Seeing Beyond: An Unexpected Encounter with the Afterlife

Has anyone else seen “dead people” before? Yes, a bold introduction, but I feel like we need to share these experiences. Seeing someone after they died was particularly terrifying for me, as I used to be very comfortable with being an atheist. The experience shook me to my core, and then I thought, “Hallelujah, maybe that’s not all there is?” Has anyone else had an experience like this?

For me, it was my father whom I saw—just a see-through head. Yes, that was terrifying. In fact, I was so scared that I shouted, “I love you, but please go, as you are scaring me!” Something I quickly regretted when the floating, see-through, and talking head of my father left the premises.

I wasn’t under the influence of wine coolers, Smirnoff Ice (that’s what 15-year-olds drank), or any other mind-altering substance. It just happened. At first, I didn’t believe it until a random encounter with a psychic confirmed it. This encounter happened because my older sister, who is bossy, dragged me along to take notes with a psychic.

The psychic started the session and right away said, “Is this person next to you your sister?” In my mind, I was mockingly clapping, saying, “Bravo, psychic, you guessed we were sisters.” Although we don’t look related, so I ended up giving her a few points for what I thought could be a good guess. Maybe it was the sister-to-sister fear in my eyes that if I missed any points, I would get my hair pulled.

So she established we were sisters. She then proceeded to say that our deceased father was here with her and he wanted to talk to me. I looked around like… he wants to talk to little old “moi” when my sister is the one who booked the session? The psychic said, “Your father wants to say sorry for scaring you at the end of the bed that night, but he wanted to say goodbye as he never got to.” I must have turned 50 shades of white. How would she know that? No one knew that. I had just put the whole dead person floating head experience into the temporary insanity part of my life. She was either reading my mind or she was talking with my dead father. Either way, I was like, “Very nice, lady, very nice.” How did she do this? It was so exciting.

For context, my dad and I had been living together after my parents divorced for maybe a year or so. He was my whole world, and it was just he and I. He was diagnosed with lung cancer, and two months later, after hopeless treatments, he was gone. In the very end, I wasn’t able to be there, as he told me he was going to be fine, as dads might do, and didn’t want me to see the worst of that brutal form of cancer. So my last memory was waving goodbye to him as he left in an ambulance to another cancer specialist hospital hours away, crying my eyes out as I begged to come along, and he said, “No, no, I’ll see you in a week,” with a brave half-smile. Looking back, I knew he knew, but I wanted to believe him.

Those sorts of encounters make the end of life seem a little less doomsday and more hopeful. That’s what I think. I would love to hear what you all think and to hear more stories. I’ll get the popcorn…