Five years after Christopher’s death, I flew to Los Angeles to conduct a workshop on nutritional influences affecting chronic pain. I was tired from overwork. I had intended to stay for five days, bringing my family with me and making this trip a small vacation. Christina, however, had sustained a concussion in a frightening automobile accident at the end of December and was in no shape to travel. So I traveled alone and carried a briefcase full of reading with me onto the plane, but I lacked the energy to read it. Leaving the satchel unopened, I spent the flight dozing, listening to music, and gazing out the window. The northeastern United States had just entered one of the coldest, snowiest, and stormiest winters in memory. In the West, the winter was dry and mild, and as we crossed the Colorado Rockies, the weather below was clear and calm, revealing breathtaking views of white peaks and green forest.
The terrain slowly changed. The color red ruled everywhere. We passed over a red desert with red cliffs and pillars of red rock casting long shadows in the morning sunlight. How beautiful, I thought. I wonder if this is the Painted Desert near the Grand Canyon.
As if in answer to that question, the pilot’s voice blared harshly over the intercom, interrupting the music. “In five minutes, we will cross the Grand Canyon. The north rim will be visible from the right side of the airplane.”
What a treat, I thought. Jordan would have loved this.
The spectacle on the ground unfolded quickly. The stark sienna-colored soil was slashed with ribbons of ochre, scalloped with white and mahogany. Ravines and chasms deepened and widened, the sun’s glare casting shadows of ebony into their corners, giant fir trees sprouting from their walls, adding tufts of green and spruce to the display of color. The ground opened like an exploding firecracker, exposing a billion years of geological strata. As I watched this celebration of the earth, a feeling of sublime peacefulness and intense joy filled my heart. It rose up within me like a fountain being fed by an underground stream, flooding in the springtime, and seemed to carry me outside the airplane.
For the first time in six years, I felt the presence of Christopher’s Spirit all around me. His last words to Christina reverberated through my mind:
“I can’t wait to go on that trip with Leo!”
I still didn’t understand their full significance.
His Spirit stayed with me until the last traces of the Grand Canyon had disappeared from sight behind the starboard wing of the DC-10. I immediately called Christina on the airphone to share this encounter with her. Chris had returned.
That winter was murder in New York. The air was frigid, the sidewalks icy, and the streets narrowed by mounds of dirty snow and frozen brown slush. The aftereffects of concussion left Christina uncertain of her footing on glazed pavement, and she was homebound for much of January and February. The weather was on everyone’s mind, dominating all casual conversation.
I spent much of winter preparing for spring. A flurry of scientific meetings dotted my calendar from mid-March to mid-June. Philadelphia, Palm Springs, Minneapolis, London, Washington, D.C. At each one, I was scheduled to present to different groups of physicians, in different forms, the main tenets of my professional work.
One night during the third week of March, I suddenly awakened from a deep sleep at about three in the morning. I shot upright in bed, my heart pounding and a feeling of intense electrical energy pulsing through my body. I sat straight up in bed, startled. A voice was speaking, soundlessly, inside my head.
“You have to tell my story. People need to know.”
Christopher!
I sighed and fell back on the pillow. Of course I had to tell his story. It should have been told years ago. Why had I ever thought that I could just keep it to myself?
I lay awake until dawn, planning the outline of a book. It would start with Chris’s death and the appearance of his Spirit, a matter-of-fact account of the immortality of the soul. There had been other encounters with departed souls recorded. I would have to research them, consider their plausibility and the supporting evidence.
In the morning, I told Christina about my nocturnal orders from Christopher.
“A book about Chris is a wonderful idea,” she said warmly. Then she scrutinized me knowingly. “Keep it simple,” she warned. “Just write about Chris.”
I planned to start writing upon my return from a symposium in Palm Springs at the beginning of April. As that symposium approached, however, my excitement about the book project was undermined by doubts I had never expected. I had so little time. The spring was filled with meetings. I had allocated the summer to completing a workbook. Once again, there seemed to be no time for Chris.
There was a more profound doubt, however, and this one challenged the very core of my identity. I was accustomed to being the problem-solver, the man in control. All my writing, all my efforts to change the practice of medicine, derived from my attempt to solve concrete, well-defined problems using intellect, reason, the methods of science, and the creative application of systems analysis. Christopher’s story had none of those elements. I was literally afraid to write it. If anyone actually read it, who would take my work seriously ever again?
I left for Palm Springs with a rift in my heart that seemed to widen by the day. My agenda and Christopher’s could not be reconciled. The strain imposed by this schism was more exhausting than any amount of work. With no change in the objective conditions of my life, excitement for the future turned to discouragement with the present. I wanted to abandon all projects and spend as much time as possible relaxing and having fun. Hiking, skiing, bodysurfing, mountain biking, horseback riding, fiction writing. That would be my new agenda. Taking every aspect of my life so seriously had made me weary.
I arrived in Palm Springs for six days of meetings, accompanied by Jordan. We were looking forward to hot, dry, sunny weather and the end of winter. At one time, I had really cared about this conference. Now all I could think of was the sun.
In between the research symposium and the clinical symposium was a free half-day. I planned to spend it with Jordan seeing wildflowers and climbing rocks in the Mojave Desert.
The night before our excursion to the desert, I was suddenly awakened at three in the morning and once again sat upright in bed, startled, my heart pounding, a feeling of intense electrical energy pulsing through my body. The soundless voice was speaking.
“Tomorrow there will be a revelation in the desert.”
I collapsed on the pillow, wide awake and trembling. Nothing like this had ever happened to me in my life, until the middle of March. It had just happened again.
“What now?” I asked of no one in particular.
The Mojave excursion was worse than disappointing. The roads were crowded, there were few wildflowers to be seen, Jordan refused to go rock climbing, and we encountered no wildlife except for one half-starved and mangy coyote. Worst of all, I was attacked by poisonous cholla cacti while trying to photograph them. For the uninitiated, as I was, let me explain that cholla—also known as “jumping”—cacti have spines like sails that make them move in the direction of any object that passes by. For humans or animals, their poison-tipped spines become embedded in the flesh, where they not only produce intense, burning pain but also swelling, making them very difficult to remove.
“I should have researched this trip more thoroughly,” I moaned, feeling like a fool. Except for my own lack of foresight, there was no revelation in this desert.
We returned to the resort for the opening of the clinical symposium at about two o’clock. Since I was not scheduled to speak until the next morning, I decided to skip the afternoon’s lectures and take a hike by myself in the scruffy, colorless desert that stretched for miles behind the hotel. Equipped with a baseball cap, strong sunglasses, and a full canteen, I set off in search of solitude and peace of mind.
Midafternoon in the hills around Palm Springs feels exactly like the inside of an oven. After walking for 30 minutes along the driest, dustiest trails imaginable and drinking most of the water in my canteen, I began a conversation with myself.
I can’t go on like this. Jordan is growing up in front of my eyes. Christina was almost killed in December. I spend all my time working. I’m making the kind of mistakes I never used to make. I’m losing control . . . I don’t even want control. I don’t have to change the world. I don’t have to prove anything. If I don’t chill out, I’m going to get sick. I should treat myself as if I were a patient. What is wrong with me, anyway?
I looked up at the searing whiteness of the sky. “Christopher,” I said out loud, “what am I supposed to do?”
The inner voice answered promptly. “Follow my lead.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What?” I mumbled. “How can I follow your lead? I’m fifty-one years old, I’m a professional, I have all these projects to sort out. You were just a child, and you died at the age of twenty-two.”
“Follow my lead,” repeated the soundless voice.
A glimmer of understanding danced before my eyes, shimmering over the sand. “Power and advantage were games you never played,” I responded silently. “You were always just yourself . . . and you treated everyone else the same way. You didn’t care who was rich or poor, powerful or weak, generous or miserly. Each was an individual, worthy of your attention by the simple virtue of being themselves . . . as if you could sense Divine Presence, struggling to manifest itself in each person, no matter how pathetic or disagreeable.”
“Teach and serve,” intoned the voice. “Teach and serve.”
This was not what I wanted to hear. “I’ve been teaching and serving for over twenty years,” I shot back. “What I want is out!” Tears of anger streamed down my dust-covered cheeks. I sat on an outcropping of rock and fanned my face with the baseball cap.
Then came the revelation.
Christopher’s Spirit was fully present, every bit as majestic as it had been at the moment of his death, every bit as bright and joyful, but somehow older and more mature.
“You are the teacher,” I whispered. “And I am to follow you. How did I fail to see that?”
No answer was needed.
I sat for several minutes on the rocks, staring out across the barren hills. I laughed softly. Maybe this is what Jesus meant, I thought. The last shall be first. Okay, Chris, teach and serve. I will follow your lead.
Lightness filled my being, as if a cool and gentle breeze were sweeping through the desert, lifting the oppressive heat.
I arose from the rock I was sitting on. “Thank you, Chris. Once again.”
I walked back to the hotel to find Jordan and accept his invitation to shoot a game of pool.