Proof of Heaven

to tell me it was okay? For comfort was, indeed, what the NDE subject’s
friends or family who greeted them were most often intent on conveying.
I longed for that comfort. And yet I hadn’t received it.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t received any words of comfort at all, of course.
I had, from the Girl on the Butterfly Wing. But wonderful and angelic as
this girl was, she was no one I knew. Having seen her every time I entered
that idyllic valley on the wing of a butterfly, I remembered her face
perfectly—so much so that I knew I had never met her in my life, at least
my life on earth. And in NDEs it was often the meeting with a known
earthly friend or relation that sealed the deal for the people who had
undergone these experiences.
Try as I did to brush it off, this fact introduced an element of doubt
into my thoughts on what it all meant. It wasn’t that I doubted what had
happened to me. That was impossible, and I’d have just as soon doubted
my marriage to Holley or my love for my kids. But the fact that I had
traveled to the beyond without meeting my father, and met my beautiful
companion on the butterfly wing, whom I didn’t know, still troubled me.
Given the intensely emotional nature of my relationship to my family,
my feelings of lack of worth because I had been given away, why hadn’t
that all-important message—that I was loved, that I would never be
thrown away—been delivered by someone I knew? Someone like . . . my
dad?
For in fact, “thrown away” was, on a deep level, how I had indeed felt
all through my life—in spite of all the best efforts of my family to heal
that feeling through their love. My Dad had often told me not to be overly
concerned about whatever had happened to me before he and Mom had
picked me up at the children’s home. “You wouldn’t remember anything
that happened to you that early anyhow,” he’d said. And in that he’d been
wrong. My NDE had convinced me that there is a secret part of ourselves
that is recording every last aspect of our earthly lives, and that this
recording process commences at the very, very beginning. So on a
precognitive, preverbal level, I’d known all through my life that I’d been
given away, and on a deep level I was still struggling to forgive that fact.
As long as this question remained open, there would remain a