#54 — Does It Take Almost Dying to Start Living Differently?

Months into a stay at a rehab hospital, with both arms and both legs broken, the caller found out the crystal they always carried in their pocket had been sitting in their bedside drawer the whole time. They couldn’t reach for it. Their best friend, who ran physical therapy there, handed it to them. That night they had the most vivid dream of the morning of the wreck: pulling away from the house, making one stop, and realizing inside the dream that they knew what came next.

They were 29. The driver, someone they had met that weekend to travel to a wedding, was killed. The caller has no memory of the wreck itself. What they remember is everyone telling them God must have spared them for something, when they were already asking it themselves: I’m still here. Thank God. What does he expect me to do now? Their life before was a good one, and they say so plainly. Still, it turned. They borrowed a term from combat veterans and call that day their alive day. They celebrate two birthdays, and at some point they realized they had lived longer after the wreck than before it.

Humor was there long before any of it. As a toddler, they told jokes at family funerals so people could laugh. Decades later, during their dad’s 20 days in hospice, they could still hear him chuckle. In their words, if you can laugh while you’re in hospice, your life has been pretty spectacular.

They’re an electrical engineer by training, and they think about death in terms of energy, which can’t be destroyed and only changes form. As a kid in the Methodist church, they wanted to know where their soul was before they were born, and no one could tell them. They’ll admit they can’t prove anything, but they don’t believe the antecedent of the pronoun “I” disappears when the body stops. Their faith widened into theosophy, an interfaith seminary, and eventually ordination. It started with a free lecture at a psychic fair, given by a woman with “Reverend” in front of her name, titled “All the voices inside your head aren’t yours.”

Before the wreck, they say, their thoughts about death were about seeking afterlife insurance. After it, the focus moved to making sure this life is the best it can be.

Topics covered (sidebar, under the episode image)

• 08:58 Jokes at funerals and laughter in hospice

• 10:47 Energy, physics, and what continues after death

• 15:30 Reincarnation and life as a series of lessons

• 19:22 From Methodism to theosophy and ordination

• 27:14 The wreck, the dream, and an alive day

• 48:10 From afterlife insurance to living this life well

Related episodes

• Anonymous #37 — Can Faith Change What It's Like to Be With Someone Who Is Dying?

• Anonymous #45 — How Would You Know If a Message From the Dead Was Real?

• Anonymous #51 — Why Does Talking About Death Sound So Woo-Woo?

Book recommendation: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. See the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here.

Video Episode: If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

Live Q&A: On October 15 at 5:30PM PDT, I’m doing my first-ever live Q&A on Substack. Ask me anything. You can send questions ahead of time by text, email, Substack or Instagram. Add it to your calendar here.

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