Proof of Heaven

Kübler-Ross book On Life After Death when I came to a story about a
twelve-year-old girl who underwent an NDE and at first didn’t tell her
parents about it. Finally, however, she could no longer keep it to herself
and confided in her father. She told him about traveling to an incredible
landscape full of love and beauty, and how she met and was comforted by
her brother.
“The only problem,” the girl told her father, “is that I don’t have a
brother.”
Tears filled her father’s eyes. He told the girl about the brother she did
indeed have, but who had died just three months before she was born.
I stopped reading. For a moment I went into a strange, dazed space,
not really thinking or not thinking, just . . . absorbing something. Some
thought that was right on the edge of my consciousness but hadn’t quite
broken through.
Then my eyes traveled over to the bureau, and the photo that Kathy
had sent me. The photo of the sister I had never known. Whom I knew
only through the stories that my birth family had related of what a hugely
kind, wonderfully caring person she had been. A person, they had often
said, who was so kind she was practically an angel.
Without the powder blue and indigo dress, without the heavenly light
of the Gateway around her as she sat on the beautiful butterfly wing, she
wasn’t easy to recognize at first. But that was only natural. I had seen her
heavenly self—the one that lived above and beyond this earthly realm,
with all its tragedies and cares.
But now there was no mistaking her, no mistaking the loving smile,
the confident and infinitely comforting look, the sparkling blue eyes.
It was she.
For an instant, the worlds met. My world here on earth, where I was a
doctor and father and a husband. And that world out there—a world so
vast that as you journeyed in it you could lose your very sense of your
earthly self and become a pure part of the cosmos, the God-soaked and
love-filled darkness.
In that one moment, in the bedroom of our house, on a rainy Tuesday
morning, the higher and the lower worlds met. Seeing that photo made