One of the many things I love about being Jewish is that the faith generally focuses less on what happens after we die than on how we should live. There is nothing transactional about being a moral person in this life, for the benefits of a good man are enjoyed here on earth, not in some airy heaven. As for the afterlife? There is no consensus on this. It’s something we discuss – we discuss everything; after all, we are Jewish – but not something we really dwell on.
Which is great for grounding one’s morality in the here and now. Less good for equipping a relatively young person with a massive dose of death.
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This happened to me in my early 30s, when four very close friends—an entire family—were killed in a horrific car accident. I was left to process the terrifying, chilling surreality of witnessing an entire family – poof – cease to exist in one day. I also had to deal with the pain of the sudden and forever absence of people who were woven into my life. I had very little spiritual grounding to process it, which only added to the devastation. Being a rational, agnostic, Jewish person who grew up in the United States, I just assumed that was it for my friends. They are gone forever. There was a binary: the living and the dead. Here and not here. They were both in the latter category. I would never see them again. Not in this life. Not in any life.
Nick and Gayle with young Teddy.
Courtesy of Gayle Forman
So I was not prepared for what happened next. First of all, about a month after the accident, I dreamed of one of my dead friends – my mother – packing up her house with her oldest son, who was eight years old when he died. How can I explain how much this little boy meant to me? First of all, I became friends with his parents — the first in my group of friends to have children for many years — when they were pregnant with him. The first time I babysat for him, the boy I was in love with, who was also very good friends with my parents, came to hang out with me. When my friends came home, I found out later, they said they could feel the sexual tension between me and the guy.
They were not wrong; we got together a few weeks later and are still together 33 years later. My love for that little boy was already deep, intertwined with my love for his parents and my now-husband, but the kid himself was funny and charming and one of my favorite people. Therefore, death really hit him hard.
In a dream, while my friend was calmly arranging and packing her clothes as if for a move, she told me about the accident. They never saw the car coming. She felt no pain. Also, there was no afterlife. But then she let me hold the little boy on my lap, so I could nuzzle his blond head as I had so many times before. I started crying in my sleep, wetting his curls with my tears. I woke up with tears streaming down my face.
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The scientific part of me, Gayle who took several psychology classes and wrote articles about dreams, recognized that this was just my subconscious showing me what I needed to see, telling me what I needed to hear. But I woke up shaken and that feeling wouldn’t go away. It didn’t seem like a dream. It felt like a visit. I felt like my friend, knowing how much I loved this little boy, brought him to me to say a proper goodbye.
When I told my friend about the dream, she recommended that I read it Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was a revelation. Of course, I had a rudimentary understanding of religions outside the Judeo-Christian realm, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism in reincarnation. But this was my first encounter with cultural beliefs where the distinction between life and death was a little more porous. According to Tibetan Book of the Deadsouls enter the Bardo Thodol after death, the 49-day period between death and reincarnation when the soul prepares for its next cycle.
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In this context, the dream seemed like something else. My dead friend was obviously preparing for the next cycle. I mean, she was packing boxes; usually my subconscious is a little more subtle than that. And the time of sleep, less than a month after the accident, fit into the calendar. Although I have occasionally dreamed of my friends since then, it has always been vague and nebulous, nothing as sharp and clear as that visit.
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Gayle and her husband Nick at the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand.
Courtesy of Gayle Forman
About a year after that dream, my husband and I were at the beginning of a long-planned trip around the world. We debated canceling – he was heartbroken and reeling from the loss as I was, and also 9/11 happened months after our friends died, further destabilizing us and the world – but we decided to go ahead. On the second leg of a year-long trip, we were driving a rented campervan through New Zealand’s North Island when we both simultaneously sensed the presence of our other friend — Dad — at the exact same time. Not for nothing, it was happening on Maori land. And Maori, I later learned, believe in something called wairua, the non-physical presence of the soul after death. We felt our friend’s presence several more times during the year until we arrived safely home.
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The psychological explanation for this is quite obvious: one or two punches of suggestibility and wish fulfillment. We wanted to see him at that moment, which we did. Then, as soon as one of us vocalized the feeling of that “presence”, the other felt it too. But a more spiritual interpretation could be that we have encountered a soul in transition, or perhaps a guardian angel, or even a curious stowaway with an eager wandering spirit.
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A few months later, in Jaisalmer, India, I felt sick and wandered into a restaurant, where I befriended its owner, an elderly Indian woman. She fed me lentil pancakes and yogurt and we started talking; eventually my husband and I confided in her how devastated we were still by the loss of our friend. She told us that according to Hindu belief, we can ask for the souls of my friends to be reincarnated in the bodies of our unborn children. You will see them again, she promised me.
And I did. But not the way she predicted. I found them written again. I found them in memory. I found them when I wrote a book that fictionalized their tragic accident and listed the spiritual questions it raised for me. The main character was fictional, but her family consisted of my friends, reanimated on the page.
I wrote that book in an ecstatic three months, pulling memories of my friends from the recesses of my mind and pouring them onto the page. As I brought them back into existence, I felt them in the room with me, their presence palpable.
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And that’s when I finally began to understand that this thick curtain that I assumed permanently separated the living from the dead was as much a construct as the idea of heaven or ghosts or wandering souls. It’s something our culture has decided is true—to our detriment, if you ask me. And so, with each keystroke, with each lived memory, I poked so many holes in that veil that it became a pure veil, over which I could pass whenever I needed to.
Did my friend come back to me with her son because they were in some spiritual bardo or because my subconscious called them? Did I experience another friend in the wairua, or was it just a vulnerable, injured brain summoning the dead? Did writing about my friends summon their spirits or were they there all along, connected to my love?
I realized that the answer to those questions is yes. Whether my friends reappeared in some liminal state or just as an electrical impulse in my brain, they were there. Call it a ghost. Call it the subconscious. Call it a turkey sandwich. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that it is.
Many years later, as my older relatives began to die, I noticed that at funerals and shivas, people did not say, “We are sorry for your loss” as often as the common Jewish phrase, “May their memory be blessed.” Then I realized that the guidance had been in my faith all along. Love is stored in memories. By holding on to them, we hold on to love, and in that love we are all immortal.
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‘After Life’ by Gayle Forman.
Quill Tree Books/Amazon
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Gayle Forman’s latest book, After lifeon sale January 7, 2025, and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.
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Source: HIS Education