I had recently found out I was pregnant with my daughter. Barry and I were sound asleep in bed, and I received a stunningly obvious after-death communication.
"It was about 3:30 a.m. when the phone on my side of the bed rang. This was back when people only had land lines plugged into the wall. I think we are all conditioned to expect the worst when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It is usually news that is urgent, important, and bad. No one calls at 3:30 a.m. to give you good news.
I love my sleep, and at the beginning of my third pregnancy, after chasing two active boys around every day, I relished it. So I didn’t really wake up when the phone rang on my side of the bed. It was Barry’s shaking me and telling me to get the phone that finally roused me out of a deep slumber. I hesitated to answer because I feared it would be something terrible. That is not exactly how it played out, though. My hesitant “hello” into the phone was answered with the soft French accented voice of my dead grandfather. “Hello, darling,” he said, using the affectionate nickname he’d always called me in his life but that I hadn’t heard in far too long.
Stunned, I asked why he was calling me. Barry, who was now wide awake, kept asking who it was. I shushed him. I didn’t want to give Barry any indication of who I was on the phone with, as I knew it wouldn’t sit well with him. I asked my grandfather where he was. The conversation went something like this:
“You know where I am. You’ve been here and seen it.”
“But why are you calling me?” I asked.
“I need you to tell your mother something for me.”
”Then why are you calling me? Why not just call her? Umm, I can give you her number if you need it.”
“I’ve tried contacting her, but she can’t hear me. But since you were struck by the lightning, you can. Contacting you takes a terrific amount of energy, and I don’t have long to talk. There is something that I want you to tell her for me.”
“Of course I’ll tell her.”
He then relayed what was to me a mundane bit of family information that he felt my mom needed to know.
By now, Barry and I were both sitting straight up in bed, wide-awake. Barry was still pestering me to tell him who was on the phone. I was still ignoring him.
“Did Grandma find you?” I asked my grandfather.
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Barry demanded. I ignored him.
Grandpa answered: “Yes. She is fine. We are together. All is well. She is whole again.”
I was so happy to hear this. Grandma had had dementia when she died, and the woman she had once been had gotten lost. At the end, her life was a ride on a bridge that crumbled as she crossed. She couldn’t look back and see her history. So hearing that she and my beloved grandfather were together and her memories were intact was healing for me.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
“I already know. You’re pregnant. And it’s a girl, just as you were told it would be.” His voice became weaker, fainter.
“I can’t hear you well,” I said.
“I have to go. This is taking a terrific amount of energy. I can’t do this often, but I will call you again. Please remember to call your mother and tell her what I said.”
“I will, but please don’t hang up,” I pleaded.
“I will talk to you again. I just can’t do it right now. You need to remember—remember when you were here, the feeling of unconditional love. Never forget that.” This was the message, of course, that I had also been told when I was in the Garden. I begged him not to go.
“Remember the unconditional love. You will have this feeling again soon.” And with that, the connection faded away.
As I reluctantly, tearfully hung up the phone, our bedroom immediately filled with an odorless vapor, as if we were in a dense cloud. In any other situation, of course, if our bedroom filled up with smoke, both of us would be running to get the boys and get out of the house. But the situation was anything but normal. Inexplicably, while we were both sitting in this thick mist, or whatever it was, neither of us acted in fear. And neither of us spoke.
At the far end of the long hallway that extended toward the children’s bedrooms from ours, I saw a bright red light shining through the fog. Like a laser pointer, it pierced through the mist. When I saw that light, I was immediately overcome with the same palpable sense of unconditional love I had experienced in the Garden and had been told moments before to never forget. This must be what he meant when he said “You will have this feeling again soon.” Somehow, the light carried the love.
Suddenly, the light and fog vanished in an instant. It was all just gone, as if nothing had happened.
Barry turned to me and now calmly asked who had called. “My grandfather.” I replied.
“Which one?” he asked.
I told him. I then asked him, “Did you see anything?” He replied: “What smoke? I’m going to sleep.”
He had seen what I had seen but would not talk about it.
After that exchange in 1990, Barry and I never talked about it again until 2011, almost twenty-one years after it happened. By then, we had divorced, had both remarried, and had traveled independently to Jerusalem to attend the rabbinical ordination of our son Andy. By this time, I had begun to tell my now adult children about some of the extraordinary things that were routinely happening to me. Andy in particular has always taken a very special interest in my experiences. Jeremy and my daughter Mallory have as well, but I often wonder if Andy’s proximity to me at the time of the strike somehow affected him spiritually. He grew up to become an Orthodox rabbi.
On the night of his rabbinic ordination, at a dinner celebration in his honor, Andy casually asked Barry if he remembered the night when I was pregnant with Mallory and the phone had rung. My ears perked up and tuned into their conversation across the dinner table.
“You mean the call from her grandfather? Yes, I remember.”
Of all the cynics and doubters of my experiences whom I have encountered through the years, none have matched Barry. This was especially true during our bitterly contested, quite ugly divorce. As Andy asked him about the call, I listened, slack jawed, as Barry recounted it just as it had happened, having remembered all the details as if it were yesterday. Like so many others, he hesitates to make the jump to any conclusion about whether or not I was really talking to my deceased grandfather. But the fact that Barry admits to having heard the phone ring, hearing my half of the conversation, and seeing the smoke and its instantaneous disappearance is enough for me.
I called my mom the day after the phone call in 1990 to share that bit of family information that my grandfather had told me. She asked me how I knew that and I recounted my experience of the night before. Our short conversation ended with Mom in tears. “I know he has tried to talk to me. I try so hard to hear him, and I just can’t.”
I find it puzzling how different we all are. On one side is Barry, who actually witnessed this communion across two worlds and yet cannot allow himself to fully believe what I suspect he knows to be true. On the other is my mom, who fully believes in these exchanges between the two realms but cannot bring the experience upon herself, no matter how much she may want to do so. I should add here that, as time has marched on and life has dealt Barry some pretty swift blows, he has become more spiritual and less cynical in recent years.
Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.
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