by Annie Kagan
Praise for
The Afterlife of Billy Fingers
“The Afterlife of Billy Fingers is an extraordinary example of extended after-death communication. It's one of the most powerful, liberating, and healing books on ‘life after death’ I've ever read. In fact, you may have a spiritual experience while reading it that will transform your beliefs about life, death, and the afterlife. I cannot recommend it highly enough to everyone who is grieving the death of a child, spouse, parent, or any other loved one.”
—Bill Guggenheim, co-author of Hello from Heaven!
“Having read The Afterlife of Billy Fingers, this world appears more deeply drenched in the sacred, and death feels like an adventure to look forward to. In this quirky, luminous account of the conversation between an introspective artistic woman and her dead bad-boy brother, Annie Kagan and Billy Fingers manage to collaborate on a work of transcendent wisdom, irreverent humor and sublime beauty.”
—Mirabai Starr, author of The Interior Castle and Dark Night of the Soul
“The Afterlife of Billy Fingers by Annie Kagan is a wholly believable story that never loses its grounding in the daily life we all know. The voices of the narrator and her deceased brother never strike a false note. This is not a story that asks you to believe anything, but simply to listen with an open mind and heart. I think you will find yourself transfixed.”
—Rev. Susan Varon, ordained interfaith minister
“The Afterlife of Billy Fingers is one of the best books I've read on the subject of life after death. So much of what the author describes jives with my experiences of both being with dying people at the moment of their deaths and in two long, extended near death experiences I've had myself. The book strikes chords of truth again and again and again. The excellent writing and the story itself hold the reader's attention beautifully. Skeptics will keep reading to ‘find out what happens next.’ And whether you're a skeptic or a true believer, the book will powerfully engage you. Part of the book's premise is Annie's questioning whether her communication with Billy is real or her own craziness, and that mystery keeps us reading and seeking answers. We want to find out for ourselves what the source of this communication really is. Along the way, what Billy tells Annie is inspiring, enlightening, and insightful. The book works. It's a good read with an appealing and controversial message.”
—Hal Zina Bennett, author of more than 30 books including Write from the Heart and The Lens of Perception
Copyright © 2013 by Annie Kagan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Hampton Roads Publishing, Inc. Reviewers may quote brief passages.
Cover design by www.levanfisherdesign.com/Barbara Fisher
Cover photo by Irving Cohen, edited by Justin Smith
Interior designed by StanInfo
Lyrics from Mahler's Eighth Symphony reprinted with permission from William Zauscher, YouTube, accessed September 6, 2008.
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Charlottesville, VA 22906
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ISBN: 978-1-57174-694-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request
Printed on acid-free paper in Canada
F
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To S.M.
I will forever love you
To my brother Steve
The Super Royal Radiant King
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Part One: Still Billy
One: The First Thing That Happens
Two: Still Billy
Three: The Divine Nature of All Things
Four: They Can't Take That Away from Me
Five: Ain't No Sunshine Without the Sun
Six: Hologram
Seven: Rescue Mission
Eight: First the Pleasures, Then the Pestilence
Nine: Billy-Dust
Ten: Vincent
Eleven: More Proof
Part Two: Even the Soul Changes
Twelve: Becoming the Universe
Thirteen: Two Universes Passing in the Light
Fourteen: I Don't Know
Fifteen: New Body
Sixteen: Blue-White Sphere
Seventeen: Quantum
Eighteen: Supra World
Nineteen: Saga of the Pearl and the Oyster
Twenty: Book of Life
Twenty-One: Soul Tribes
Twenty-Two: Patty Malone
Twenty-Three: Cosmic Sound
Twenty-Four: The Billy Box
Twenty-Five: Tex
Twenty-Six: The Grace Coin
Twenty-Seven: Stream of Life
Twenty-Eight: Sacred Scripture
Twenty-Nine: The Funeral
Part Three: From Soul to Spirit
Thirty: The Death of Memories
Thirty-One: Shvara Lohana
Thirty-Two: Parade of Souls
Thirty-Three: The Archway
Thirty-Four: Golden Lotus Cave
Thirty-Five: White Light Brothers
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.
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 k
ind 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 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.
Dr. Raymond Moody
This is a true story. Some names, places, and other identifying details have been changed to protect individual privacy. The timing of some events has been compressed to facilitate the telling of the story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my friends Steve Wander, Caroline Fierro, Brian Keane, Laura Stein, Bobbi Shapiro, Jessica Gormley, Anna Kiersnowska, Eve Eliot, Cathy Gandell, Ruth Washton, Sophie LaPaire, and Pamela Millman.
Gratitude to my book angels, Dr. Raymond Moody, Mirabai Starr, Elise D’Haene, Katharine Sands, Hal Zina Bennett, Howard Kaplan, Stacey Donovan, Michele D’Ermo, Teresa Kennedy, Ashley Womble, Jillen Lowe, and Sallie Randolph.
Thank you Deena Feinberg for my author photo, Justin Smith for his magic on Billy's cover photo, and William Zauscher for permitting me to use his magnificent translation of the lyrics to Mahler's Eighth Symphony.
Blessings to Barbara, Danielle, and Samantha from Poppy Bill, and to the rest of the crew, Mems, Rocco, JimBob, Leslie, and Steven.
Special thanks for joining me on this odyssey to Michele Tempesta, Ann Patty, Claire Gerus, Jill Mangino, Tex, Stephen Gorad, my publisher Jan Johnson and the team at RWW, and to the Cherry Boy, je t’adore.
All my love to my family: my mother, Florence, whose dark beauty and goddess-like strength have taken up residence as the lioness of my heart; my father, Irving, my handsome, charming Rhett Butler, who always looked at me like I was the greatest miracle on earth; and Billy, my bad-boy-Buddha-brother.
Part One
Still Billy
ONE
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.”
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 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 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 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 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.