut around five cars and struck our oncoming vehicle in the driver’s door, sending us rolling backward, our bug ending up in a ditch.

Ninety minutes later, the ambulance pulled into the Redmond, Oregon, hospital.  I was dying.

Conscious during the whole ordeal, experiencing discomfort, anxiety, and not very much pain, I still recall them placing me on a gurney-like bed in the emergency room.  A Jesuit priest was suddenly peering down at me and, to the surprise of the two doctors and several nurses, I responded to his questions.

They had thought that I was already dead.

Father gave me the Last Sacrament, and I cannot begin to relate how wonderful, how peaceful, that experience was.  All worry left me.  The others were going to be okay.  Only my son had a serious injury and it was not fatal.  My wife, I realized, would be okay.  She would go on with life, raising our children.  My family would continue.

Peacefulness.  No pain.  Weightlessness. 

Fully aware of what was transpiring, I began to observe the emergency room from somewhere above my broken body.  A nurse dropped an instrument and I could see her picking it up.  I thought that was humorous.  Sound, vision, possibly even smell, were acute, far more intense than now or at any other time before or after the crises.

My sharply focused eyes experienced something quite profound.  I was moving away.  Doctors, nurses, lights, the whole room before me, became more distant, moving more and more rapidly toward something behind me.  Soon I was observing the room as if I were looking through binoculars, backwards. 

The thoughts that ran through my mind are still with me, even the unspoken words.  “Hmmm,” I thought, as I imagined placing my hands, one on my forehead and one to the rear of my skull.  “My head is only a few inches thick.”  How could that be?  “I wonder where I am going?”

Bright, shiny, silvery twin-tunnels.  One for each eye. Me, moving rapidly backward from the emergency room.  Going where?      

I was happy and very curious.

About then, the doctors gave me electric shock or did something else.  In a split second, I was back in the ER, back in my body.  Pain, gravitational pull on my muscles, blurred vision, every sensation became uncomfortable, yet indistinct.  I was back among the living, in this world, this existence that we are all enduring.

A day or so later, I told my wife Betty what had happened.  We both wondered a moment and then put the thoughts out of our minds.  A few years later, the book 90 Minutes in Heaven came out and I said, “Hey!  That’s what happened to me.”  We both agreed.

Since then I have never been afraid of dying.  What kills you might hurt, but death, itself, is wonderful.

In spite of all of the tragedies and misdeeds, I never doubted that our souls go on, to something wonderful, to another part of Creation.

Then, after decades of adventures and living, I have recently found myself doubting.  That emotion is upsetting.  I should know (as I really do) that life goes on beyond mortality.  I am disturbed and disappointed by my thoughts, my doubts.

Then, as if on cue, an article appeared in our regional paper, The Morning News.  The article was titled “Mother Teresa often felt Abandoned by God.”  As I read the information beneath the title, I discovered that Mother Teresa and other mystics and saints often reported feeling abandoned.  There were many quotations from Mother Teresa’s writing.  One was quite remarkable.  She reported, “I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

Almost every thinking person has doubts, uncertainties.  My concerns about my doubts are normal.  That is another experience that we must live and deal with as best we can.

January is sort of like that, you know.  Death.  Stillness.  Bitter cold.  Darkness.

Yet, if one here on Signal Hill looks closely, one finds a tiny, minute blue flower peeping out of the melting snow.  An insect chrysalis flutters on a wind-blown dried stem, the developing creature protected from the biting, arctic winds by nature’s little sanctuary.  Our friends, the crows, caw and even in winter’s grasp, play their games of tag or torment a screech owl trying to hide among the pine trees’ needles.  Bulging leaf buds are magnified by thick, clear coatings of ice, reassuring us of the life renewal that is sure to come.

In a way, those are examples of life after death.  Perhaps that is the way our souls, or spirits, exist.  On and on, moving in an inexplicable pattern of beginnings and endings, moving onward toward what we cannot yet comprehend.

Life is beautiful.  I am so very fortunate to know that death is also wonderful.  I hope that you know it too.  

•