Flash back to October 1991.  It was my sister-in-law Kathleen on the phone.  By the time I've walked across the kitchen and turned at the dining room to where the kids are playing in the back of the house, I'm weeping, which surprises me, I hadn't expected that.  Bryn's surprised too, she's eight and I'm pretty sure she's never seen her father cry before.  She wants to know what's the matter, and I sob out the answer, "Grampa Mike died, my Dad died."

The next morning my sister Carla picks me up at Logan after the red-eye from the coast, and on the drive through Boston and out the cape to Falmouth she fills me in.  Dad's wife Megan had been shopping and came home to find his car gone and the television left on.  He'd apparently had one of his asthma attacks, severe enough that he'd driven to an outpatient clinic where he could get emergency treatment.  He'd collapsed in the clinic parking lot next to his car.  It's hard to take in.  At seventy-four Dad was strong and active, mentally and physically, and fit except for the asthma, which we all thought was well under control.

The television had been tuned to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.  I can imagine that Orrin Hatch or Arlen Specter might have come out with some particularly offensive and obnoxious attack on Anita Hill, pushing Dad over the edge, so that after trying since the heyday of McCarthy and HUAC the Republicans had finally managed to kill him.  It's the kind of story that would have gotten a chuckle out of the old man.

I want to see the body.  He'll be cremated today and there's no viewing scheduled, but I insist, I've heard somewhere that you don't get closure with the dead if you never actually see the body.  Dad was a remarkable man but it wasn't always easy to be his son, and I want every ounce of closure.  The mortuary's called, an arrangement's made, I drive there by myself and am shown into a plain room and left alone and there in an open gleaming stainless steel box is what's left of Dad.  He looks beautiful and I lean in to kiss his forehead, ice cold which somehow takes me by surprise though of course how could it be otherwise.  And the other obvious but still shocking thing is that he's not there.  His face is there, but he's not in the room, and I flee sobbing which I didn't expect.

. . . 

Flash back another twenty-five years.  I've arrived at a point where I can no longer figure out why I'm still in college.  Another year on a student deferment doesn't seem like a good enough reason any more, so I drop out.  The day the draft board's letter shows up I leave it unopened, go down to the Army recruiting office and make the best deal I can -- a guarantee of the Corps of Engineers, a shot at OCS and a five month delay before induction. 

To keep body and soul together without having to return home to live, I apply for a job at the GE plant and get hired as a project coordinator at the big R&D center outside town.  The bottom floor of the center is dedicated to shops that support the scientists upstairs, fabricating specialized one-of-a-kind equipment for use in their labs.  My job is to take a project order and coordinate the work done in the various shops, glass-blowing, electroplating, metal-working, ceramics, electronics assembly, and see that the components of the job are built and put together on schedule.

The guy at the bench right in front of mine is a wizened little man whose craft specialty is cutting, grinding and polishing.  He has salt and pepper hair and a twisted body, his spine's not straight and he drags his right leg when he walks.  His name is Armin and he doesn't seem to be on friendly terms with anyone else in the shop, but for some reason he takes a liking to me.

One day Armin hands me a gift, a paperback.  It's titled Stranger than Fiction and has a lurid cover with blurbs promising the revelation of sensational earth-shattering secrets.  In fact, it's a reprint for the American market of a fairly stodgy British book called You Can Take It with You that purports to make the scientific case for life after death, relying heavily on material from the archives and proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

I'd been raised in a non-religious household and taught that when your life ends, you just stop being.  I'd gone off the reservation for a few years around early pubescence, joining our neighbors' Methodist congregation, and had gotten the rundown on redemption and damnation but hadn't found it completely convincing.  As a child I'd read some popular magazine articles about Bridey Murphy, so reincarnation's not a new concept to me either.  And of course, nobody grows up without hearing a few ghost stories.  But Armin's book is full of material I've never before encountered -- near-death experiences, communications with the departed, the silver cord, the tunnel of light, a wealth of anecdotes and findings of earnest studies.  It's as convincing as anything else I've heard.

That autumn I report for active duty.  When I get a leave after basic training, I look up some of the guys I'd worked with at the labs and learn that in the few months since I left, Armin has died.

. . .

Flash back again, another eleven years.  I'm nine.  Mom and Dad have been on the phone a lot tonight, talking in low voices, people are upset, there's some crying, we kids are being kept out of the picture.  We go to bed but I can't sleep, so I get up again, find Mom and corner her.  I want to know what's going on.  It's been Aunt Lola on the phone, my cousin Matthew is dead.  I'm not ready for it.  He's younger than me.  I know he's been sick, that's why he didn't come up from New York this year with his sister Ronny to spend part of the summer with us in the country, like they'd done for as long as I can remember.  It's the first time I've ever gotten the news that someone I know is gone.  I know a new word now.  Leukemia.

. . .

Flash forward this time, twenty-six years.  I'm at Shanti Nilaya, the healing center founded by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.  I'd read On Death and Dying and some time later had an opportunity to hear her in a speaking engagement.  She was spellbinding, inspiring.  When she opened some of her workshops at Shanti Nilaya to the general public, I'd jumped at the chance.

So here we are, about thirty people, cancer patients, survivors who've lost children or spouses, rape and child abuse victims, a woman who's done time in prison for her husband's drug crimes, healers, social workers, nurses, at least one writer.  I think I'm just here to be with Elisabeth, to partake of more of the wisdom and agape I'd experienced in her presence in the lecture hall.  I get that and more, as those who choose share their stories, and I uncover and begin the healing process for a grief I hadn't even known I've been carrying.  Every day for a week we laugh and cry together, we sing together, we bond in pain and love and recognition, and we learn from this tiny warm tough soft-spoken holy woman with her Swiss-German accent and cigarette habit.

One of the ideas Elisabeth shares is that the butterfly is an apt symbol for death, casting off the body like emerging from a cocoon.  It's a concept that adds beauty to existence, so I choose to believe it.

. . .

Flash forward, a short hop, four years.  Risa and I are loading the u-haul to move our stuff from Glendale to Sonoma to rescue two-year-old Bryn from the smog.  A gang of friends are helping with the heavy lifting. My acting buddy Charlie's with us.

Charlie and I had met in a production of Sam Shepard's The Unseen Hand in Berkeley.  Some of the gang from the Cal drama department mounted it outside the auspices of the university.  We'd had a live rock band playing an original score and had cut a '56 Chevy body in half to get it into the space, then put it back together again as the centerpiece of the set.  Charlie was a pal of the director, Richard White, and he came down from Seattle to work with us, playing an ancient gunslinger living in a junkyard outside Azusa.  I'd played one of his two brothers brought back to life from a shootout eighty years in the past to help save an enslaved race of space monkeys from their galactic overlord.  What d'ya want?  It's early Sam Shepard.

We'd reconnected as struggling actors in LA.  Charlie's actually had a two-hand scene with Jack Nicholson in The Postman Always Rings Twice, better than anything I've ever managed to land.  But he hasn't been able to do stage plays for quite a while.  He's been diagnosed with aplastic anemia and gets too weak between transfusions to be able to sustain that kind of effort through several weeks of rehearsal and performance.  He's been beating the odds for over two years, but lately his transfusions have to come a lot closer together, and he has a rare blood factor that makes it unlikely he'll find a match with a bone marrow donor, the only hope he has to be healed.

Charlie didn't come over today to help with the moving, he doesn't lift much any more.  He's here to say goodbye.

. . .

Flash back thirteen years.  Heidi and I meet on the bus from Marrakech to Essaouira.  She's a fearless redhead from Sherman Oaks exploring Morocco on her own, a Valley girl whose guts and intelligence give the lie to the stereotype.  Now we're traveling as a couple.  We've just hitched into Málaga during Semana Santa, and there's not a room to be had in any of the cheap pensiones.  A parade featuring a huge crucifixion has taken over the center of town, and we head down side streets to get out of the crush, looking for a place to set down our packs and take our bearings.

Walking past an open taberna, we're hailed in English from a table inside by a small muscular guy with a bright red beard who invites us to join him and his companions.  He's Jack from Canada and we quickly exchange informal introductions with the others -- Coral, a tall blonde New Zealander, a dark-haired Geordie named Alan, and a Dutch couple, Harry and Margreet.  We swap traveling stories over beers.  Like us they've just come up from Morocco, where they'd been hanging in a hippie colony on a beach in the far south.  They've come north to Spain to catch the Euro Cup on tv and rented a house for a month near the beach in a small town just up the coast in the unfashionable direction.  They invite us to crash at their place, and the next day we make a deal to pitch in for the rent and join the family.

One night Harry sets up a parlor game with a small glass tumbler and a sheet of paper on which he's written the alphabet, sort of a handmade ouija board.  Everybody takes turns to be one of the pair laying their fingertips on the glass as it slides between letters, spelling out silly messages and answers to frivolous questions in both English and Dutch.  A third person acts as a stenographer.  The spooky thing is that sometimes a Dutch message spells out when neither Harry nor Greet is touching the glass.  It's eerie and funny and good for laughs.

We play the game again another night.  Harry and I are touching the glass when it suddenly starts moving very quickly through a long message in Dutch as Greet's eyes get bigger and her face turns white.  It seems to be from her baby sister, a Down's syndrome child who died when they were both children.  She wants Greet to know she's happy and refers to a favorite doll that she'd lost in a river on a family outing.  As Greet explains the story to us, her sister had so enjoyed bathing and splashing in the river that she'd taken her doll, from which she'd been inseparable, and thrown it in, peacefully letting the river carry it away, sharing with her doll the gift of her joy in the water.

We don't play the game again.

. . .

Flash back twelve more years.  I'm fourteen.  It's afternoon in the dead of winter and I'm trudging up the hill from the county road toward home.  About a quarter mile downhill from our house the line of sugar maples on the east side of the road come to an end, and to the right I can look across the dell formed by the creek that starts from the spring in our backyard to the solitary lightning-struck tree years-dead but still standing atop the steep hill on the opposite side.  Under a gray sky the world is black and white, deep snow and the bare limbs of trees.

I'm thinking deep thoughts about life and death, survival and extinction, the ultimate meanings of things, you know, the typical stuff that might run through the head of a bookish introvert reaching adolescence under the shadow of the Cold War nuclear standoff, when the flash hits me.

It's not an idea arrived at as the end of a thought process, or a reasoned consideration of possibilities.  It simply appears full-blown in my mind as if a light were suddenly switched on in a dark and unfamiliar room, everything in the room instantly apparent with the clarity of 20-20 vision, mental inventory and examination to follow.  It's a visceral experience as concrete as a thunderclap, as tangible as an embrace, a knowledge as obvious and undeniable as my own existence.  Words don't convey it.  But they can hint at it, nudge in its direction.

The experience of self-awareness doesn't end just because "I" may end.  Life and self-awareness are properties of reality, they don't go away.  We exist as participants in reality, no more separate from it than fingers are separate from a hand.

Is there life after death?  The question itself is meaningless, irrelevant, beside the point.

What's the sound of one hand clapping?  Why is a raven like a writing desk?