Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

  *There is, of course, disagreement as to whether they are actually traveling somewhere or simply experiencing a vivid hallucination; a good discussion of this can be found in the Skeptical Inquirer article by Susan Blackmore listed in the bibliography. Blackmore, a parapsychologist turned skeptic, has had out-of-body experiences of her own, which you can read about on the website of TASTE, The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences.

  *That is, in the near-death journals. You can find them in certain fundamentalist Christian publications. I read that in the February 1990 issue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network newsletter Praise the Lord, there’s an article about scientists drilling in Siberia and suddenly poking through to a hollow space from which issued screams and temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees. I spoke to a woman in the newsletter department at TBN, who apologized for not being able to send out pre-2003 back issues. “We disregard them every year,” she explained confusingly. “We shred them.”

  *And now I must reveal to you that Wes is not a defibrillator insertion patient in Charlottesville, but in San Francisco, near where I live. The human subjects committee for Greyson’s study would not allow me in the operating room. So I called UCSF Medical Center, who kindly let me observe an insertion. My apologies to the reader, and my thanks to UCSF Medical Center (number six on U.S. News & World Report’s 2004 list of the nation’s best hospitals). And to the unconscious Wes, who later wrote and apologized for “not having been more sociable.”

  Last Words

  SOMEWHERE THIS past year, I read that the most powerful influences upon your opinion about paranormal phenomena are your friends and family. The closer you are to the teller of a ghost story, the more likely you are to believe that the ghost in the story was a ghost, and not a raccoon or a temporal lobe seizure. Your beliefs are formed not by researchers or debunkers or television psychics, unless perhaps one of them is your mother or your good pal. Your beliefs are formed by your own experiences and those of your inner circle. And then validated by the researchers or the debunkers or the television psychics.

  Now that you’ve spent 275 pages with me, I suppose I almost fall into the category of a friend, or anyway, someone that you know. And you might be wondering what it is, at this point, I believe. Has my year among the evidence-gatherers left me believing in anything I didn’t believe in a year ago? It has. It has left me believing something Bruce Greyson believes. I had asked him whether he believes that near-death experiences provide evidence of a life after death. He answered that what he believed was simply that they were evidence of something we can’t explain with our current knowledge. I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago.

  Perhaps I’m confusing knowledge and belief. When I say I believe something, I mean I know it. But maybe belief is more subtle. A leaning, not a knowing. Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people who’ll tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know that the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing. I remember once standing in the kitchen of my friend Tim, having a conversation about organic milk. I explained, in my usual overagitated, long-winded way, why I wasn’t yet convinced of the need to part with an extra dollar a quart. I didn’t believe in organic milk. Tim, who buys organic milk, listened to me for a while, and then he shrugged. “It’s just a decision,” he said. In other words, you don’t have to go out and read every published paper on antibiotics and bovine growth hormone, weighing those that speak for milk’s safety against those that warn of its dangers, before you can decide to believe in buying organic. You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination.

  Perhaps I should believe in a hereafter, in a consciousness that zips through the air like a Simpsons rerun, simply because it’s more appealing—more fun and more hopeful—than not believing. The debunkers are probably right, but they’re no fun to visit a graveyard with. What the hell. I believe in ghosts.

  Acknowledgments

  PEOPLE ASSUME that authors are experts in the field about which they have chosen to write. Possibly most are. Possibly I’m the only one who begins a project from a state of near absolute ignorance. But I do, and it makes me an especially irksome presence in my sources’ lives. I ask naive, misguided questions and giggle at the wrong moments. I stay too long and grasp too little. The following names are listed in order of diminishing exasperation: Kirti Rawat, Bruce Greyson, Gerry Nahum, Gary Schwartz, Michael Persinger, Julie Beischel, Vic Tandy, Allison DuBois, Grant Sperry, and Karl Jansen, please accept my thanks for your patience and generosity and my apologies for the limits of my experience and the blind spots of my mindset.

  For miscellaneous offerings of wisdom and arcane fact, a formal bow to Jürgen Altmann, Peter Copeland, Marco Falconi, Jürgen Graaff, Lew Hollander, Jr., Nan Knight, Greg Laing, Anne LeVeque, His Excellency Pasquale Macchi, Peggy Pearl, Dean Radin, Eric Ravussin, Colleen Phelan, Julie Rousseau, Michael Sabom, Pim van Lommel, and Valerie Wheat. A tip of the hat to Kim Wong, Susan Grizzle, and Wes Lange, who got me into the operating room and out of a logistical pickle; to everyone at the Grotto; and to the ever-miraculous interlibrary loan staff of the San Francisco Public Library.

  Lester, Ruby Jean, and Lloyd Blackwelder must have their own paragraph, because they not only helped me and trusted me with their story, they practically adopted me. If I could bake, I’d send you a persimmon pie.

  I hesitate to thank Jay Mandel as my agent, because that is only one of the many hats I force him to wear on my behalf: reader, advisor, hand-holder, career counselor. You make it all easy. Similarly indispensable guidance and good humor came from Jill Bialosky, who has the gall to be as gifted an editor as she is a writer. The two of you have taken me on an incredible trip, for which I am deeply, unabashedly grateful.

  A book is a collective undertaking, and this one, like the last, benefited tremendously from the talents of Bill Rusin and the rest of the Norton sales staff, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Erin Sinesky, and Jamie Keenan, whose covers make my heart fizz.

  And then there is Ed, to whom every mushy cliché applies and none does justice.

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  Chapter 8: Can You Hear Me Now?

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