Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Jeffrey Kane is an academic vice president and has a PhD in the philosophy of science; he has written and edited scholarly books on the philosophy of knowledge and educational policy.
“Jeff’s oldest child, Gabriel, died in a car crash in June 2003, four days before his twenty-second birthday. In 2005 Jeff wrote Life as a Novice, a powerful book of meditative poems describing the journey of his deep grief, inspired by his son’s continuing presence in his life. A profound, gifted poet and a true contemplative, Jeff describes repeatedly waking up in the morning to ‘a hole torn in the side of the world where once you stood.’ Jeff’s connection to his son seems to be as strong as any human bond could possibly be.
‘Perhaps the shock and incomprehensible nature of the loss of a child leave the parents somehow more receptive to messages from the spiritual realm,’ Jeff told me. ‘We are often so confused that the comfortable realities of daily life no longer hold their solidity. The real becomes unreal; the sounds and sights of a familiar room seem as if they come from a foreign land. There is not so much pain as utter confusion about how a child you watched come into the world is no longer in it.’
"On Gabriel’s birthday just days after his death, Jeff and his wife, Janet, heard a crash inside the house somewhere but didn’t think much of it. When Jeff went into his walk-in closet before going to bed, all the shelves on the right side had collapsed onto the floor, so that everything slid off them to the center of the closet. There had not been any changes to the closet shelves, or the items on them, for years and there was no explanation for why all the shelves on one side would suddenly cave in. And there, on top of the pile of clothes, shoes, and photo albums lying in a heap on the floor, square in the middle with its front cover facing Jeff, was the album of Gabriel’s birth. None of the photo albums had been touched for seven years prior, yet on Gabriel’s birthday, his birth album lay there staring Jeff in the face. This was the first tangible event that occurred, and Jeff interpreted it as ‘either cruel fate or meaningful.’ It was at least enough to leave a question in his mind saying perhaps this was more than coincidence.
"Soon after, Janet had a reading with a medium, who told her Gabriel would leave dimes for them to show he was around. Jeff told his wife this was ‘absolute nonsense’: the medium had planted the notion in their minds to look for dimes so that it would become a circular and self-fulfilling prophecy. A few days later, Janet and their daughter Emily went to the beach, and while in the water swimming, Emily felt a dime float into the palm of her hand. How often does such a thing happen? Still, Jeff attributed that to an ‘amazing coincidence.
"Yet a few days later he questioned that interpretation. He was sleeping, woke up and in the dim light saw something that looked like a dime or a penny about seven or eight feet away on the floor. He mused cynically to himself, snidely dismissing the idea with sarcasm: ‘Oh, I wonder if that’s a dime from Gabriel!’ He turned away and then suddenly heard Gabriel’s voice. ‘I absolutely heard him, clearly, in English; it was loud and precise and unmistakably his voice,’ Jeff told me. The voice said, ‘Aha! Check the date. It’s a 1981!’ That was the year of Gabriel’s birth. Jeff picked up the coin—a penny—but couldn’t read the date on it, so he woke his wife. It was 1981. ‘He was telling me something I couldn’t possible have known,’ says Jeff.
“That summer, Jeff and Janet went on a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, and were driving in Acadia National Park. ‘I wish Gabriel could give us some kind of sign to let us know he’s around,’ Jeff said. At that moment, the car clock jumped one hour. They both saw it. Was this a sign from Gabriel? They drove around to see if somehow they had entered a different time zone, or had been affected by a nearby tower, trying to find a rational explanation—without success. Three days later, they were driving again and Jeff mentioned to Janet that, yes, the hour shift might have been a fluke caused by a malfunctioning cell tower or something. He added that if the clock changed by two hours, that explanation would not make sense and there had to be something else going on. Within two or three minutes, the clock changed by two hours."
Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).
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