So I’d said my good-byes, my body was taken care of, I’d processed all the thoughts and emotions that were coming at me, and I didn’t really know where else to go except back to the house. I focused on going there, but instead of just showing up like I did when I thought about going somewhere, something totally different and unexpected happened: I felt myself moving. It was a weird sensation. It wasn’t like my feet hit the floor one after the other. It wasn’t like I felt the wind blowing across me or the scenery passing me by like you’d expect if you were moving forward. There were none of the usual visuals like you’d get when you’re driving in a car or walking down the street. This kind of disturbed me. No, it’s more like it alarmed me because I wasn’t expecting it. Where the fuck was I going, and was someone pulling me there? Was it some sort of weird-ass force of nature, like a giant magnet or maybe some sort of being with a huge cosmic fishing pole?
Then I felt this airiness like you’d feel on a roller coaster ride right when you come over the peak and drop. I felt stuck in that moment. My stomach, or what used to be my stomach (it’s hard to explain how bodily feelings get felt after death—it’s a bit like phantom limb pain, I guess; you still feel feelings, it’s just that your actual body’s not around anymore), felt like it was being lifted up, and a weightless ease filled me. My thoughts—this consciousness that was rolling through my head that made me aware of what was happening—were also coming from my chest, which wasn’t what I was used to. As humans, we designate stuff like, “Our thoughts are in our head, and our emotions are in our heart, and our heart is in our chest.” My emotions and thoughts were both in that unified central location in my chest, and as I was being pulled, the emotions I mostly felt were curiosity mixed with nervousness.
Everything seemed to happen quickly, like a blink—a long casual blink, like when you’re tired. Suddenly, I felt warm, like I was in a really nice warm bath, but the warmth was all over me. I felt it on the inside; I felt it on the outside. I was absorbing the warmth, but I wasn’t breathing it in. Well, I wasn’t breathing at all, since spirits don’t need oxygen, but you get the idea.
Then I saw white light around me. Yeah, you do see a white light—no fucking joke—but it’s not like the white tunnel of light people expect when you “cross over.” It was like I was moving across this huge white room with a white floor. For some reason, the light comforted me. It eased my nervousness a little bit, but not all the way. There were no smells or sounds, though, and I didn’t see anyone. I thought there’d at least be some angel playing a harp on a cloud, but no—just silence and whiteness.
For a while, I just focused on what was around me. My thoughts then wandered to my physical form. It felt like I had arms and legs, a head and a chest, but I didn’t. I wasn’t solid. I was airy, free, light—the essence of me. Now I know that I was pure energy, but I didn’t call it that back then. I think the reason I felt like I still had a human form but also knew that I didn’t was because I wanted to have the feeling of a human body. I wasn’t 100 percent ready to let go of my human existence then. I needed something recognizable to hold on to for the time being.
Slowly, the white light started to turn into this glowing silvery mist with all sorts of beautiful hues that I don’t even know how to describe. It was like I was going through a nebula but with a rainbow of many colors. I didn’t feel like anything startling was about to happen, like I was about to be hit by a train, but at the same time there was this little lingering worry that I was going to end up in the wrong place, kind of like Harry Potter when he’s getting sorted by the sorting hat. Everything was too much, too close, too crazy all of a sudden—that’s what made me scared. It was then that I screamed for help.
After I screamed, I started to see shapeless blobs in the light. Things started to change around me again. My logical mind said, “You moved,” because I was still trying to think linearly, but it was more like a dimensional shift. Energetically, what happened to me was that I was coming out of the human dimension to enter a parallel one. Later, I learned that dimensions are all parallel but kind of smushed and swirled together.
The blobs of light turned into what looked like people. So many people. I thought they were people, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was in Heaven and they were angels. Maybe I was in Hell and they were devils. Either way, they fucking freaked me out. Think about it: My only memories were from my human life. Seeing that dimensional shift and transformation was like watching a scary movie. Shit turning into monsters like in that movie The Blob. It spooked me.
With those “people” around me, I felt like the center of attention, but it wasn’t an ego thing like, “Look at me. I’m all that.” Once I realized I wasn’t in a horror movie, I actually started to feel love. That transition from being spooked to feeling loved was like seeing somebody in the dark and not knowing who they are and then getting closer to them so that you get a better clue, and then the fog lifts and you’re like, “Hey, man. What’s going on? You scared the crap out of me.” The love I felt was the kind that brings you to your knees, weeping. Happy tears. Tears that wash you clean. I was that important. I found out later that all that love was necessary to begin my healing process. It’s weird because in human life, sometimes the more people there are, the more expendable you feel. You’re like a piece of meat. Here, everybody is important and no one is more important than the other. Still, I was afraid that I’d never see my family again. I was afraid that I’d be stuck with these dudes I didn’t know.
Next, I noticed that there were two “people” around me. They weren’t shapeless. Instead, both of them looked like they had human bodies, and I think they looked like that so I’d recognize them. They were helping me out with all this new dead stuff. One of them was Aunt Denise. Like me, she’d killed herself, but she did it by overdosing on her pills. She had been very sick from having diabetes for years. Her kidneys didn’t work; she couldn’t walk without help; she could only eat through a tube; and she was almost blind. In a way, I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have wanted to live like that.
Aunt Denise was in front of me, to the left. Hers was the first smile I saw. That was when I had this awakened moment that this was really real, even though I sort of thought it might be before. Now it was different because I was about to have real conversations with dead people. (It still hadn’t really sunk in yet that I was one of them, even though it was pretty obvious that my physical body was dead.) I asked her if I was in Hell, and she laughed and asked, “Why? Because I’m here?” Then she hugged me. She was so happy, and I was confused as to why. Isn’t that funny? It was like I didn’t catch what made her happy, and I didn’t realize it was because of me. She was happy to see me. She was happy to be with me. When she hugged me, I hugged her back. After that, there was no talking for a while. Everything was quiet and peaceful, and the white light I’d seen before was still shining. It seemed to be brighter behind her, and I still felt warm.
I knew there was a woman to my right, but I didn’t turn toward her. I was still focused on Aunt Denise. Then the other woman stepped forward and gave me a hug. That’s when I recognized her as my grandmother—my dad’s mother, Bestemor. Other than my mom, I’ve never known anyone as sweet as her.
Aunt Denise took my hand and walked me forward, explaining what was happening to me and telling me that everything was going to be okay. She made sure I kept moving and told me I couldn’t go back. I had no problem walking with her. I didn’t hesitate at all. I was wondering where the fuck she was taking me, but I wasn’t nervous about it. I got the feeling that she was taking me to a place where something important was going to happen, but I can’t tell you why I knew it. Since the other voices and emotions I was trying to manage from the funeral had faded away and I wasn’t processing all that anymore, it felt like I was gaining my focus back, and I was just focused on her.
Just like before, I didn’t feel like anything was moving past me as Aunt Denise walked me forward, and I didn’t feel like I was covering any ground, but I still knew I was going somewhere. It felt like I was in one of those dreams where you’re running but not going anywhere. When I looked ahead, I saw that the white light had grown really bright. It was so bright that I couldn’t see anything else, but it didn’t hurt my eyes and it didn’t bother me. There was such a sense of trust and peace knowing that none of it bothered me. If a light like that had come toward me when I was alive, I’d have gone, “What the fuck? Alien abduction!” but it wasn’t like that.
Even then, it hadn’t completely dawned on me that I had crossed over, because I thought that meant crossing some line or walking through a door. The whole thing felt like a journey where everything I experienced seemed to happen all at the same time. I had no desire or need to fight or resist what was happening to me, even though I didn’t know where I was going and what the fuck was going on. It just was, and that was so fucking awesome.
As we walked, at first all I could see around me were beings in that bright, bright light. It was during this walk that I realized these beings weren’t human looking. They looked like light with a shape to it, and sometimes they morphed into different shapes, something no human could ever do. That’s when I realized that they were spirits, not people, and that if they were spirits, then I must be one too.
When my mom and Michelle captured me in the photograph looking like an orb of light, I just figured that that was the way the camera caught me. Up until that point, I had only seen spirits represented in a human form, so it was a little confusing. Some of the spirits were skipping, smiling, and messing around. If I saw people acting like that on Earth I would have thought, “What the fuck have these people been smoking?” It didn’t feel fake, though; it felt natural to me. Authentic.
After a while, my surroundings changed, and I started seeing some stuff I had seen on Earth and some that I hadn’t. So this gets a little bizarre, but bear with me here; I promise it’s super cool too. Imagine a very Disneyesque landscape but even more colorful and vibrant. There were lampposts and walkways and things like that. It kind of looked like a park. I also saw all sorts of creatures that I’ve seen on Earth, like butterflies, but these butterflies were different. They had long colorful trails behind them. It was like they were leaving rainbows in their wake, and the rainbows were shooting out sparkles like you’d see in a Skittles commercial. It was bizarre, but kind of cool too.
As I was walking along, spirits would come up to me and say, “Go this way. Okay, now go this way.” They were all smiling and pointing in one direction or another, and I ended up in this really open area that looked like a utopic version of Earth. My surroundings were beautiful. They filled me with what I can only call joy. I would discover later that it’s our natural state to be fulfilled here, and we create this fulfillment for ourselves.
Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
We create whatever we need in each moment. So, like, here I could be friends with the butterflies that were flying all around me, but in human life, I’d be like, “Oh. It’s a butterfly. Okay,” and move on. I’d never think to be like, “Hey, Mr. Butterfly, let’s be friends,” because that would be dumb, but here I can, and it’s the most natural thing in the world. I can interact with anything and anyone I want because everything and everyone is connected, and this all makes for feeling fulfilled, and I somehow knew this intuitively from the moment I got here.
During the walk with Denise, I met all the dogs that I had had as pets growing up and started talking to them as if they were human beings. Every pet owner’s dream, right? They knew what I was saying too. It was like my words got translated into a form that they could understand. I learned later that there’s a universal language here that everyone speaks. It’s a language of energy, and it’s instantaneous. Whatever I needed to communicate to anyone here was understood immediately.
As we walked, the light that was still pervading everything all around us had gotten brighter and brighter. Denise took me into a space that was kind of like a room. I felt like I had crossed through a doorway into yet another dimension to get to that space. She brought me over to a crescent-shaped table with six spirits behind it. What followed was like an emotional communication. I really don’t know how to explain that better. Later I found out that the room and the table were totally my own creation. Not everybody gets the “team behind the table” thing—I’d created that visual setup because it just seemed more realistic to me to be addressed by elders who knew better. Each spirit creates the version of their transition that resonates best with them, whether they’re aware of this or not.
I thought it was a little weird to see that there weren’t any lines of spirits like you’d expect to see at the Pearly Gates. I was just being presented. I didn’t recognize these spirits, but I knew they weren’t there to judge me. Even so, I felt like I was standing up in front of a class, about to give an oral book report, and I had no idea what they were going to do and what was going to happen.
The six spirits were tall, and the closer I got to them, the more intense their energy felt. I think their tallness and their strong energy are metaphors for their wisdom and the experiences they’ve had, but they didn’t make me feel like they were better than me. We all have certain skills—both in our human and in our spirit forms—and these beings’ skills were wisdom and compassion. I could just feel that wisdom oozing out of them, and this drew me to them. I knew that they were the ones who could help me understand what was going on and what was about to happen next.
Before we get to what happened next, though, I want to explain something to you guys. For all of you who’ll cross over—and that’s all of you—it’s all about what you make it. What I’m trying to say is that how you get into Heaven (or whatever you want to call it—it’s Heaven for me, so that’s how I refer to it) will be based on the belief system you maintain while you’re alive. For example, if you think you’re going to go through some big-ass tunnel and be absorbed by a great white light, that’s what’ll happen. That’s what you’ll create for yourself. Same thing if you believe you’re going to open your eyes and see your loved ones right off the bat. Other people think that when they die, they’ll finally get to chill out because life’s been so hard on them, so they’ll get a shitload of rest before anything goes down.
A lot of people wonder what happens to atheists after they die, including atheists. If you’re an atheist and you believe in the whole “ashes to ashes” thing and think that when the lights go out, that’s it and you just disappear, then you’ll simply cross over into blackness—nothingness. If the blackness is where you want to be and how you find your peace once your physical body has died, then that’s where you’ll stay. However, some atheists who enter that blackness may have thoughts like, “Where am I?” or “Where’s the light switch?” They might realize they don’t want the permanent blackness, so they’ll call for help, and once they do, they cross over to the place I’m in now.
I crossed over the way I did because I didn’t have a structured belief system of what would happen after I died. I didn’t think that there was nothing after death, though, and that’s why I didn’t cross over into darkness. I’d figured that something would happen to me after I pulled that trigger, but the only thing I knew for certain was that it was going to be different and it was going to be better. I think not having any idea of what the fuck would happen was why I didn’t cross over right away. Instead, I hung out for a few beats first, which gave me time to say my good-byes. Once I’d done that, it was like my crossing over just happened to me, as if some invisible force yanked me across the finish line.
It’s different for everyone, though, and so is the rest of your transition, which is where we’re going next.