I grew up in a home where science was the way. We believed in science. Science told us that the story of Christ was just a fairy tale. And Dad told me that believing otherwise made me an imbecile. But still, I longed to have faith. I joined a bible study for a while, but Dad was relentless in his insistence that I was just a brainwashed dweeb and finally I relented.
Many years later, I heard the word “Narcissist” for the first time. But it would be another decade before I realized that it applied to Dad. Turns out, it was not that I was always wrong, it was that Dad’s belief in himself always being right is considered a mental illness. He was the one with the problem, not me. At least I hoped, and still hope, that, that part of his personality did not rub off on me too much. My wife reports that I seem to have a need to always be right. Ugh.
The Evidence is All Around Us
Many years have gone by since the last time I searched for faith. Lately, I have been attempting to syncretize my vision of the world we live in, my view of religion, in general, and things I have witnessed that do not fit my Dad-defined paradigm.
My wife and I have two Golden Retrievers. We have volunteered with a local Golden Retriever Rescue organization for 18 years.
Various poets in the 1980s and 1990s are credited with the description of the Rainbow Bridge, a place where pets go when they die to wait for their owners. It is a paradise of sunshine, fresh food, and water, where the animal is restored to full health. They can run and play and generally have fun while they wait patiently at the bridge for their owners to join them. Even I, as a non-believer found comfort in that description.
To date, we have had 5 Golden Retrievers call our home their forever home, and 33 more Golden Retrievers who stayed with us in foster care for 2 weeks to 6 months with the average being about 2 months. As of this writing, 3 of the 5, have gone to the Rainbow Bridge: Cody on 1/5/2009 at the age of 13 years and 5 weeks; Jasper on 4/14/2017 at the age of 14.5 years; and Amos on 4/15/2019 at the age of 14.5 years. Cooper (11) and Luke (3) live with us now.
Over the years, since Cody left, the dogs often pause and stare off into space, wagging their tails, and often barking. They will be looking at a spot where one of the deceased dogs used to lay. It can get fairly eerie at times. I swear that dogs can see beyond the life / death barrier. Cooper never met Cody. Cooper came to call our home, his home, long after Cody had already passed. Yet Cooper knows Cody’s favorite spots and will stand and stare and bark and wag his tail at those spots in our home. None of our dogs, ever, exhibit this behavior with any of our previous foster dogs — even those that stayed with us the longest. So, I have been asking myself lately…. is it possible? Could there be life after death? Can dogs see beyond the life / death barrier? Even if a Supreme Being does not exist, that does not preclude the possibility of life after death.
I think of it this way. A caterpillar crawls into a cocoon to start its metamorphosis to become a butterfly. The caterpillar doing what instinct tells it to, for all practical purposes thinks – assuming for the moment that it can ‘think’ — that it is dying when it creates this cocoon around itself. The caterpillar knows it is the end. The caterpillar does not know about the butterfly. But the butterfly knows it was not the end. And the butterfly knows about the caterpillar. Many animals undergo a metamorphosis. Why not humans? Perhaps death is just the metamorphosis to something better, or something else. Perhaps life goes on.
I have made a breakthrough. I am starting to believe that life after death is, indeed, possible. I see signs of it all around if I am patient enough to pay attention.