Opening Heaven's Door: Investigating Stories of Life, Death, and What Comes After - Couverture rigide

Opening Heaven’s Door CHAPTER 1

An Unexpected Vision

My father died in his blue-striped pajamas on a soft bed in a silent house. He wasn’t ailing. At three or four in the morning, he gave out a sigh, loud enough to wake my mother, who sleepily assumed that he was having a bad dream. A sigh, a moan, a final breath escaping. She leaned over to rub his back, 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, on which I was being interviewed about a brand-new book. Her youngest of five children, I was providing commentary about a lawsuit brought 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 didn’t wonder why Geoffrey, my father, still remained in their bed. No heightened sense of vigilance for a healthy man who’d just turned eighty.

In families, attention is directed toward crisis, and during the early spring of 2008, we were all transfixed by my sister Katharine’s health. It was she, not my father, who faced death. Vivacious Katharine, an uncommonly lovely woman—mother and sister and daughter—was anguished by the wildfire spread of metastatic breast cancer. Katharine’s fate had become the family’s “extreme reality,” as Virginia Woolf once put it.

My father played his role most unexpectedly.

“Rachel,” said my mother, shaking my niece’s slack shoulder where she lay snoozing in the guest room, after Mum had headed back upstairs for her morning bath. “Rachel.” My niece opened her eyes, glimpsed an expression of wild vulnerability on my mother’s face, and shot into full awakened consciousness.

“Granddaddy won’t wake up.”

Later that morning, we all received the call, the what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about news that my mother, with Rachel’s astonished assistance, dialed out to the family. But Katharine, one hundred miles east of my parents, in Montréal, received her message differently.

“On the night of my father’s death,” she would tell mourners at his memorial service some weeks later, “I had an extraordinary spiritual experience.” My sister, please know, wasn’t prone to spiritual experiences. Stress, she was familiar with, as the single mother of two teenaged boys. Laughter, she loved. Fitness of any kind—she was vibrantly physical. Fantastic intellect, fluent in three languages. But she hadn’t been paying much attention to God.

“It was about four thirty a.m.,” she said, of that night, “and I couldn’t sleep, as usual, when all of a sudden I began having this amazing spiritual experience. For the next two hours I felt nothing but joy and healing.” There was a quality of light about my sister Katharine, a certain radiance of expression, a melody of voice that hushed every single person in the church—atheist, agnostic, devout. She clutched the podium carefully, determined to be graceful while terminal illness threatened her sense of balance. “I felt hands on my head, and experienced vision after vision of a happy future.”

Katharine had described this strange and lovely predawn experience to her elder son as she drove him to high school, before she received the call about Dad. She also wrote about it in her diary: “I thought, is this about people praying for me? And then I thought of Dad cocking his eyebrow, teasing me about hubris.” She hadn’t known how to interpret the powerful surge of energy and joy she felt in her bedroom—the sense of someone there, the healing hands—until the next day. “I now know that it was my father,” she told the mourners. Flat-out, she said this, without the necessary genuflections to science and to reason, no patience for the usual caveats: Call me crazy, but . . . “I feel deeply, humbly blessed and loved,” she said simply, and sat down.

Astral father, there yet not there. Love flowing unseen. A benign companion of some sort, whose embrace is light but radically moving.

My family is not in the habit of experiencing ghosts. Arriving at my parents’ house on March 19, the day after Dad’s death, I heard about Katharine’s vision for the first time and collapsed to the carpeted floor of the hallway, on the verge of hysterical laughter. My reaction wasn’t derisive so much as surrendered. Reality was vibrating, close to shattering.

“Dad is dead, Dad is dead,” I had muttered for twenty-four hours already, like a child fervently memorizing new instructions about the way of things, crisscrossing the icy park beside my house, pacing back and forth. Dad is dead.

Now Katharine had had a vision.

We took it in as an aftershock. But almost immediately, it began to make profound sense, like puzzle pieces slipping perfectly into place. Without discussing it, we were convinced as a family that he had done something of great emotional elegance. He had died for his daughter. He had seized a mysterious opportunity to go to her, to her bedroom in Montréal, to caress her and calm her before heading on his way.

Later, I learned that this sort of experience when someone has died is startlingly common, not rare, but families shelter their knowledge, keeping it safe and beloved like a delicate heirloom, away from the careless stomp of strangers.

There was much I would learn in the ensuing year about the kept-hidden world all around me, but at the time I understood this much: what a gift this was for Katharine. Waking up over the previous twelve months had meant regaining knowledge of her predicament, which was like an immersive drowning terror in the darkness. How limited we have become, in our euphemistic language, that we speak of patients “battling” cancer, without affording them the Shakespearean enormity of their vulnerability, as if they are pragmatic and detached, marshaling their troops, and nothing like Ophelia, or Lear.

I knew my sister better than anyone else in my life except, perhaps, my children. She was no more or less “brave” than the biblical Jesus when he called out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” She stood keening in the shower the night that the emergency room doctor dispassionately informed her that she had lesions on her brain; she begged an abstracted universe for ten more years to see her sons through school and their own weddings.

Then, suddenly, this astonishment when our father died—not knowing that he’d died—of feeling serene, protected, and joyful. Katharine had watched herself—the future beheld in a mirror, a pool?—as she played with an unborn granddaughter, who she understood to be her teenaged son Graeme’s child, on the floor of her bedroom. A five-month-old baby she knew to be named Katie, this wobbly little creature was trying to sit up straight. In her vision, Katharine was holding up the baby girl’s back, helping her sit and crushing on her sweetness, admiring the wacky little bow in her hair.

“She was beautiful,” Katharine told Graeme, of his distant-future fairy child, when she drove him to his Montréal high school that morning. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Back at the house, the phone rang. My mother, calling to report that our father had died.

A month later, in early April, I flew to Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon. A scan had shown that Katharine’s cancer had spread to her bones, her liver. “Beauty is only the first touch of terror we can still bear,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I read that some time later and thought, Ah.

Along the South Rim of the canyon, flies buzzed about the twitching ears of pack mules as they descended the Bright Angel Trail, hooves stepping lively along the steep traverse a few hundred yards ahead of my husband and me. We leaned reflexively into the cliff wall as we followed the party of mule riders, shrinking back from the empty, falling spaces that seemed almost to pull at us, inviting us to swoon and tumble headlong a thousand feet to our doom.

Were only tourists venturing down this crumbling path, I wondered, or pilgrims, too, intent on humbling themselves, feeling their way with hands scrabbling rock, confessing to having no knowledge of the vastness that engulfed them, lured by that very admission? When a scouting party of conquistadors first set eyes on the canyon in the sixteenth century, they chose to believe their eyes, and thought that the Colorado River in the canyon’s depth was simply a creek, a thread of blue, easily trudged across at knee’s height by their horses. They never did grasp that the canyon was ten miles across, rim to rim, and that the river below coursed as wide as the Nile.

We understand those dimensions now, only because the guidebooks make it plain. We fix our eyes accordingly and, when we spy the river, calculate in relation to what we’ve been told: if that ribbon down there is actually one mile across, then this height is dizzying. We cower into the Supai sandstone. How do we know what is infinite and what is not? What do we trust—our eyes or our instincts, our guidebook or our gut?

My sister’s death was imminent, I felt, perhaps a month away, although she hadn’t been given a prognosis—didn’t want one—and was still working out at the gym, where people were starting to call her “the Lance Armstrong of Montréal.” She certainly looked the part, graceful, agile, and strong. I was acutely aware of her dying, so much so that it seemed to me that the air itself was dangerous to breathe, for each breath demarcated the passage of time. I sensed the clock continuously, how it betrayed me, let go of me, ruined me, and broke my heart with every exhalation.

“It’s not that soon, do you think?” my husband asked uncertainly, hiking beside me, aware of my fear of the cell phone in my pocket, of its ring. Well, yes, it was that soon. I’d done the research. Average time to death after brain metastasis from inflammatory breast cancer: three months. But I was alone with this knowledge, because Katharine’s oncologist wouldn’t say anything out loud that didn’t involve metaphors of war. He was currently engaged in bringing out the “heavy artillery,” as he called it. Shells were exploding in the rain-dark trenches.

My clock felt increasingly internal and intuitive. When you need to read the world differently, when ordinary channels of information are blocked, what then do you do? About a quarter mile down the Bright Angel Trail, we stopped to rest. My husband went off to make sound recordings, a passion of his, and I crouched in the scant shade of an overhanging rock, perched uneasily on the slope. The view from here was altered, for the canyon now towered above me. My tilted chin faced an immense wall of stone, as tall as a skyscraper. A red-tailed hawk circled high above me in the shimmering air. What I saw, I labeled instantly, unconsciously: a bird of prey, a wall of stone, the quick and apprehensive movement of a ground squirrel. Some tourists, French and German, lumbering along, out of breath, their nylon packs a jarring shade of blue. Someone’s dog, trotting; the flies, the mules’ dung. And far away a helicopter’s burr.

Would a Hualapai woman pausing here a few hundred years ago have broken down this vista into its constituent, material parts? Or would she have seen a landscape rich with portent and spirit, where that bird was not just a bird but a song?

“One has never seen the world well,” wrote the metaphysicist Gaston Bachelard, “if he has not dreamed what he was seeing.”

Father dead and sister dying, time to welcome portent and spirit, even while the doctor yacks on about the efficacy of the latest round of chemo.

We climbed out of the canyon, stopping frequently to take sucks of water from the clear plastic tubes jutting out of our newfangled backpacks. As we approached the rim, I noticed a rainbow. A perfect, vivid little crescent rainbow hanging in the desert sky as if a child had placed a decal on a window. It was so incongruous, given the arid climate, that I chose to make note of it, and checked my watch. Just shy of noon. By evening the sun set breathtakingly, spilling colored light into the canyon. From an Adirondack chair on the porch of the El Tovar Lodge, I called Katharine in Montréal on my cell. No answer.

“Kitty-Kat,” I tell her answering machine, “I’m at the rim of the Grand Canyon”—at the end of the world, at the confluence of beauty and terror; here for you, here without you. Katharine, “I’m thinking about you all the time.”

She didn’t respond, my sister. At the hour I saw the rainbow in the desert sky, just shy of noon, she was being admitted to a hospital in Montréal suffering from acute septicemia, being urged by the doctors to scribble a living will.

A week later, I lay entangled with her on her narrow hospital bed at Montréal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, watching CNN on the hanging TV in her curtained-off ward cubicle. In her wisp of a hospital gown, she sipped Pepsi from a straw, bald as an eagle, hands bruised from multiple IV punctures, her legs too pale and slender. My face was tanned from the Arizona sun, while my beautiful sister’s was puffed by steroids and flushed from the blood infection that was slowly being brought under control.

She was finally on morphine, and for the first time a little smile played at the corners of her mouth after a weeklong stretch of pained affliction due to wave after wave of intense headaches, with nothing being offered by the hospital but Tylenol because they were treating her for a blood infection and had lost track of the other medical team who had been treating her for cancer. Katharine’s characteristic grace and composure masked the degree of her suffering from nurses and doctors on ward rotation, until I had a Tasmanian Devil–style tantrum at three in the morning, when the nurse once again said that Tylenol was the only option “allowed.”

So that was where we were, my sister and I, holding hands on her bed and watching coverage of the 2008 U.S. primaries, when her oncologist—finally aware of her existence on this ward being treated for septicemia—came in to break the news that he was transferring her to palliative care. No more chemo. No further radiation. The guns would go silent. It was time, now, he said, to “manage the symptoms.”

Katharine moved to hospice on May 14, 2008. The palliative care physician guessed that she had weeks, at the outside margin. But nobody told her that. She was left to envision a horizon without end, distant or near, bright or dark. She didn’t ask. Instead, she became a peaceful queen presiding over her court as fifty or more friends, relations, and colleagues arrived for one last conversation, a final kiss. The short hallway of the hospice seemed to me to be streaming to and fro with weeping executives in tony suits, and well-heeled women with red-rimmed eyes carrying bottles of Veuve Clicquot. Just one more toast, another laugh.

The hospice nurses were fascinated, as they told me later, for they were more accustomed to small family groups visiting elderly patients in a quiet, off-and-on way. They watched as we cracked open champagne and played Katharine’s favorite...

“The word is out: you don’t die when you die. That’s 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. Pearson’s 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)

“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 an)

“Pearson has brought us something rare: a unique blend of gifted storytelling combined with exhaustive scientific research about dying, grief, and spiritual connectivity. Opening Heaven’s Door leaves us enthralled that death’s mystery may be life’s solution.” (Allan J. Hamilton, MD, author of The Scalpel and the Soul)

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

“Your life is over the moment you die. So I used to believe, with something like religious fervor. And then I read Opening Heaven’s Door, and such is the power and art, the passion and rigor of Patricia Pearson’s writing that I’m not nearly so sure of myself. This is a splendid book in all the ways a book can be splendid. It is a book to be read and re-read and urged upon friends.” (Barbara Gowdy, author of We So Seldom Loo)

“Patricia Pearson’s Opening Heaven’s 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 know—but Pearson provides an unprecedented glimpse.” (Kevin Patterson, award-winning author of)

“‘On the night of my father’s death,’ said the author’s sister at their father’s memorial service, ‘I had an extraordinary spiritual experience.’ How can you put down a book that begins like that? Hardheaded and openhearted, Pearson has brought together riveting accounts of near-death experiences that will shake your assumptions about where life ends, and what death means. For seekers and skeptics alike, Opening Heaven’s Door is profoundly comforting, questing, and wise.” (Marni Jackson, author of Pain: The Fifth)

“This remarkable new book by Patricia Pearson is a rare thing: bringing journalistic rigor to an impossible question... The book succeeds so well because it favors questions over answers, humility over certainty, and (when called for) crunchy ice-breaking humor over earnestness. But mostly it succeeds because of its unabashed concern with love, as it’s experienced not just by those at heaven’s door, but by the human tribe that’s inevitably left behind when someone dies. Love, too, is a mystery that changes us.” (The Globe & Mail)

“A wide-ranging account of discoveries and evolving understanding about life, death, the afterlife, and the true dimensions of consciousness. Numerous firsthand accounts, observations and results of scientific research provide a readable primer on psi phenomena, significantly expanding our understanding of the realities of our existence.” (Light of Consciousness magazine)

“Readers will be humbled and filled with a sense of hope rather than fear as they realize that the deaths of loved ones, or even their own deaths, are not losses, but simply transitions. A fascinating and candid analysis of the process of dying.” (Kirkus Reviews)