I honored my speaking commitments for the spring and fall, but decided to postpone all other projects until Christopher’s work was done. For once, Chris would come first. His message was more important than mine.
As I prepared to write his story, I marveled at the change that had occurred in my relationship to him since his death. I also marveled at how long the change had taken to come about and how persistent Chris had been in making it happen. I began to wonder how much of Chris’s after-death activities had just happened, spontaneously, and how much had been planned in advance.
I thought about his last words to Christina: “I can’t wait to go on that trip with Leo!” Which trip did he mean? Was it the drive to the Grand Canyon I had planned for Chris and Jordan, a trip that was canceled by Chris’s death, or was it the flight to Los Angeles—City of Angels—that carried me over the Grand Canyon five years later? I had felt his presence very strongly during that flight. It seemed to mark the return of his Spirit into my life and was soon followed by his command that I tell his story. How much had Chris known in advance, before his death? Five years before, I would have considered speculation along these lines ridiculous and fanciful. Now I considered it worthy of investigation. The fact of personal immortality made anything possible.
I reflected on what I’d been told about Chris’s behavior the morning of his death. It had by all accounts been extraordinary. He seemed to be telling the Lifesharing community, “This is my last day with you. Here is the way I want you to remember me.”
When we’d arrived at North Plains Farm to plan Chris’s funeral, I had asked about the circumstances surrounding Chris’s drowning. There had been only one adult with him on the hike, which was unusual.
“I make it a rule that I never go hiking without a helper,” she said to me. “When my helper got sick, I was going to cancel the hike. But Christopher begged to go. That morning he was brilliant. He did all of his chores so well. He was so helpful. At eurhythmy5 he was able to do all the movements he couldn’t do before. It was uncanny, a culmination of everything he had struggled with for the past nine months. It was a special moment. He brought us all together. That’s why I let him take the walk. I couldn’t refuse him. He chose two other boys to go with us. Instead of hiking on the ridge, I chose an easy stroll on a logging road by the highway, near a streambed that was almost dry. The first snow of the season had fallen during the night, about an inch of very wet snow. Chris did not usually pay much attention to scenery, but on that walk he kept telling me how beautiful the snow looked. We were almost back to the van, about fifty yards from the highway. I walked ahead to unlock it. When I turned around, I saw that Frank and Roger were there, but not Christopher. We called his name. There was no answer. We went looking for him off the trail. About ten feet from the edge of the trail, on the other side of some trees, was a ditch through which the stream ran. I saw Chris lying facedown in the stream, in about two inches of water. He wasn’t breathing. We pulled him out and called for an ambulance on the CB.”
I then learned about Chris’s transcendent performance at eurhythmy the morning of his death. Eurhythmy was developed by Rudolph Steiner as an educational tool, an instruction in the expansion of human consciousness through movement. It was adapted by health workers to the treatment of illness and functional disabilities, something akin to dance therapy with symbolic content. Eurhythmy is very much like dance, especially the piece that Chris had finally mastered the morning of November 2, a piece called “Alleluia.”
“Alleluia” is about personal growth. When done in a group, it is specifically about the transformation that occurs when an individual joins in community with others. The dancers stand in a circle, facing inward. Their first movement represents the first sound, “Ah.” Hands are clasped lightly to the breast and then the arms are extended outward as the dancer exhales. The movement reveals a freeing and an openness to something new, as the dancer now stands with outstretched arms. The second movement is like the script form of the small letter “l.” The outstretched arms extend upward and then down, each describing an ellipse. The movement signifies letting go and taking in. This is the act of transformation, repeated 10 times during the exercise. While their arms create the ellipse, the dancers rotate, each turning in a circle. At first the circles are very small, just large enough to fill the space of the individual dancer. As the “l” movements progress, the circles enlarge, so that the circle stepped by each dancer begins to intersect the circles stepped by the dancers on either side. By the seventh “l,” all the circles meet at a point in the center; the whole pattern is like the petals of a flower. By the 10th “l,” each dancer’s circle encompasses the whole space; everyone is dancing the same circle at the same time but each is in a different place. To avoid collisions, each must move at the same pace, completely aware of the movements of every other dancer. As the piece draws to a close, each dancer stands erect, in his original place, arms at his sides, in the shape of an “I.” This is the mark of the individual ego, strengthened by the group, now standing alone. “Alleluia” ends as it started, with “Ah,” a movement of freeing and openness to change.
In a letter written the day after Christopher died, his eurhythmy teacher remembered Chris’s performance from the day before. “It was quite remarkable. He was really with us mentally, physically, and emotionally. He made all the appropriate gestures in a beautiful way. He sustained his efforts and concentration with apparent ease and with his own special kind of grace. He seemed so complete, so contented. We will be able to hold the picture he gave us in our memories of him. It was the picture of Christopher at his most dignified, with awareness and poise and that special sparkle that was uniquely his own.”
This was a tremendous feat for a young man with severely impaired coordination, depth perception, and balance. Chris was always walking into doors and walls. His face bore more scars than the face of an old prizefighter. He had stopped a swing with the bridge of his nose at the age of seven and had been so persistent in picking at the scab, despite our herculean attempts to keep it covered and protected, that a mammoth scar deformed it.
When Chris was 15, I had arranged for him to be evaluated at the Gesell Institute of Human Development in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was employed as Director of Medical Research. The visual-function examination revealed that Chris’s eyes worked independently of each other. Although his visual acuity was excellent, he lacked binocular vision. Dick Apell, the director of Gesell’s vision department, described Chris’s visual world as a collage of competing images that must often have seemed random and arbitrary. Christina observed the examination through a one-way mirror. Apell was patient, gentle, and precise. Christopher’s behavior was typical of his responses to a formal testing situation. He tried his best to win a star but didn’t quite understand the rules. When Apell asked him to describe the pictures on an eye chart, Chris kept asking, hopefully, “Could you give me a clue?”
“Could you give me a clue?” is what I asked Christopher. That request had become a kind of totem for us. I had no way of knowing what Chris knew about his destiny. Was his transcendent behavior the morning of his death a sign? I couldn’t begin to answer that question, but I knew that, were I permitted to have the answers, Christopher could give them to me.
My initial encounters with Christopher’s Spirit had been uninvited. He had appeared, in one way or another, communicated a message or impression of some sort, and quickly departed. In Palm Springs, however, he had come in response to my plea and had actually answered a question. Would he do so again, and was it a question of his readiness, or of mine?
On a cool and rainy afternoon in autumn, I walked along the beach between Amagansett and Montauk, at the extreme eastern end of Long Island. The slate-gray waters of the Atlantic curled into four-foot breaking waves that crashed on the soft sand of the shoreline, spewing yards of foam and spray before them. I would have liked to be riding those breakers, but I never swim alone and my only companion was a beautiful 10-month-old husky named Siena, who pulled at her leash to chase seagulls or dug in the sand to unearth skate egg cases and crab claws, which she chewed up voraciously. Like all young huskies, Siena feared the water. Her inexhaustible playfulness, willful stubbornness, and mischievous resistance to training at times reminded us of Christopher. Christina often remarked, after Siena had chewed up her glasses or her clothing, “There’s more than a little bit of Chris in that puppy!”
“Christopher,” I asked silently, “how can it be that you are so like Siena and yet so like a sage? Who are you really, anyway?” I closed my eyes and waited for a reply.
His voice answered soundlessly, speaking directly to my mind. There were no fireworks, no visions of a Spirit, no electricity in the air, just a voice that I recognized as not being my own, but which I had heard before.
“I’m the same as everyone else,” he said. “Don’t try to make me more than I am. Every person in the world is like an untrained puppy, and every soul has something to teach.”
“Where are you?” I asked quickly.
“That’s not an easy question to answer,” came the slow, studied reply. “I’m with God, and God is everywhere, all at once.”
Christina’s uncle, Gerry Cast, who called Christopher “Charlie,” used to toss him in the air when Chris was five or six and proclaim, “There’s nothin’ wrong with my little Charlie. In fact, he’s way ahead of all of us.” Gerry really meant it. He died during open-heart surgery at the age of 55, when Chris was 14. Were they together again? I wondered. And what did Gerry think of his little Charlie now?
“What about Gerry? Is he there?”
“Of course. Where else would he be?” Chris said, as if the answer should have been obvious. “It’s hard to visualize this when you exist as matter, but Spirits are not local, the way that people are. We are not confined to a particular space at a particular time. Space is irrelevant to us. So is time, as you know it. Being material is what keeps you in your own place, so to speak. That is the essence of the human problem. Humans are addicted to place. Place is everything, the basis of your entire way of life. Your nationality, your ethnic background, your sex, your religion, your class, your address, your income bracket, your IQ, your SAT scores, your grades, your degree, the title of your job—they’re all designed to keep you in your place. Place is the cause of so much misery and heartbreak. Pride of place—and envy of another’s—is the root cause of evil. Here, place has no meaning, in any form. There is no hierarchy among angels. Hierarchies were invented in hell, wherever that is.” I sensed that he was laughing.
I opened my eyes. I was still standing on the beach. A fine drizzle had dampened my hair and face. Beads of water were dripping from the hem of my nylon shell. The dog was sitting by my feet, chewing on a sandy tennis ball. I did not think I had been in any sort of deep trance. Throughout this silent dialogue, I had been constantly aware of the pounding of the surf. Any distraction—Siena’s frantic tug on the leash as a tern swooped by, or the shudder produced when a drop of cold water ran down the back of my neck—instantly halted the discourse. As soon as I focused my mind on it, the voice would resume, sometimes repeating ideas and phrases.
“You wanted to know how prescient I was during life,” continued Chris. “That’s another tricky question, because there are different ways of knowing. Each soul has a unique agenda, a set of tasks to be completed, a divine imperative, straight from the heart of God, designed to help each of us be our perfect selves. These tasks are known to us before birth, even before conception. We all forget them during infancy and slowly rediscover them throughout the course of life. Whenever you find your path—or stumble across the next segment of it—there’s a stirring of memory, a sense of recognition.
“Many souls get so bogged down by the oppressive nature of place that they never find the intended path. You on Earth cannot see who they are, because you cannot readily see past the illusion of place. They may be rich or poor, famous or obscure, beautiful or ugly, accomplished or unskilled. It doesn’t matter. In missing the intended path, their lives remain unfulfilled. This is sad, but not necessarily tragic. For life exists after death. Our tasks continue after death. It’s never too late.
“I was given a great gift. From the earthbound point of view this may seem paradoxical, but I was blessed. In exchange for some paltry physical and mental defects, I was given something rare and precious: ignorance of place and freedom from its tyranny. None of the trappings of place meant a thing to me. When others, addicted to order, crossed my path, I delighted in turning their plans to mayhem. You were no exception, and—you’ll notice—I’m still disrupting your plans, even now.”
“So, Chris,” I asked, “where do we go from here?”
“Ahead of you lies a long, uphill journey,” came his disquieting reply, to which he generously added, “with many tribulations. Embrace them. Each is a gift. The secret lies in remembering that plans and schemes lead nowhere. Their success or failure is no concern of yours. Give your full attention to the needs of each day, and resist all temptation to withdraw into that intellectual twilight zone where long ago you built such a comfortable hiding place.”
Christopher had not lost his uncanny ability to push the right buttons. “I have been trying,” I said, a bit defensively. “The progress is slow.”
“Slow?” replied Chris, with gentle laughter. “Compared to what, Leo? The age of the universe? After addiction to place, the second greatest bane of humans is confusion about time. You all try to measure it, as if it were a commodity. Some of you see it slipping through your fingers. The rest act as if it belongs to someone else. Physicists and philosophers debate its properties. Is it cyclic or linear? they ask endlessly. In truth, it is neither. For God, and thus for Spirit, there is only one moment, which holds within it all time. At every instant of your earthly life, you have the ability to consciously live in that moment by being fully present in your own life. Children often do so, in their play. My second great fortune was the ability to live in that moment naturally, without effort. Adults not graced with the gift of brain damage need to work much harder at it.” I felt him laughing again, with gusto. “But God provides you with many paths of entry. The rapture of music, the stillness of prayer, the passion of love, the caring of the friend and of the helper, the unquenchable laughter of your child-self.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the majestic, angelic image of Christopher’s Spirit, and within it I saw the boy, sitting down to a plate of apple pancakes at the breakfast table, delirious with joy, singing out at the top of his lungs:
“Mommmyyyyyyyy!”
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5 Eurhythmy is a form of rhythmic, therapeutic exercise that originated within the Waldorf education movement in Switzerland during the 1920s, and was later adapted by the founders of the Camphill movement in England to meet the needs of brain-injured children and adults.