Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a
Flash: Many strange things have happened
to me since my near-death experience. One of the earliest and strangest took
place in the spring of 1990, a year and a half after the lightning strike.
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.