Pearson - Opening heavens door: investigating stories of life, death, and what comes after

In this compelling and provoking read, Patricia Pearson examines death and dying with uncommon thoughtfulness, asking questions too rarely asked. Moving and insightful, Opening Heavens Door is an important work for all of us struggling with the inevitability of death. Steven Galloway, author of The Confabulist and The Cellist of Sarajevo

Patricia Pearsons Opening Heavens Door is a fascinating examination of the conclusion of all our struggles and victories: the instant of death. This omnivorous journey through grief and neuroscience and spirituality carries the reader swiftly along and into places we can never truly knowbut Pearson provides an unprecedented glimpse. Kevin Patterson, award-winning author of The Water in Between and Consumption

Pearson brings her blend of humor, sympathy and keen critical intelligence to a topic that is all too often off limits to writers of her caliber. This is exactly the smart book on the possibility of an afterlife that readers curious about the topic but leery of mush have been looking for. Ptolemy Tompkins, author of The Modern Book of the Dead and collaborator with Dr. Eben Alexander on Proof of Heaven and The Geography of Heaven

The word is out: you dont die when you die. Thats the message from around 15 million Americans who have experienced a near-death experience, as Patricia Pearson, in sparkling prose, shows in this enormously engaging book. I know, I know: this premise causes serious intellectual indigestion in die-hard skeptics, but we should not be diverted by their leaky arguments. The fear of total annihilation with physical death has caused more suffering in human history than all the physical diseases combined. Pearsons message is a Great Cure for this Great Fear. This book conveys deep meaning and hope. It takes the pressure off and makes life more fulfilling and joyous. There is only one reason why you should not read this magnificent book: if you have a secret way not to die. But since the statistics so far are against you, let Pearson be your guide. Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters

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PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2014 Patricia Pearson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and in the United States of America by Atria Books, an imprint of the Atria Publishing Group, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pearson, Patricia, 1964, author Opening heavens door : what the dying may be trying to tell us about where theyre going / Patricia Pearson.

ISBN 978-0-307-36013-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36015-1

1. Near-death experiences. 2. DeathPsychological aspects. I. Title.

BF1045.N4P42 2014 133.9013 C2013-905961-X

cover design by Kelly Hill

Cover image: Jan Bruggeman / Getty Images

v3.1

For my family, and the tribe.

Blessed are those who mourn.

CONTENTS

2 W HAT THE D YING S EE
The Phenomenon of Nearing-Death Awareness

3 S IGNALS AND W AVES
Uncanny Experiences at the Moment of Death

4 A STRAL F ATHER
The Phenomenon of a Sensed Presence

5 B E S TILL
How the Dying Attain Peace

6 D EEPER
What NDEs Tell Us About Where the Dying Go

M y father died in his blue-striped pyjamas on a soft bed in a silent house. He wasnt ailing. At three or four in the morning he gave out a sigh, loud enough to wake my mother. A sigh, a moan, a final breath escaping. She leaned over to rub his back, sleepily assuming that he was having a bad dream, and then retreated into her own cozy haze of unconsciousness. Morning arrived a few hours later as a thin suffusion of northern March light. She roused herself and walked around the prone form of her husband of fifty-four years to go to the bathroom.

Downstairs to the humdrum rituals of the kitchen. Brewing coffee, easing her teased-apart English muffin halves into the toaster, listening to the radio. I was being interviewed about a brand-new book. There I was, the youngest of her five children, going blah blah blah with impressive authority about a lawsuit that had been launched by a man who had suffered incalculable psychological damage from finding a dead fly in his bottle of water.

Did he have grounds? the host was asking me. Was it possible for a life to unravel at the prospect of one dead fly?

My mother spread her muffin with marmalade, thought ahead to her day. Some meetings, a luncheon, an outing with her granddaughter Rachel, who was visiting for March break. She didnt wonder why Geoffrey, my father, still remained in bed. No heightened sense of vigilance for a healthy man whod just turned eighty.

In families, ones attention is directed towards crisis, and during the early spring of 2008 we were all transfixed by my sister Katharine. It was she, not my father, who faced death. Vivacious Katharine, an uncommonly lovely womanmother and sister and lovernow anguished by the wildfire spread of metastatic breast cancer. Katharines fate had become the familys extreme reality, as Virginia Woolf once put it.

My father played his role unexpectedly.

Rachel, said my mother, shaking my nieces slack shoulder as she snoozed in the guest room on the top floor of my parents house. Rachel. My niece opened her eyes and glimpsed an expression on my mothers facewild vulnerability in the visage of the matriarchthat shot her to full waking consciousness.

Granddaddy wont wake up.

That morning we all received the call, the what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about news that my mother, with Rachels astonished assistance, dialled to the family. But Katharine, one hundred miles east of my parents, in Montreal, received her message differently.

On the night of my fathers death, she would tell mourners at his memorial service some weeks later, I had an extraordinary spiritual experience. My sister, please know, wasnt prone to spiritual experiences. Stress she was familiar with, as the single mother of two teenaged boys. Laughter she loved. Fitness of any kindshe was vibrantly physical. Fantastic intellect, fluent in three languages. But she hadnt been paying much attention, in essence, to God.