Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The ADC Project:
A Leap of Faith
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D.”
Like a caterpillar that was asleep in its cocoon, I was about to be transformed, but I never suspected it at the time. It was summer 1976, and my wife, Judy, and I were living in Sarasota, Florida.
“Bill, come in here! Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is going to be on Donahue,” she called from the living room.
“I think I’ve heard her name. Who is she? What does she do?” I asked from my office.
“She’s the famous European doctor who works with people who are dying,” Judy replied.
This answer didn’t thrill me. Why would I want to watch an entire program on a subject that I didn’t even want to think about? Formerly a stockbroker and a securities analyst who had worked for two Wall Street firms, I was an avowed materialist. My primary interests were the Dow Jones Industrials Average and earning money on investments. My beliefs about death and life after death could be summed up briefly: “People are like flashlight batteries. When their juice runs out, you simply throw their bodies away. When you’re dead, you’re dead!”
Judy called again, “Come on, Bill. The show’s about to start. You don’t want to miss Elisabeth. She’s a really special person!”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, though I joined Judy with little enthusiasm. To my amazement, the program turned out to be one of the most engrossing hours of television I had ever seen.
I learned that Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a world-renowned Swiss-born psychiatrist. Her pioneering work with the terminally ill was helping millions of Americans overcome their fear of death and dying.
On this show, Elisabeth talked about the near-death experiences her patients had shared with her and of her belief in life after death. She spoke with such compassion, sincerity, and conviction about these issues that I was unexpectedly impressed.
Two weeks later, we watched the same program on another cable channel. This time I felt inspired to send Elisabeth a small donation to help her continue her humanitarian work.”
In a few weeks, a package arrived in the mail containing a letter and a set of audio tapes Elisabeth had recorded. Surprisingly, she invited me to attend her five-day “Life, Death, and Transition Workshop,” which was to be held in Florida early the next year. At first I felt very flattered to receive her invitation, but I gradually became afraid of participating in such a workshop. Ever since my father had died in 1947 when I was only eight years old, death had been a morbid and distasteful subject for me.
Judy believed I had some unresolved issues concerning the death of my father. Though I denied it at the time, part of me realized this was probably true. I am an only child and had never talked about his death or expressed my feelings about my loss to anyone. Back then the prevailing attitude was “Big boys don’t cry!”
In November, on the last day for workshop registration, I called Elisabeth’s office in Illinois to decline her offer. I was expecting to speak to someone on her staff, but it was snowing heavily in the Midwest that day, and her secretary had been unable to drive to work. Elisabeth answered the phone, and I recognized her voice immediately. I thanked her for the tapes, then quickly gave a phony excuse for why I couldn’t attend her workshop.
Elisabeth remembered me and listened attentively. Then she said in her charming German-Swiss accent, “Bill, I feel you should be there.” There was something about the way she said those words that caused me to reply, “If you think so, I will.”
Feeling a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, I drove to the retreat center in North Palm Beach in February 1977. All my fears proved to be unfounded, for Elisabeth’s workshop was really about life and living, not death and dying.
Seventy strangers rapidly bonded together and soon became a loving family. We supported one another while relating our stories of loss and pain, and we ate together, sang together, played together, and hugged each other freely. Remarkable emotional healings took place as we began to release our accumulated grief of a lifetime. The unconditional love we shared was so tangible that tears of sadness were replaced by tears of joy, and nearly everyone felt safe enough to reveal their innermost self.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the seeds for this book were being planted within me during Elisabeth’s workshop. This process began in a group sharing session when Maggie, a nurse from Illinois, told us she was a bereaved mother. Her 15-year-old daughter, Joy, had been hit and killed by an automobile while she was out walking.
Maggie told us she had had a dream after Joy’s death, but added, “It wasn’t like an ordinary dream. It was just so real!”
This was right after Christmas, about thirteen months after my daughter was killed. I had been having a bad time, and this particular night, I cried myself to sleep.
While I was sleeping, I dreamed that Joy came to me. We were sitting in a tree on a low, overhanging branch. The landscape was filled with light, and everything was in extremely vivid color. The tree, the green grass, and the blue sky were all very intense.
Joy looked very happy. She was wearing a pastel pink, diaphanous gown. It was very sheer and flowing with long sleeves and a sash around the waist. It wasn’t like anything she had owned before.
She sat with me and hugged me and put her head on my left breast. I could feel her weight and her substance.
Then Joy told me she had to go, but that she could come back again. To demonstrate this, she kind of floated away, then came back and sat with me on the branch. She was showing me that my sadness wasn’t necessary because we weren’t really going to be apart.
Joy was comforting me. She was happy, and she wanted me to be happy too. Then we hugged again and just sat there for a while. But pretty soon, she had to leave.
I woke up feeling very comforted because I felt Joy had really been with me. That’s when I began to get better and was able to begin letting go. It was time for my daughter to move on and for me to do other things with my life.
All of us were very happy that Maggie had had such a positive and uplifting experience concerning her deceased daughter, and it was obvious she had undergone much healing since her tragic loss. Because she had called her experience a “dream,” that’s how I regarded it. I knew people had vivid dreams, but to me dreams were products of our subconscious mind and nothing more.
But Maggie had more to say as she went on to describe an experience her 17-year-old son, Bob, had with his sister:
This happened before my experience, about six to eight months after Joy’s death. If anybody was hurting, it was my son, Bob, who was just twenty months older than his sister.
He missed her badly and was really suffering. He went from being one of the most popular kids at school to being a loner, with just one or two friends. He’d come home and say, “It was just terrible today.”
So one evening, he was in his room studying, and my husband and I were in the family room watching TV. Suddenly, Bob screamed and came running to us, saying, “Mom! I just saw Joy!” Then he told us his experience.
Bob said that he had been reading, but he realty couldn’t concentrate. Then he looked up and saw Joy standing in front of his closet.
He told us Joy’s hair was like it always was, and she was wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt that he’d never seen on her before. She didn’t say anything to him, but he said the expression on her face was like she was fine, like everything was okay.
Bob said he was so startled that he couldn’t move or speak for a couple of minutes. Then he jumped up, but Joy wasn’t there anymore. That’s when he screamed and came running to us.
Could this boy’s experience be real? Was it even possible? Could a teenage girl really appear to her brother in Midwest America in the twentieth century after she had been hit and killed by a car? I thought about it briefly, but quickly discounted Bob’s experience, attributing it to his grief or wishful thinking or an overactive imagination. I reminded myself, “When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
