After-death communication and reincarnation are apparently separate subjects that are, in my view, quite closely related. We may have contact from our deceased beloveds and think reincarnation is malarkey, but my own experiences with both of these have helped me to find meaning in both life and death. For me, that we are embodied more than once makes sense of the vast differences in individual people’s circumstances. If we only live once, life seems cruelly unfair—with some born deformed, or spending lives in extreme pain and poverty, and others having perfect health and every advantage money and education can provide—with some infants dying and other folks living lustily to one hundred.
That our deceased beloveds can and do contact us indicates that consciousness survives the death of the body, that our essential nature does not require the physical to exist. I perceive that we enter into the physical realm and leave it and return again and again until we are perfect reflections of Spirit’s highest ideal, until love and compassion are all that we express.
Reincarnation enters my book in Chapter 8 when I write about how awareness of sharing other lives with my daughter Randi brought meaning to some of our mother/daughter struggles and offered me another way in which to relate to her death. Because of this, I joined the Facebook group Signs of Reincarnation. A German member, Iris Giesler, read and reviewed The After Death Chronicles for the group.
Iris has generously allowed me to share her review, which follows. Though it is not her first language, she writes in near-perfect English. Iris told me to make corrections as needed, but I only made a few tiny changes for clarity’s sake.
Iris Giesler is a lawyer, an Assessor Juris, employed by the Ministry of Interior of the German state of Niedersachsen.
Review of The After Death Chronicles by Iris Giesler
There are quite a lot of books on the market that include experiences of those who are convinced they have had contact with a deceased dear one. Usually, these books try to prove that the mind survives the death of the body and some of them do a rather good job in doing so. The author of The After Death Chronicles explicitly says she doesn’t aim at presenting “evidence”. Instead she invites her readers to “crack a window open to the breeze of possibility that the totality of existence cannot be perceived by the mind, that there are mysteries beyond its ken, and that these mysteries are worthy of exploration”. Annie Mattingley’s language is poetic at times and throughout the book, the reader feels engaged in an intimate conversation with the author.
Annie Mattingley herself experiences the worst that could possibly happen to a parent: The loss of her child. In the midst of her grief, the idea that the dead can speak to those left behind became her “daily reality.” Brief contacts, sometimes even prolonged conversations, usually happened in the early morning hours over the span of many months. In the course of those conversations that led her to a path of self-discovery, memories of several past lives she had shared with her daughter surfaced in Annie’s mind. While those memories were only fragmentary and it would be impossible to verify them, Annie discovered patterns that helped her to make sense of her daughter’s death.
Inspired by the impact after-death communications had on her and their immense healing power, Annie started to seek and collect the stories of people who had experienced the same. We will learn in the course of the book that the ways the dead contact the living are manifold and are as personal as a fingerprint. Annie Mattingley did not strictly structure her book according to the type of experience (visual, auditory, dreams, occurrences in nature and so on), just because many of the subjects she interviewed experienced several different kinds of contacts.
The author interviewed many, if not most, of the subjects personally, so their testimony is just as intimate as the author’s own story and we will realize the huge psychological consequences after-death-contacts can have on the grieving process and on a person’s worldview. The reader will get to know Lisa, whose deceased grandmother urged her to deliver a message to her father and Celeste, whose father appeared to her in a vision at the foot of the bed, right when her husband answered the phone with the call to notify the couple of Celeste’s father’s death. Some of the contacts described in the book are more subtle, like Karen’s, who, when a ladybug landed on her friend’s shirt and then flew to and remained inside the arm of Karen’s glasses, knew it was her deceased mother.
The reader will learn that the subjective impression of having been contacted by someone who passed on happens to all kinds of people, regardless of their age, gender and profession. Usually such an experience is comforting, but the author also dedicated one chapter to the question of whether there is also a “shadow side.” She says the visit of a deceased is rarely experienced as upsetting.
Annie Mattingley anticipates her conclusion in the introduction: “I could have distilled this book’s essence into a single sentence: The dead return to let us know they are okay.”
You may order The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil through www.AnnieMattingley.com and through the following sites:
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2zSaTLB
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/2ljjV0I
Indie Bound: http://bit.ly/2gEcr3f
Hampton Roads/Red Wheel/Weiser: http://bit.ly/2gM255a
I am writing this on Halloween while the ghosts and goblins and ghouls are roaming about. Little is more fun than dressing up in costumes, but the haunted houses and fright masks and scary guys emerging from coffins distort the sacred meaning and history of this season.
I discovered this opening quite by accident on an autumn vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico. Inspired by their Muertos festivities, I created a makeshift altar with a few candles, and some marigolds (the traditional flower of the dead) from the flower stalls at the Veinte de Noviembre Market, and one of Oaxaca’s famous sugar skulls. I used my travel sewing kit to represent my mother, a tourist brochure for my magazine publisher father. Once I lit the candles, the quality of sacredness was palpable. Though the signs were subtle, I was pretty sure I felt the presence of my parents, a first. Then came the real surprise—though I had done nothing consciously to invite it—the definitive presence of the baby I had aborted years earlier. When she (I had never known her gender!) reassured me she was all right, I was not only astounded by the visitation, but also by how much it comforted me, since I thought I had long ago made peace with my choice.
To illustrate just how seriously Mexicans take their altars, I’ll tell you about another year I was in Oaxaca for Muertos. My Mexican son-in-law Emiliano had left for his home village before my arrival, because his father was ill. My daughter Rowena and I had already put up the altar when we got the call that his father had died. She and my grandson left at once to join Emiliano. On their arrival, his tias, his aunts, looked worried. “Who’s minding the altar?” they asked. When my daughter replied, “Mi madre,” the tias smiled and sighed with relief. To have simply stopped lighting those candles when a significant death was so fresh was unthinkable. Perhaps at any time mid-Muertos, it would always be unthinkable.
The trains are full. The train station teams with men in uniform. It is impossible for civilians to buy tickets, not just for the day but for the week, he’s told, maybe more. Their suitcases are ready. He had tried to get his first job after college closer to home and family in Chicago. Reader’s Digest had not wanted him. He attributes this rejection to his paralyzed legs and his canes. There was no Americans with Disabilities Act in 1941. He telephones Fort Monmouth. “Of course, we’ll hold the job,” they say. “We need you,” they say, “now more than ever.” Who would be more understanding than the Army Signal Corps?
On the crowded train, ten days later, we are the only civilians. The boy-soldiers are excited and nervous and they won’t let themselves know they are scared. They admire my delicate and pretty mother. The basket—designed to hold lettuce—that is my carrier is passed from soldier to soldier, so they can admire me too. They eye my father and his canes warily, full of pity for this crippled man, and maybe a tiny bit jealous that he gets to stay behind.
I am able-bodied. I walk with a vigorous gait, but there are wrinkles and gray hair and that thing I call my turkey wattle and to a 20-year-old I guess I look ancient. When one sees me crossing the parking lot and holds the Credit Union door open way too long as he waits and waits for me, I feel the shadow of my father’s wounded pride rise up within me.
Blenders go on in the middle of the night. Alarm systems may suddenly malfunction. Televisions change channels while they’re off or turn on when no one is around. Lights flash. Unexamined, these may simply seem strange, as well as unrelated to the dead. If experts are called in and no problems are discovered, we may be told, “It’s just a fluke, ma’am.”
There was also something more fundamental to be noted. The role of an alarm system is to keep us safe, which, when we’re young, is our mother’s role as well. That protective role was one of the hardest things for me to let go of as my two daughters matured. Perhaps this mother was pointing out her desire to continue keeping her daughter safe. Before we allow a surprising event to frighten us it behooves us to try to determine what our dear dead might be trying to say.
Synchronous experiences are easier to ignore than the beeps of an alarm system and we love to brush them off as coincidental. Again, I suggest we look for meaning. Heidi awakens at 2:22 AM convinced that her mother has died. Within minutes a call from the nursing home confirms this. Long after her mother’s death she finds that whenever she notices 2:22 on a clock, she strongly senses her mom’s presence. The time—2:22—becomes a kind of secret code language between them. Although I didn’t hear that this was true for Heidi, at times, the specific numbers may hold important keys to either the living or the dead. Sure, any of this could be “coincidence.” However, such experiences are often accompanied by an uncanny and difficult to describe (or to defend to a skeptic) awareness, a knowing. If we reject this knowing, we could be allowing logic to rob us of a sweet and profound gift.
“I’m okay, scariest earthquake ever.” (on Facebook from Oaxaca)
I’m dizzied by keeping track of my loved ones, checking on hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and extreme heat across the continent. I read rising death tolls in Texas, the Caribbean, the Isthmus of Mexico, Florida. The number of acres burning in the northwest is reflected by the smoky haze where I live in the southwest more than a thousand miles away. I am face to face with the risks of being alive, the reality of our mortality. Death looks over my left shoulder. It keeps clearing its throat to remind me of our impermanence.
I try to remember how to keep my balance. I note the beauty of my maxmilian sunflowers which just burst into bloom today, the red on the wings of a flicker flying past the window. I have my mantra practice, my own breath. I ask for extra hugs from my sweetie. A friend shares a mantra from Thich Nhat Hanh—I have arrived and I am home. Home is a place of safety and like it or not, home encompasses it all, including both life and death.
Annie Mattingley 