In the silence, as we wait to rejoin each other, as we touch reverently the objects that connect us to the dead, something is born. What we knew as truth together must be found again — changed by listening in the bitter quiet.
The ones on the other side wait for us to listen, for the moment we are ready. They will come then in dreams, in the feeling of a presence. They will come as animals or in passing murmurs on the street. In the high mountains they’ll come as streams or granite.
We make pictures of angels — tall, with alabaster wings. We have given them roles: the angel of death, the angel at the gate. But in truth the souls who have passed from this world are like us — survivors of life and death.
In the ways we seek to be heard, they seek to be heard. In the ways we watch helplessly while people we love dissolve and collapse, they watch us struggle, consumed by the illusion that we are alone.
The angels, the people we love but cannot see, try to reach us. Within the first year or two after their death, they often direct an outpouring of communication to friends, family, present and past relationships, even distant acquaintances — anyone who is receptive and able to receive the message. Such dreams, feelings, or whispered thoughts are often answers to questions. And if the person who needs the answer can’t hear it, usually someone else will.
In the silence after Jordan’s death we sought his spirit, trying to feel his presence in his room or in nature. We waited for dreams and looked for signs in some unusual occurrence. Nothing. We could feel only our own pain; we could hear only the quiet of the house after the mourners left. It remained for others — perhaps no less heartbroken, yet more receptive — to make early contact with him. We encouraged them to write down their experiences, and the messages started immediately.
At 2:00 AM on September 17 — the exact moment Jordan died — Mauchi, his employer and friend, awoke with a strong sense of Jordan’s presence in the room. He had no idea what it meant because he didn’t yet know that Jordan was dead. The next night Eli, Jordan’s friend, awakened to what he thought was an earthquake. The shaking was so intense that he rose and stumbled to the floor. Suddenly he felt Jordan’s presence. He later said that it was as if the room had filled with Jordan’s essence, with pure love.
Four days later Elena, a friend of Jordan’s older sister, had this experience: “This morning I awoke and Jordan was there. What I got was that he is in a state of pure contentment. He is unadulterated love. He is not in pain or chaos or sadness. His life has been completed. He may have been surprised by the turn of destiny, but he is at peace.”
But he did have unfinished business. When Jordan was killed, he was on his way home to the flat he shared with his girlfriend, Elisa. “I keep getting the vision of him being an arrow stopped physically in midflight,” Elena wrote to Elisa. “The night of Jordan’s death he continued on his path home. He feels a responsibility toward you. He was careful to convey that he has deep faith in your ability to recover. I think Jordan very much saw his home as the home you have together. He loved the space you created. He very much saw himself making a life with you.”
The message went on to request that Elisa keep a colored stone in memory of him. Elena’s note continued: “He urged me to go to your house, and I did, and I understood. When I entered your room, I was drawn to a happy window ledge filled with brightly colored rocks and shells. There was one stone in particular that most closely resembles the stone that came to mind first. That is the one that is enclosed [with this letter].” As it turned out, it was a stone that Jordan and Elisa had found together. “Know always — as was made very clear — that he will carry a piece of your heart with him, and you will carry his heart with you.”
Jordan was making sure that the people he loved were hearing from him.
Ten days after Jordan’s death, my friend David Feldman had a dream. He described it to us in a letter:
The dream appears as an animated painting. On one side, in somber tones, Jude and I are standing together in grief. We are looking away from Jordan, who is on the other side of the painting. He appears in manga style — bright colors, happy, dancing. He is trying to get our attention, dancing around, but we are preoccupied with our pain and don’t see him. Jordan is happy, even ecstatic, and wants us to know he’s okay. The dream is a message. Meant particularly, I think, for his mother, Jude.
While Jude was grateful to hear of David’s dream, she struggled with the pain of hearing nothing from Jordan herself. At about this time, Elena received another message from Jordan. This one was directed to his younger sister, Bekah. “He stated that he has grown up with Bekah and that his spirit will speak through her children. And they will be protected by him.”
It was unclear what this meant — whether he expected to reincarnate as her child or would simply watch over Bekah and her offspring. A later dream, experienced by my friend Catherine, clarified the meaning. “In the dream, Bekah was traveling a great distance, and Jordan could be seen flying directly above her — in the form of an angel. He looked exactly like the angel in Chagall’s Lovers in Moonlight. He was protecting her.”
On some level Bekah got the message, because a short time later — without ever hearing about Catherine’s dream — she gave us a reproduction of Lovers in Moonlight.
Within the first few months after his death, Jordan appeared in dreams to each of his close friends. Always he laughed and joked, assuring them he was still around, still with them. But there was one dear friend — Chris Houston — who received no initial contact from Jordan. Perhaps, Chris suspected, it was because he was a skeptic who didn’t believe in an afterlife. Nonetheless, months later, Jordan eventually made contact. Chris dreamed that he and Jordan met in San Francisco. They went walking, engaged in a long conversation. Eventually they arrived at a café, where Chris took his leave.
In the dream, Chris walked on alone. He later told me:
I very clearly remember thinking to myself, “This can’t just have happened; Jordan has passed away.” I remember feeling very uncomfortable, as if my unwillingness to accept Jordan’s death was finally catching up to me, and I was losing my mind. I quickly turned around and headed back to the café. As I entered, I once again saw Jordan’s face. With a feeling of rising insanity, I asked Jordan if I could speak to him again. We walked outside, and I admitted that I felt I was going insane — because there was no way we were having this conversation, as he had died some months back.
At this moment I realized I was dreaming and said as much to Jordan. He ignored my dreaming comment, but went on to tell me it didn’t matter that he’d passed away; it didn’t make our conversation or time together any less important or real. Because he was still very much alive inside me.
Chris’s dream had a vividness he wasn’t used to. “This dream somehow felt much more real than almost any dream I’d had before. But this concept is hard for me to understand and accept, as I’m a very skeptical person.”
There are dreams and then, I suspect, there are visitations that take the form of dreams. This kind of vivid, “realer than life” dream is reported by many who’ve had a loved one die. The dreams feel different because they include the true psychic presence of the one who was lost. They also differ from normal dreams because they frequently contain a direct message — specific information or instructions delivered from the dead to the living. Chris’s dream is an example of these visitation experiences, not just in its unusual vividness but also in the clear message: their conversation was still real and Jordan was still present despite the fact that he’d passed away.
Hearing of these dreams and encounters with Jordan gave me comfort. He was finding open channels and seeking the people who could receive his voice. The ones who were dense with pain, or who sought contact without having anything to say, often ended up waiting. Communication across the barrier between life and death is not very different from other forms of discourse: you have to listen to hear anything, and you have to have a clear, coherent message to be heard on the other side.
In the days after Jordan’s death, I was almost demanding contact. I sought him with a fierce determination that muddied rather than cleared the channel. His efforts to reach me collided with my cacophony of emotions, which rendered me psychically deaf, even while my only conscious intention was to listen.
Over time I began to let go. Not of Jordan, but of some expectation of what I needed him to say. As the shark attack of grief turned more into a deep yearning, dreams began to come. The first one included a dear friend who had died. Peter, my old partner at the Haight Ashbury Psychological Services, was holding a child version of Jordan in his arms — with the clear message that my boy was being cared for by ones who loved him on the other side.
Then came a dream in which I was lifting Jordan’s spirit out of his lifeless body. The power and physicality of the image made me sense that some part of my own spirit had been present at Jordan’s death — and Jordan later confirmed this.* I could feel him as heat and energy. Even though I had actually slept through the night when Jordan died, awakening the next morning without the slightest hint of loss, I now felt that a part of me had been there to greet him at the moment he left his body.
Later I had a vivid, hyper-real dream in which we sat together at the kitchen table. Jordan made it clear that it was a visit, a chance to have one of our delicious, rambling conversations. He said he wanted us to know that he was often present at that table, watching over Jude and me.
In fact, many family members and friends have reported feeling Jordan’s presence in the kitchen, the center of our family life. So my dream confirmed what they already knew — that Jordan joins us when we are together, and his presence can be felt.
Over the next year, Jordan’s messages became more specific, often answering questions that we struggled with. For example, after his death, I read a journal that he had kept during an exchange year he spent in New Zealand. A theme that frequently emerged was Jordan’s struggle to be authentic. He often described the sense that he was trapped behind a mask that prevented real connection. I agonized about this privately, wondering if he had been able to resolve these painful feelings of entrapment and isolation.
Then my friend Catherine — knowing nothing about my concerns — had this dream about Jordan and me:
We were in an amphitheater. Matt was reclining on the slope, leaning on his elbows. He was crying, with tears steadily pouring from his eyes and down his cheeks. I was standing, and to my side was Jordan. Jordan stood calmly, with his legs slightly apart and his hands comfortably in his two pants pockets. He told me that Matt couldn’t see him, but I could.
He told me to give Matt a message and insisted that Matt would know what it meant. He said very simply, yet with such clarity, “Tell him I went [to this life] to practice, and I didn’t fight the mask. . .he’ll know what it means.”
I felt the message very intensely in my being. To me, it meant that he showed up to life. He knew there was a persona, but he stopped struggling with the gap between his true existence and his “mask.”
I felt enormous relief. My fear that Jordan had been overwhelmed with self-disgust just disappeared. I also let go of the sense that he’d been trapped and alone in New Zealand.
I began to feel more and more hopeful that our questions, if they were clear and deeply felt, would be answered. Remarkably, Jordan continues to respond to our fears and concerns to this day.
Listening is everything. The entire community of the deceased person needs to listen. If you have lost someone, be sure to ask people to report times and situations in which they sense the presence of your loved one, including any of the following:
• Messages that come through dreams
• Unusual occurrences (for example, Jordan’s older sister, Dana, had a falcon stare at her for an hour through her office window on the twenty-sixth floor of a building in Los Angeles)
• Objects associated with the loved one that suddenly “show up”
If friends and family are committed and open, the signs will come. When people are encouraged to write their dreams and feelings over time, they will create a collection of “sightings.” This record of contact can then be shared with everyone, nurturing each friend and family member.
Don’t worry about skeptics. Mostly they will keep a respectful silence. If they don’t, ask them to accept your journey, regardless of their personal beliefs.
Jordan also provided specific messages when his mother planned a trip to honor his memory a year following his death. Jude was about to leave for New Zealand, where she was planning to hike the Milford Sound trail. She hoped somehow to encounter Jordan there — but she feared the silence would continue.
Then Catherine had another message: “I dreamed that Jordan told me that some part of his spirit was in this beautiful, mystical, jungle-like plant. When I woke from the dream, I had a strong feeling that he was calling to his mother, that she would hear his voice calling her to him in the jungles of New Zealand.”
The message was clear: Jordan would be waiting for his mother on the Milford trail. While Jude didn’t consciously encounter him in New Zealand, she went to all the wild places he’d gone to, saw his friends and heard their memories, retraced his steps, and experienced his world without the filter of her own.
Jude has since developed a strong sense that Jordan comes to her in the form of birds — in particular hawks and hummingbirds — and she feels uniquely close to him when she sees these birds in her environment. She doesn’t believe that he is the birds. Rather, when the birds are present, it means he is close by. Catherine’s dream confirmed Jude’s sense that Jordan is present in her life when she thinks of him or needs him.
Let me offer one more example. Recently I was besieged with thoughts that I was failing to love and stay connected to Jordan. After five years, the pain of loss was less, and I felt that somehow I was abandoning him — as if the pain was itself a wire holding the current of our relationship.
And then I had this dream: I was led to a library, where Jordan met me. I started to push through the doors, but he said, “Only the dead can enter this place, a sanctuary where they might review past lives and learn from mistakes.” Jordan smiled at me, and suddenly I felt the full intensity of my yearning for him. I stifled a scream that kept welling in my throat. And then the message came: “This is your true feeling of loss. But it would cripple you; it would make you unable to do your work. You have ways to soften it — so you can do what you came to do.”
I continue to listen. The people who love Jordan are listening. What one of us cannot hear, another one will. The record of his love holds us all, and it reminds us that the circle is unbroken. He cannot be seen, but he is present. He is in our kitchen, in our hearts. He is a thought away. And we, collectively, hold the door open.
* Years after, without knowing about the dream, medium Austyn Wells reported learning from Jordan that I was there. The ability to simultaneously be a soul on Earth and in the life between lives is discussed in later chapters of this book.
