31-08-2016, 11:22 AM
1451664998-afterlifebilly.pdf (Size: 1.97 MB / Downloads: 12)
FOREWORD
This fascinating book may initially surprise and baffle
some readers. After all, the events it recounts may
seem completely unbelievable and far beyond reality.
Therefore, I am grateful to Dr. Kagan for asking me to
write this foreword, because it gives me an opportunity
to talk about one of my favorite subjects—the incredible
world of the ancient Greek philosophers.
The average American will probably find Dr.
Kagan’s narrative of her other-worldly adventures
with a deceased brother hard to believe. That is too
bad, though, because the Greek philosophers who
founded Western thought knew full well about the
remarkable phenomenon she describes. In fact, Greek
philosophers even had a name for the people who
were somehow suspended between this life and the
next life. They called such people “walkers between
the worlds.”
The walkers between the worlds had important
social functions. As the early Greek philosopher
Heraclitus put it, they “watch over the living and the
dead.” In about 600 BCE, one of the earliest of these
figures, Aithalides, was reputed to be able to pass back
and forth at will between the physical world and the
afterlife world. In Ancient Greece, walkers between
the worlds served functions that in modern Western
society are carried out by individuals who have neardeath
experiences. Specifically, they were mediators,
intermediaries, or messengers between the realm of
the living and the realm of the dead.
x
The philosopher Menippus was another famous
walker between the worlds. Menippus visited the
afterlife dimension, returned, and then wrote a book
about his journey. Menippus was sent back from the
afterworld and charged with the task of monitoring
what was happening among humans on earth. Then
he would report back to his superiors in the world
beyond to keep them apprised of humanity’s progress.
Menippus dressed the part. He sported an
incredibly long gray beard and wore a long gray
cloak tied at the waist with a scarlet sash. He carried
a wooden staff carved from an ash tree. He wore a
strange hat inscribed with the signs of the Zodiac. He
was serious about his mission.
The experiences Dr. Kagan relates are completely
consistent with the kind of role walkers between the
worlds played in antiquity. And that is no surprise
to me. I think that such experiences are part of the
collective psychological heritage of humankind—not
artifacts of any one culture.
I suspect there are plenty of other people like
Dr. Kagan. However, Westerners have developed an
utterly false impression that experiences like hers are
impossible—or even pathological. Hence, the many
people to whom such things happen simply don’t
report them for fear of being judged or ridiculed.
Accordingly, I salute Dr. Kagan for her courage in
writing this book.
In 2006, I conducted a seminar on grief for
professionals and hospice workers. A middle-aged
businesswoman who worked for the organization
xi
asked me about something that happened to her
when she was almost killed. She was severely injured
in a car crash and left her body at the scene. She
immediately saw an old man in a gray robe standing
beside the road. The man had an extremely long gray
beard, carried a staff, and wore an odd hat. And she
felt he was there to carry her across to the afterworld.
Incidentally, I hadn’t mentioned Menippus or other
walkers between the worlds during my presentation.
The woman spontaneously related her experiences out
of her own curiosity. I suspect such encounters have
been with us for thousands of years and no doubt
occur to quite a few individuals.
Dr. Kagan’s thought-provoking account is an
excellent example.
The First Thing That
Happens
The Miami Dade Police left a message on my
answering machine at nine in the morning. “If
you know William Cohen, please contact Sergeant
Diaz at 305 . . . ”
Oh no! Billy must have been arrested. Not prison.
Not again. Not this late in his life.
It still made me queasy to think about the time
my brother was arrested almost thirty years ago; the
thud of the gavel, the words “twenty-five years to
life,” my mother crying in my arms, begging the
judge to change his mind. The day I watched the
police handcuff Billy and drag him off to Sing Sing
for selling cocaine was probably the worst day of
my life.
I was shaking when I punched in the phone
number of the Miami Police.
“This is William Cohen’s sister. Has he been
arrested?”
“No,” Sergeant Diaz said in a soft voice. “He was
hit by a car at two-thirty this morning. I’m sorry. Your
brother is dead.”
6
My heart went cold. Dead? My head spun. I was
dizzy. I reached for a chair and sat down.
“What happened?”
“William was coming from the emergency room
at South Miami Hospital. He was drunk and ran out
onto the highway,” the sergeant reported.
“Were you there?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I was called to the accident scene.”
“Was Billy injured?” Injured? What am I thinking?
He’d been run over by a car! “I mean, was he taken to
the hospital?”
“No, ma’am. Your brother never knew what hit
him. Died instantly. Didn’t suffer at all.”
Died instantly? Didn’t suffer? How on earth could he
know that? The sergeant was trying to cushion the blow,
but it wasn’t working.
“William was wearing a hospital ID bracelet. We
got your name and phone number from their records.”
So that’s how they found me! Billy always wrote me
in as his “in case of emergency” person.
Sergeant Diaz cleared his throat. “Listen, ma’am,
you don’t have to identify the body. The bracelet is
good enough. Better to remember him as you do now.”
Better to remember him as you do now? Oh my God!
The sergeant must have heard me start to cry,
because the next thing he said was, “It’s kind of against
regulations, but if you give me your address I’ll send
you the things your brother had on him.”
Since I didn’t have to view Billy’s post-accident
body, there was no reason to fly from New York to
7
Miami. By the time my sixty-two-year-old brother
died, he was homeless, so everything he owned was
in his pockets. My brother had left things neat and
tidy for me—not like when he was alive. What I had
worried about for years had now happened. Billy was
dead.
I called Billy’s drug counselor at South Miami
Hospital. Eddie’s voice was edgy.
“Billy showed up at the ER last night, high and
coughing up blood. He wanted to be admitted to the
hospital so when the nurse told him he’d have to go to
the detox unit instead, he got belligerent, picked up
a chair, and threatened her. She called the cops, Billy
ran out, and, you know the rest. Your brother just
didn’t trust his Higher Power. I’m really disappointed
in him.”
Disappointed? Billy was dead. And Eddie was
disappointed? I hung up on him and threw the phone
across the room to get his words as far away from me
as I could.
Oh God, Billy is dead! My body ached so much I
felt like I was the one who’d been run over. I got into
bed with my clothes still on and pulled the covers over
my head. Then I remembered the incredibly strange
thing I’d done the day before.
Although we hadn’t spoken in months, for the
last week I’d been thinking obsessively about Billy.
This was unusual because trying not to think about
Billy was a survival tactic I began practicing in fourth
grade. As a little girl, I adored my big brother, but
8
I was always afraid something terrible was going to
happen to him. Billy was constantly in trouble. I
didn’t really know what “trouble” meant, but when
the trouble got bad, he would be sent away to some
mysterious place. And when the trouble got really
bad, my parents didn’t even know where to find him.
In fourth grade my parents explained that the
trouble Billy was in was something called “heroin
addiction.” To distance myself from my anxiety, I
began practicing the art of cold-heartedness.
All these years later, the week before he died, no
matter how cold-hearted I tried to be, I couldn’t stop
thinking about Billy. Living alone in a small, secluded
house on the Long Island shore and working at home
didn’t help. I tried to distract myself from my angst
by keeping to my routine—up by six, feed the cats,
meditate, walk by the bay, make lunch, go to work in
my music studio writing songs.
Sitting at my electric keyboard, all I could think
about was Billy. I wanted to phone him, hear his
voice, tell him I loved him, help him in some way.
But I didn’t know how to reach him. Part of me was
afraid to reach him. I was sure he was in bad shape.
The day before Billy died, a bitterly cold January
morning, I layered on two sweaters, a down jacket,
and two wool hats and ventured into the raw air. I
walked across the frozen brown leaves, through the
bare winter woods, and climbed down the wooden
staircase that led to the bay. I never ask God for
favors, but that morning I looked up at the silvery
9
sky, raised my arms, and imagined pushing Billy into
the hands of the great Divine. “Take care of him for
me,” I whispered.
Hours later, Billy was dead.
The next few days I stayed in bed, unable to do
anything but drink tea. They say there are different
stages of grief—shock, guilt, anger, depression. But
all those feelings collided and came crashing in on me
at once.
My friend Tex stopped by to see how I was
doing. “It’s weird,” I told her. “It’s not like I’m sad,
exactly. I feel like a voodoo doll with pins stuck in me
everywhere.”
I had given Tex her flashy nickname because she
was five-foot-eleven, dark-haired, angular, and partial
to cowboy boots. Even though she looked tough, she
was kind and always thought about what she said
before she said it.
“Oh, honey,” Tex said, taking my hand, “That’s
grief.” Tex would know. She lost her older brother,
Pat, in a plane crash when she was just a teenager.
Three days after Billy’s death a monster storm
moved through Long Island. I pushed the foot of my
bed up against the window and watched the blizzard
tear up the world outside. Billy loved wild, turbulent
weather, and as the storm obscured everything, I felt
a kind of satisfaction. The snow was “whiting out”
my world, just as death had “whited out” Billy’s.
I’ve always believed something exists beyond death,
but what that something was, I had no idea. As the
10
wind screamed through my windows, I was sure it
was Billy’s spirit, making his usual racket, knocking
around the sky, trying to find his way.
The storm passed and the winds subsided. I spent
my days mostly in bed, crying. The rest of the time I
was swallowing Valium until I was a walking zombie.
My long, dark, wavy hair was lank and uncombed, my
eyes puffed into slits, my skin haggard. I didn’t look
forty-something anymore, I looked a hundred—and
that was okay with me, because every time I saw myself
in the mirror the verdict was always the same: guilty.
Over the last few years I had done everything I
could to help Billy: hospitals, rehabs, psychiatrists,
methadone clinics. Nothing worked. His struggle
became a black hole that sucked me into his chaos. I
came down with a different ailment every other week
and saw one doctor after another. Finally, I pleaded
with him, “I can’t take this anymore! Please stop
calling me!” But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Then, instead
of talking, we were mostly crying and screaming at
each other. One day he did stop calling. And now he
was gone.
Three weeks of post-death misery and selfrecrimination
later, it was my birthday. Just before
sunrise, as I was waking up, I heard someone calling
my name from above me.
Annie! Annie! It’s me! It’s me! It’s Billy!
It was Billy’s unmistakable deep, mellow voice.
I was startled,