Having faced my mortality last autumn, I now find myself wondering where we go after we die. I have heard many of the theories, but theories don’t do it for me. I try to come back to my own lived experience to find my answers. That’s easier now. Because in the heart of my adverse reaction to prescriptions, I saw into something quite remarkable—the contours of my soul. Not theoretically, but quite palpably. Everything slowed right down, and I bore witness to the inner workings of my consciousness. There was a powerhouse human mind—a vast and precise library of our lived experience—and there was an essentialness that threaded through all of it. It’s difficult to find words for this essentialness, not because it was vaporous or imprecise, but because it defied my habitual framework of perception. It was all permeating—both subtle and gross in nature—and it was encoded and emblazoned with its own directionality. In other words, it had its own agenda for this lifetime, both with respect to who I was, and why I was here. It was essentially me, I was essentially it, and everything else had been constructed to serve it.In the heart of these realeyesations, a whole bevy of memories rose to the surface. And some memories had a particular feeling associated with it. Not an arbitrary feeling, but one that was attuned to the soul’s journey itself. Whether I felt good or bad often depended on whether the experience was congruent with the soul’s directionality. If I felt haunted by a memory, the experience was inimical to the sacred blueprint for my lifetime. If it felt good, it was aligned. And—not surprisingly—some of the most difficult experiences actually produced good feelings. Either because they had been pre-encoded, and/or because I was somehow able to convert them into the growth at their heart.It was difficult to imagine that this lifetime was the end of the story for this old? soul. There was just so much richness inside of it, like it had been roaming through time for many lifetimes. And the blueprint itself didn’t feel arbitrary or ephemeral. It was very detailed and deliberate, as though it was working its way towards something. Like it had somewhere to go, and it needed the stuff of this lifetime to help get it there.Where do we go?Towards the end of this adventure, I began to feel into the question of what comes next. Not that I wanted to leave yet, but it was certainly in the ethos. I looked inside and I couldn’t find an answer. Perhaps it wasn’t clear yet, perhaps it wasn’t available to me? The soul was so generous in its revealing, but the question of what happens next was hidden from view. I began to remember things that I had experienced, events that felt informative.I remembered the loss of my eighty-nine-year-old Grandmother in 2004. One morning I jumped out of bed very early to race to her hospital bed. I said, “I felt like you were summoning me.” She said, “I was. Jeffrey, I think my number’s up.” I tried to encourage her, but she gave me the look. She said, “I’m tired of fighting. I’ll always love you. I will walk beside you, in front of you, and above you every step of the way.” She seemed to know something about what comes next. She wanted permission to surrender. I gave it to her.A few days later, I went to see her again. As she sat so vulnerable in her hospital bed, she gingerly reached for a newspaper article. Her nephew Jerry, a popular newspaper columnist, had been awarded a prize for journalism a few days earlier. Ever the lover of family, her eyes lit up. She did not know that he had died the night before. As Jerry was being eulogized the next day, I saw myself at the pulpit eulogizing my Grandmother. It felt imminent. After the service, I felt summoned away from the funeral procession. I left it and drove past her apartment. I couldn’t look. I knew she was gone. I went to the office and checked my messages. She had died while I was driving to the funeral.That night she reassured me. In the middle of the night I was awakened by the most horrible sound—a death cry, like nothing I have ever heard. I looked out the window. It was a foggy night, eerily foreboding. I saw a big raccoon dangling upside down on the tree right in front of my bedroom window. The branch it was on was so thin, I didn’t understand how the animal could hang from it without the branch breaking. This raccoon was doing everything in its power to get right side up so he could walk along the branch to safety. There was a second raccoon at the other end of the branch, screeching out to the other. It was unbelievable how much they longed to be together. I went outside and walked up to the tree. I said something and then suddenly the upside-down raccoon miraculously turned right side up. It calmly walked along the branch, joined up with its partner, and together they strolled down the tree and across the street like re-united lovers. It was one of those experiences that you just know was intended for you.My grandparents met on the street and they just knew that they were soul-mates. And after many decades of love their bodies separated, perhaps never to touch again. But when I saw those raccoons, I was sure that I didn’t have to worry about my grandmother’s passage. She was the upside-down raccoon, unwilling to get right side up and join her partner until I came outside and saw that she was going to be okay. It was just so bloody palpable.Quite apart from the confirmation that we are deeply connected—alive or dead—to other personally significant souls, this experience confirmed for me that the soul goes on.Years later, I had a similarly informative experience with my Father. I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to him before he died. One morning, I did. In a dream, soon after he passed. I was driving a car beside a dear friend when a truck hit my father. I got out to help him, but they said he was pinned under the truck. I yelled at a nurse to stop panicking and help him. By the time I arrived at the other side, he was sitting on a stretcher. They were trying to save him. I got up behind him, put my hand on his lower back and he turned to look right at me. All I could say was “Let there be love Daddy, Let there be love”. Repeatedly, like a mantra. He looked at me, and smiled. I looked up and there was a beautiful black woman sitting on top of the stretcher smiling at me. She was an angel, no doubt there to take him home. I woke up. Not a moment later, thunder crashed through the sky. My father was home. Let there be love, people. Let there be love…With love, Jeff