Passed present

What is it with us fragile, vulnerable, deeply alone inhabitants of this Earth? How urgently we crave certainty in terms of a continuum of life. 

DO you believe in an afterlife?

Here's Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, in one of those radio interviews where the car is lingered in long after the journey's end: "I just feel this very strongly from members of my own family who've died ... I always feel that they move into a kind of relationship with us which is even closer than when they were here. And it's a very interesting relationship and certainly very intimate. I don't feel that the dead have gone at all, I've never felt this; I feel they're at another stage and having another life with new adventures in it which is really very exciting. I also felt when two old people died very recently that they were moving on consciously, that they felt they were in some more interesting realm and they'd lost interest in the world itself; they were not interested in Earth life anymore, there was something more they were going to ... "

A man I loved was killed in an accident several decades ago. I felt skinned by grief. My world was a howl. But shortly afterwards, in the thick of the rawness, something challenged all my rational beliefs. I was lying on my stomach on the couch, my face resting on folded arms, when suddenly, vividly, I felt his presence. Utterly calm, tender, light, lying belly-down on top of me along the length of my spine. It was a moment of pure peace. A knowing swept through me; he was with me, he was all right, I didn't have to worry about him. That fleeting haunting felt so real and even now I can feel the shock of it - that chink of a glimpse into something else. Yet I feel foolish even telling you. For my rational self tussled with the memory and rejected it: no, impossible, a trick of the imagination. A mind grasping at straws, at some kind of solace, nothing more. But how the brain can deceive so convincingly! Similar moments persisted for several months afterwards - in some wistful, lovely, tender lingering - and then he was gone. Just like that. Lost to me. But I was at peace, for it felt like he had vanished of his own volition. Yet with others close to me who've died - my grandparents, for example - I've felt no persistence, reluctance, energy; they're utterly gone.

A friend brought it all back in a recent missive about the death of her dog: "Everywhere I go I seem to see Monty, but oddly, it doesn't feel as though he's there. When dad died, my sister and I both felt he was 'around' for several days, then subsequently he was very often 'with us' - but Monty seemed to depart instantly. No lingering presence, no complicated emotions ... " It's not just after death that the presence of life seems to linger; the cycle seems to start before birth. Each of my own babies seemed so fully formed and present as a person, a soul; fresh from the womb. As if they'd been inhabited by an older consciousness, some imprint of another in there. This wondrous sense of completeness and freshness persisted for months, then faded.

What is it with us fragile, vulnerable, deeply alone inhabitants of this Earth? How urgently, irrefutably, we crave certainty in terms of a continuum of life in some form. A knowing. With our organised religions the concept of an afterlife feels like an ingeniously insidious idea, a big con, the great man-made construct that ropes us in and binds us to servitude. Yet are religions trying to explain a mystery of life and the mind similar to what happened to me, once, whether it's imagination or something else? The question: whether to believe in that abrupt nothingness, a la Kerry Packer's famous declaration after almost dying on the polo field, or the idea of a journey more wondrous and peace-filled than anything ever before experienced? I know which one I want to believe.

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