Living in the Afterlife

My interest in the paranormal began in the last year or so of my marriage. My ex was disappointed and confused by my fascination with life after death, with the world of spirit, and anything else that wasn't grounded in materialism and atheism. I didn't blame him; in fact, I was embarrassed for myself. I didn't know why I read book after book on a subject that made so little sense to my husband. Nevertheless, I continued my search for evidence of an afterlife.

I think I understand now. One doesn't just die once, but many, many times. The physical death of the body is still far in the future for me (God willing), but I have died before. When my partner of ten years started looking at me as if he despised the very ground I walked on, or worse, with irritated indifference, my time in that life was running short. I didn't know how short.

His departure happened gradually, although I really didn't see it or understand it then. I had grown accustomed to his long absences from home, his all-consuming life at UCLA. I had resigned myself to his rages, his hot anger at me for all the things I did that angered or disappointed him. In the last year of my marriage, the year I lost all control over myself, I was preparing myself for the afterlife.

The death itself was slow and very painful. I hated dying; as I became invisible to the person I loved the most in the world, I realized that there is no going back to your old world. Once you die in that world, you are a corpse. You do not exist. This lesson is still sinking in, since every now and then I attempt to contact the Other Side, in hopes that the person who once created my universe might conjure me up once more, just to prove to me that I really was real.

And yet, he resists and annihilates my spirit every time. I learn, even if slowly, to avoid any contact with a home that is not home, a place that has disappeared, and memories that refer to nothing. He killed me once, and he will do it again, as many times as it takes for me to stay in the tomb.

The parallel universe is infinitely better than the world from which I was ejected. Heaven really is a place, and although I don't believe in perfection, I know I have found the highest of all earthly realities: I am loved, and I love in return. I understand that I inhabit the light now, and that nothing will drag me back to the darkness of a life that expressed itself in pain and constant yearning.

Yet the other world holds its painful attractions, as a place you wish you could claim as real, where you had some dignity; you know that your wishes represent a fantasy, but one you still need.

Dying was hard; becoming a ghost was even worse. Although I know that I am real, that I am loved into this world, sometimes I look in the mirror, and I am still transparent.