Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife (8 page)

“But at the time I just thought how beautiful and bright the King of Planets appeared, watching over us from above.”

As she entered the hospital foyer, a magical thought struck her. Girls generally stayed in the Crittenden Home for two weeks after they delivered their babies, then they’d go home and pick up their lives where they’d left off. If she really delivered that night, she and I might be home for Christmas—if they actually set her free at two weeks. What a perfect miracle that would be: to bring me home by Christmas Day.

“Dr. Crawford was fresh from another delivery, and he looked awfully tired,” Ann told me. He laid an ether-soaked gauze over her face to ease the pain, so she was only semiconscious when finally, at 2:42
A.M
., with one last great push, she gave birth to her first child.

Ann told me that she wanted so much to hold and caress me, and that she would never forget hearing my cries until fatigue and that anesthetic finally won out.

Over the next four hours, first Mars, then Saturn, then Mercury, and finally brilliant Venus rose in the eastern sky to greet me into this world. Meanwhile, Ann slept more deeply than she had in months.

The nurse awakened her before sunrise.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” she said cheerfully, and presented me, swaddled in a sky-blue blanket, for her to admire.

“The nurses all agreed that you were the most beautiful baby in the whole nursery. I was bursting with pride.”

As much as Ann wanted to keep me, the cold reality that she couldn’t soon sank in. Richard had dreams of going to college, but those dreams would not keep me fed. Perhaps I felt Ann’s pain, because I stopped eating. At eleven days, I was hospitalized with the diagnosis that I was “failing to thrive,” and my first Christmas and the following nine days were spent in the hospital in Charlotte.

After I was admitted to the hospital, Ann took the two-hour bus ride north to her small hometown. She spent that Christmas with her parents, sisters, and friends, whom she had not seen in three months. All without me.

By the time I was eating again, my separate life was under way. Ann sensed that she was losing control and that they weren’t going to allow her to keep me. When she called the hospital just after New Year’s, she was told that I had been sent to the Children’s Home Society in Greensboro.

“Sent with a volunteer? How unfair!” she said.

I spent the next three months living in a baby dorm with several other infants whose mothers could not keep them. My crib was on the second floor of a bluish gray Victorian home that had been donated to the society. “It was a most pleasant place for your first home,” Ann told me with a laugh, “even though it was mainly a baby dorm.” Ann took the three-hour bus ride to visit half a dozen times over the next few months, trying desperately to come up with a plan that would succeed in keeping me with her. Once she came with her mother and another time
with Richard (although the nurses made him view me through the window—they would not let him in the same room, and certainly not let him hold me).

But by late March 1954, it was clear that things weren’t going to go her way. She would have to give me up. She and her mother took the bus to Greensboro one last time.

“I had to hold you and look in your eyes and try to explain it all to you,” Ann told me. “I knew you would just giggle and coo, blow baby bubbles, and make pleasing sounds no matter what I said, but I felt I owed you an explanation. I held you closely one last time, kissed your ears, chest, and face, and caressed you gently. I remember inhaling deeply, loving that wonderful aroma of freshly bathed baby, as if it were yesterday.

“I called you by your birth name and said, ‘I love you so much, so much you’ll never know. And I’ll love you forever, until the day I die.’

“I said, ‘God, please let him know how much he is loved. That I love him, and always will.’ But I had no way of knowing if my prayer would be answered. Adoption arrangements in the 1950s were final and very secret. No turning back, no explanations. Sometimes birth dates were changed in the records just to hamper anyone’s efforts to uncover the truth about a baby’s origins. Leave nothing to trace. Agreements were protected by harsh state laws. The rule was to forget it ever happened and go on with the rest of your life. And, hopefully, learn from it.

“I kissed you one last time, then laid you gently in your crib. I wrapped you in your little blue blanket, took one last look into your blue eyes, then kissed my finger and touched it to your forehead.

“‘Goodbye, Richard Michael. I love you,’ were my last words to you, at least for half a century or so.”

Ann went on to tell me that after she and Richard were married and the rest of their children came along, she became more and more taken up with finding out what had become of me. In addition to being a naval aviator and an airline pilot, Richard was an attorney, and Ann figured that gave him license to uncover my adoptive identity. But Richard was too much of a gentleman to go back on the adoption agreement made in 1954, and he kept out of the matter. In the early 1970s, with the war in Vietnam still raging, Ann couldn’t get the date of my birth out of her head. I would turn nineteen in December 1972. Would I go over? If so, what would become of me there? Early on, my plan was to enlist in the marines to fly. My vision was 20/100, and the Air Force required 20/20 without correction. Word on the street was that the marines would take even those of us with 20/100 vision and teach us to fly. However, they then started winding down the Vietnam war effort, so I never enlisted. I headed off to med school instead. But Ann knew none of this. In the spring of 1973, they watched as surviving POWs from the “Hanoi Hilton” disembarked from the planes returning from North Vietnam. They were heartbroken when missing pilots they knew, more than half of Richard’s navy class, failed to emerge from the planes, and Ann got it in her head that I might have been killed over there myself.

Once in her mind the image refused to fade, and for years she was convinced that I’d died a grisly death in the rice paddies of Vietnam. She certainly would have been surprised to know that at that time I was just a few miles away from her in Chapel Hill!

In the summer of 2008, I met up with my biological father, his brother Bob, and his brother-in-law, also named Bob, at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. Brother Bob was a decorated
hero in the navy during the Korean War and a test pilot at China Lake (the navy’s weapons test center in the California desert, where he perfected the Sidewinder missile system and flew F-104 Starfighters). Meanwhile Richard’s brother-in-law Bob set a speed record during Operation Sun Run in 1957, a circumglobal relay record in F-101 Voodoo jet fighters “outflying the sun” by circling the earth at an average speed of over 1,000 miles per hour.

It felt like Old Home Week for me.

Those meetings with my birth parents heralded the end of what I’ve come to think of as my Years of Not Knowing. Years that, I came at last to learn, had been characterized by the same terrible pain for my birthparents as they had been for me.

There was only one wound that wouldn’t heal: the loss, ten years earlier in 1998, of my biological sister Betsy (yes, the same name as one of the sisters in my adoptive family, and they both married Robs, but that’s another story). She’d had a big heart, everyone told me, and, when not working at the rape crisis center where she spent most of her time, she could usually be found feeding and caring for a menagerie of stray dogs and cats. “A real angel,” Ann called her. Kathy promised to send me a picture of her. Betsy had struggled with alcohol just as I had, and learning of her loss, fueled in part by those struggles, made me realize once again how fortunate I had been in resolving my own problem. I longed to meet Betsy, to comfort her—to tell her that wounds could heal, and that all would be okay.

Because, strangely enough, meeting my birth family was the first time in my life that I felt that things really
were,
somehow, okay. Family mattered, and I’d gotten mine—most of mine—back. This was my first real education in how profoundly knowledge of one’s origins can heal a person’s life in unexpected ways.
Knowing where I came from, my biological origins, allowed me to see, and to accept, things in myself that I’d never dreamed I’d have been able to. Through meeting them, I was allowed to throw away, at last, the nagging suspicion that I’d carried around without even being aware of it: a suspicion that, wherever I
had
come from, biologically speaking, I had not been loved or cared about. Subconsciously, I had believed that I
didn’t deserve
to be loved, or even to exist. Discovering that I had been loved, since the very beginning, began to heal me in the most profound way imaginable. I felt a wholeness I had never known before.

It was not, however, the only discovery in this area that I would make. The other question that I thought had been answered in the car with Eben that day—the question of whether there really is a loving God out there—still held, and the answer in my mind was still no.

It wasn’t until I spent seven days in coma that I revisited that question. I discovered an entirely unexpected answer there as well . . .

S
omething pulled at me. Not like someone grabbing my arm, but something subtler, less physical. It was a little like when the sun dips behind a cloud and you feel your mood change instantly in response.

I was going back, away from the Core. Its inky-bright darkness faded into the green landscape of the Gateway, with all of its dazzling landscape. Looking down, I saw the villagers again, the trees and sparkling streams and the waterfalls, as well as the arcing angel-beings above.

My companion was there, too. She had been there the whole time, of course, all through my journey into the Core, in the form of that orblike ball of light. But now she was, once again, in human form. She wore the same beautiful dress, and seeing her again made me feel like a child lost in a huge and alien city who suddenly comes upon a familiar face. What a gift she was! “We will show you many things, but you will be going back.” That message, delivered wordlessly to me at the entrance to the trackless darkness of the Core, came back to me now. I also now understood where “back” was.

The Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View where I had started this odyssey.

But it was different this time. Moving down into the darkness with the full knowledge of what lay above it, I no longer experienced the trepidation that I had when I was originally there. As the glorious music of the Gateway faded out and the pulse-like
pounding of the lower realm returned, I heard and saw these things as an adult sees a place where he or she had once been frightened but is no longer afraid. The murk and darkness, the faces that bubbled up and faded away, the artery-like roots that came down from above, held no terror for me now, because I understood—in the wordless way I understood everything then—that I was no longer
of
this place, but only visiting it.

But
why
was I visiting it again?

The answer came to me in the same instantaneous, nonverbal way that the answers in the brilliant world above had been delivered. This whole adventure, it began to occur to me, was some kind of tour—some kind of grand overview of the invisible, spiritual side of existence. And like all good tours, it included all floors and all levels.

Once I was back in the lower realm, the vagaries of time in these worlds beyond what I knew of this earth continued to hold. To get a little—if only a very little—idea of what this feels like, ponder how time lays itself out in dreams. In a dream, “before” and “after” become tricky designations. You can be in one part of the dream and know what’s coming, even if you haven’t experienced it yet. My “time” out beyond was something like that—though I should also underline that what happened to me had none of the murky confusion of our earthbound dreams, except at the very earliest stages, when I was still in the underworld.

How long was I there this time? Again I have no real idea—no way to gauge it. But I do know that after returning to the lower realm, it took a long time to discover that I actually had some control over my course—that I was no longer trapped in this lower world. With concerted effort, I could move back up to the higher planes. At a certain point in the murky depths,
I found myself wishing for the Spinning Melody to return. After an initial struggle to recall the notes, the gorgeous music, and the spinning ball of light emitting it blossomed into my awareness. They cut, once again, through the jellied muck, and I began to rise.

In the worlds above, I slowly discovered, to know and be able to think of something is all one needs in order to move toward it. To think of the Spinning Melody was to make it appear, and to long for the higher worlds was to bring myself there. The more familiar I became with the world above, the easier it was to return to it. During my time out of my body, I accomplished this back-and-forth movement from the muddy darkness of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View to the green brilliance of the Gateway and into the black but holy darkness of the Core any number of times. How many I can’t say exactly—again because time as it was there just doesn’t translate to our conception of time here on earth. But each time I reached the Core, I went deeper than before, and was taught more, in the wordless, more-than-verbal way that all things are communicated in the worlds above this one.

That doesn’t mean that I saw anything like the whole universe, either in my original journey from the Earthworm’s-Eye View up to the Core, or in the ones that came afterward. In fact, one of the truths driven home to me in the Core each time I returned to it was how impossible it would be to understand all that exists—either its physical/visible side or its (much, much larger) spiritual/invisible side, not to mention the countless other universes that exist or have ever existed.

But none of that mattered, because I had already been taught the one thing—the only thing—that, in the last analysis, truly matters. I had initially received this piece of knowledge from my
lovely companion on the butterfly wing upon my first entrance into the Gateway. It came in three parts, and to take one more shot at putting it into words (because of course it was initially delivered wordlessly), it would run something like this: