Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Raymond Moody
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Conclusion
Copyright
RAYMOND MOODY, MD, PHD, is the bestselling author of twelve books. His seminal work, Life After Life, has completely changed the way we view death and dying, and has sold over 13 million copies worldwide. Called “the father of the near-death experience” by the New York Times, Dr. Moody has researched a variety of paranormal experiences, from ghost sightings to past lives. Dr. Moody received his medical degree from the College of Georgia and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Virginia, where he also received his MA and BA. For more information visit his website: www.lifeafterlife.com.
PAUL PERRY has co-written four New York Times bestsellers and is a documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared internationally on television. This is the fifth book he has written with Dr. Moody. For more information, visit his website: www.paulperryproductions.com.
Few people have the opportunity to single-handedly change the face of medicine, but that is precisely what Dr Raymond Moody did when he published his classic work, Life After Life, in 1975. In it, he introduced the concept of the Near Death Experience, or NDE, and opened up a whole new field of research. With over 13 million copies sold, Life After Life changed the way we think about dying, and Dr Moody has been at the forefront of investigations into life after death ever since. He has gone on to examine virtually every aspect of the paranormal as it relates to a better understanding of the human spirit.
Now, for the first time, Dr Moody has agreed to share his remarkable story. In Paranormal, he recalls his pioneering research into phenomena such as NDEs, reincarnation, hauntings and ghosts. Compellingly honest, he also reveals deeply personal aspects of his own life, including his battle with a debilitating disease that nearly drove him to suicide. By turns moving, entertaining and revelatory, Paranormal charts one of the most intriguing minds of our time.
Other books by Raymond Moody:
Life After Life
Reflections on Life After Life
Life After Loss
The Light Beyond
Reunited
Glimpses of Eternity
With love to my family
—Raymond Moody
I HAVE STUMBLED onto many things in my life, and through this brief loss of stride I have found the world that I live in. It was through a student in my philosophy class who began to question me deeply about his own experience of almost dying that I studied and named the phenomenon known as the near-death experience. Had I not allowed the student to dominate my time with his story, I might have never examined near-death experiences, a path of discovery that led me to write Life After Life and led to my lifelong exploration of matters related to the afterlife.
Had I not, literally, stumbled into a bookshelf and been hit on the head by an old book of research by Northcote Thomas, I would not have begun researching the fascinating world of facilitated visions. It is through this line of research that I have been able to re-create many aspects of the near-death experience in patients without them having to almost die. Better yet, I have been able to ease the grief of losing a loved one by helping people to see and otherwise interact with their dead relatives.
And then there are past-life regressions. I tripped into that field of endeavor after listening to a patient who’d gone back in time while engaging in an ordinary session of hypnotherapy.
These are all fields of endeavor that I have gratefully stumbled into. And yes, I believe Mark Twain when he said, “Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.”
Sometimes, though, I have just stumbled. And the worst of these stumbles have been the result of a disease that clouded everything for me, from my physical senses to my sense of humor to my sense of the world around me. From my late twenties until now, I have lived with a disease called myxedema. This is a difficult affliction to diagnose. Simply stated, with this disease the thyroid gland does not produce enough thyroxine, a hormone that acts in our body something like the volume dial on a radio. The result of this disease is a variety of peculiar symptoms that can lead to myxedema madness, in which the afflicted person gradually loses his mind.
Although myxedema seems as though it should be an easy disease to diagnose, it isn’t. Residual thyroid in the bloodstream can trick test instruments into “false positive” readings, which make thyroid levels seem normal when they are not. As a result, my thyroid levels have been erratic over the years, and at times nonexistent. These have been the times when I stumbled the most. At times when my thyroid levels have been low, I have made major mistakes in judgment: given control of my financial life to people I shouldn’t have; found myself in mental hospitals; worn thick woolen coats in the middle of a Georgia summer because I was terribly cold; locked myself in my house and refused to come out because I thought the world was against me. I could go on and on.
Over the years I have kept this condition quiet—or as quiet as I possibly could—thinking that it might affect the perception of me or my work. But now I have become wiser about my illness and its effects on my persona. Instead of working against me, it has made me more empathic and understanding of those who are faced with end-of-life issues. It has also made me look at illness as an altered state that changes our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us as much as, say, an out-of-body experience or even a near-death experience. Like those and other altered states, illness can make us feel both weak and powerful at the same time, depending upon our level of acceptance of the way things are and our ability to dig deep and find new sources of strength. When one man said to me—as others have said—that his near-death experience drained him of strength yet filled him with hope, I understood completely how that could take place. I also understand that to accept such a contradiction, one often has to experience an altered state as powerful as illness.
That’s why I feel it’s important to begin this book by recounting the battle of my own life. Without such a near-fatal illness, I wouldn’t have the empathy for others necessary to continue my research in the field of the afterlife. And without it, I wouldn’t have had my own near-death experience, an event that taught me more in a few minutes than years of research and lecturing.
So what I am trying to say, dear reader, is that if the presentation of my attempted suicide makes you doubt my work or the value of its lessons, you should stop reading now. Let me just say that I think this experience has made me more honest about myself and my work; without it, I would lack that dimension that is not present in many doctors, the one that goes beyond knowledge and into the realm of actually being a patient. To paraphrase William Osler, the father of modern surgery, a man who has been a patient becomes a much better physician.
That has certainly been the case with me.
My switch from physician to patient came in January 1991. This was before my myxedema had been properly diagnosed. My thyroid level had dipped off the charts, although I didn’t know it. I just knew that I had not felt well for months, but somehow I had convinced myself that it was world events combined with the impact of those events on my personal situation that was making me ill.
This was the year that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein decided to attack Kuwait for stealing his country’s oil. It was also the time when a new book of mine was being published. Coming Back was a study of past-life regressions that I had worked on for years. I had made some astounding discoveries in this work. I had found ways in which modern medicine could use these hypnotic transitions into the past to help patients overcome long-standing psychiatric problems. I had also discovered that a large number of patients seemed truly to go back in time to past lives. Not only did they say they had, but many of them provided proof through their hypnotic regressions that they had indeed lived in an earlier era. I had collected this proof from the patients during my sessions with them. I had established to my satisfaction that if they hadn’t actually lived in the past, they had somehow been channeled very vivid information linking them with the past.
I was very excited about this book. Not only could it change the lives of many patients with long-standing psychiatric problems, but it would open another door into my continuing study of life after death.
But as the summer progressed, it became more and more obvious that the publication of my book and world events were about to collide. Saddam Hussein was preparing his attack on Kuwait, and our president was lining up international support for an attack on Saddam. These events couldn’t have converged at a worse time for me. My marriage had fallen apart, I had been defrauded out of a fortune and had little money left, and I was exhausted from an imbalance of thyroid in my system, a condition that wasn’t diagnosed yet. I begged my publisher to delay the book tour until the coming “mother of all battles” (as Saddam called it) was over. “If I go out on tour now, I’ll be canceled in every state,” I told the publisher. “I don’t think people want to hear about my work when a war is starting.”
Surprisingly, no one at the publishing house seemed to understand what I was talking about. Instead, they launched the press tour two days before Saddam’s troops rolled into Kuwait.
My first stop was New York City. I was ill by the time I reached the Big Apple from Georgia, but still ready to tell the world about the findings in my new book. But there was no need to be ready. All of my media appearances were canceled as Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait. “Of course,” I said as a TV producer told me she didn’t have an extra reporter to do an interview with me. “Why would you? For once, present life is more exciting than past lives.”
I visited each of several media outlets on my schedule and got the same comment from each of them: Operation Desert Storm was the biggest thing going. They couldn’t waste a minute on any other coverage. “We’re hardly covering the Yankees,” said one distressed producer.
I left New York the next day for Boston, where no one would interview me either. “Go home,” said a blunt-spoken producer. “Saddam’s getting everything we’ve got.” After a day in old Beantown I was interviewed by exactly no one. I was zero for eight: no press interviews and eight studio visits.
I pressed on. By the time I left Canada I was zero for twelve. Well, sort of. One Canadian station found a few minutes to interview me and said they would run the interview at a later date. I don’t know if the interview ever ran. I didn’t care. I was getting sicker.
By the time I reached Denver I knew I should see a doctor about my rapidly declining thyroid level. There I could get a blood test and be prescribed an appropriate amount of thyroid medication to get my blood level back where it should have been. But I didn’t see a doctor. The lack of thyroid had clouded my cognition so much that I thought the haze I was living in was due to severe depression I felt from being on the road and pushing a dead book, one that had been killed by world events.
And so I pressed on, one for eighteen by the time I left Denver.
California was next. By the time I landed in Los Angeles I was seeing the world in black and white, a danger sign for me of very severe thyroid deficiency. I was accustomed to the routine by now. A public relations person would pick me up at the airport and then tell me how many of the planned interviews for that day had been canceled. Then we would drive to the ones that hadn’t been canceled, only to find that they had been too busy the past week to remember to cancel by phone. A couple of the stations did hurried interviews out of courtesy, and by the end of the day I was on another airplane headed for San Diego.
It was in San Diego that the idea to kill myself took hold. I sat in my hotel room, looking down at the street below, and considered prying the window open and taking a final leap. Every day it was feeling as though tomorrow would be the day everything came apart. Being a psychiatrist, I knew that presque vu was the name for that feeling. It means a constant state of frustration. Now, alone in this San Diego hotel room at the end of a failed press tour, I was ready to end the despair once and for all.
I called Paul Perry, my co-author, in Arizona. We had been talking daily as my tour progressed across the country, and he knew how down and depressed I had become. But the conversation we had from San Diego alarmed him. I shared with him my latest plan. I was going to figure out a way to open the window—hotel windows rarely open all the way just for this reason—and throw myself into the alley below.
Paul had a different plan. “We can always do another press tour,” he said.
It was worse than that, I said. I had been watching my life unravel for some time, and now it was finally happening. I could see it coming apart right before me, like springs and screws coming out of the back of a wristwatch. That was it. My life was broken. I wanted out.
I spoke to Paul for more than an hour and then, exhausted, fell asleep. In the morning I left for Atlanta.
I hoped things might improve when I returned to the comfort of home, but they didn’t. I could hear tension in my own voice as I explained to my friends what a failure the lengthy press tour had been. I am exhausted, I said to my friends, who looked genuinely concerned. I made an appointment to see my doctor on Monday, but by Sunday I was completely over the edge, deep in the grip of myxedema madness. With a large bottle of the painkiller Darvon in my possession, I got in my car and drove to my office at the university. There, I reasoned, I would lock the door and take an overdose of painkillers sufficient to kill me.
In my office I opened the bottle of Darvon and poured them out onto my desk. Then I began to take them several at a time with gulps from a can of Coca-Cola. I took about two dozen of the pills and then sat down at the desk. For some reason I called my co-author Paul.
“I’ve done it,” I said with a note of finality.
“Done what?” he asked.
“I’ve taken pills and I’m dying,” I said.
I could hear the controlled panic in Paul’s voice as he started to ask a series of questions: “What did you take? How many did you take? Where are you?”
I became somewhat angry at the line of questioning. I could tell that he wanted to get enough information to somehow intervene from Arizona. But I didn’t want an intervention. What I wanted was good conversation in the final moments of my life.
“Look, Paul, I have researched death and I know it’s nothing to be afraid of. I will be better off dead.”
And that was genuinely how I felt. Myxedema madness had put me in the throes of a paranoia and despair so great that I felt everyone would be better off if I was no longer around. No amount of talk could convince me otherwise. Paul suggested a number of possible solutions to my problems, including an agent and CPA to straighten out my money problems and a new press tour to arouse interest in the book. I would hear none of it. I was ready to die.
“You know, Paul, being alive holds more fear for me than being dead. I have talked to hundreds of people who have crossed into death, and they all tell me that it’s great over there,” I said. “Every day I wake up afraid of the day. I don’t want that anymore.”
“What about your children?” Paul asked.
“They’ll all understand,” I said resolutely. “They know I’m not happy here. They’ll be sad, but they’ll understand. It’s time for me to leave.”
I could hear someone jiggling the office door knob as we spoke. Then there was a pounding on the heavy wooden door, a couple of raps at first and then a persistent drumbeat. Then a loud voice. “Campus police, open the door.”
I ignored the demand and kept talking to Paul, taking a few more pills as we spoke. Within seconds a key was slipped into the door lock and the door sprang open. Policemen rushed in, and before I could say much of anything they had put my hands behind me and sat me on the floor.
One of the policemen picked up the phone and began talking to Paul. Apparently Paul asked about the presence of pills, because the policeman began to count the pills on the desk. When he was done, he dropped the phone on the desk and from his police radio dialed 911.
An overdose of Darvon has little effect on a person until it reaches a certain blood level. Then the painkiller overwhelms the heart’s beating mechanism and quickly stops it cold. A dentist friend who had seen someone overdose on Darvon said it was like falling off a table. The person was going along fine until they just dropped. I knew that the same thing would happen to me shortly. All I had to do was wait. I sat patiently on the floor as emergency medical technicians charged up the stairs with their gurney and equipment.
“Are you okay?” asked one of the EMTs.
“Sure,” I said, and I was. Never better, actually. I was not afraid of death, but I had obviously become very afraid of life.
Things began to happen very fast after that. My chest felt very heavy, and I had the feeling of slipping into a dark blue place. They hoisted me onto the gurney and strapped me in and rolled me quickly down the passageway to the waiting ambulance.
As they loaded me into the ambulance the world around me began to fade. The concerned EMT was in my face, trying to keep me awake. Another EMT was drawing something into a very large syringe, probably adrenaline, to inject into my heart. “Better get going,” shouted one of the policemen as he slammed the rear doors. I could feel the ambulance accelerate, hitting speed bumps hard as we headed for the hospital. An elephant was sitting on my chest. My eyes were closed, or at least I think they were. Either way, I could see nothing.
After decades of studying the process of death, I knew what was most likely coming next. I would have the feeling of moving rapidly through a tunnel; maybe I would see my grandmothers and grandfathers. Certainly I would have a life review before it was all over. I hoped that would happen. As far as I was concerned, my best years were behind me. If anything excited me it was the past.
Now I could relive it again. . . .
I WAS BORN on June 30, 1944, the very day my father shipped out for World War II. I don’t know what my mother thought as she labored to give birth to me that summer day. Given the way her life had gone up to that point, she probably thought that her husband would be killed in the war and would never see his newborn son. Already in her young life, eight of her fifteen brothers and sisters had died in childhood, and one more would be lost in the war. Death had been a constant companion for Mom, and it would be safe to say that she didn’t expect a better future.
I know mine was a difficult birth. Mom was young, I was large, and negative thoughts about Raymond Sr.’s likelihood of returning from war were on her mind as she struggled with my childbirth.
Childbirth, dark memories, and fear of the future all added up to a tremendous case of depression that my young mother would only talk about with her parents. In those days people didn’t talk freely about their emotions, as they do now. Americans were almost devoutly stoic, expected to show endurance in the face of adversity rather than let anyone know how they truly felt. The result for my mother was a worsening case of depression, which she had to hold inside rather than express.
I think the town of Porterdale, Georgia, was filled with women coping with the same level of depression as my mother. World War II had emptied the town of all its young men, and the women of Porterdale lived with a daily uncertainty about whether their sons, husbands, and lovers would come home alive.
The war also left them childless. Few children had been born since the war started in 1941. And now, with my birth in 1944, an event of some importance had occurred in the town of Porterdale. The town had a baby.
That was good for my mother. When she needed a rest or just some time alone to deal with her depression, Grandmother and Grandfather Waddleton would take over the role of parenting. They doted over me like I was the only child they had ever seen, passing me constantly from one to the other in an effort to give my mother breathing space. It was through them that I was “shared out” to the rest of the community, an arrangement that gave me a large and caring family.
All of the women in the neighborhood who were about the age of my grandmother unofficially adopted me as a grandchild of their own. Two doors down was Mrs. Crowell. She became one of the most important figures in my life. I remember her as being a sweet but very strong woman, the kind I would eventually be the most happy with in marriage. I would go to see her all the time—as an infant and later as a preteen. She allowed me to come in without even knocking, which I did frequently. Once inside, I would curl up on her sofa and dream. She was among the most encouraging people in my life. Her son told me at her funeral years later that she would hold me on her lap and repeat over and over to me, “Raymond, you are going to be a very special person someday.”
Next to us was the home of Mrs. Day, who baked and cooked all the time and let me sample with impunity anything that came out of the oven. Best of all were her chocolate chip cookies, followed by puffy home-baked white bread.
Then there was Grandmother Moody, my father’s mother. She lived about a mile away. I spent many hours there, smothered with kisses and given great praise for looking just like my father, who was at that time struggling with the daily dangers of combat in the Pacific Theater. I don’t think she expected to see him alive again, and sometimes she hugged me just a little too hard.
Mrs. Gileaf, Mrs. Martin, Mrs. Ally—to all of these women I was a novelty because I was a baby. I remember well being held, rolled around in a stroller, or rocked by each of these beautiful people. They were the ones who made my childhood such a big and bright place in my mind.
Porterdale was on the wide and fast-flowing Yellow River, which powered a sawmill. The streets were tree-lined, the sidewalks were clean and new, and the atmosphere was bucolic. Porterdale was the perfect little town. The most memorable place of all, though, was the front porch. Believe me, in Porterdale in the forties there was nothing to do but sit on the porch and talk. That is what people did. Town folks would stroll the streets at night, going from one porch to the next, trading stories of the war or local news.
It was on the porch one night that I was first introduced to the concept of the return from death. It was in a story that my uncle Fairley told about his dog Friskie. One day, as the story went, little Friskie got hit and killed by a passing truck. Uncle Fairley was heartbroken as he loaded Friskie into his truck and took the poor little dog to the dump. (Sorry, readers, but that is what we did with dead dogs in Porterdale.) Several days later, an unnerving thing happened: Friskie trotted up the street and showed up on the porch, his tail wagging and his face a vision of happiness. Everyone was moved deeply by the return of Friskie, as was I. Friskie was my protector, and to have him back was a great delight.
I was very young when this event happened, but members of my family spoke about it constantly over the years, especially my aunt May, who found in it powerful religious overtones and alluded to Friskie and the resurrection of Christ all in the same breath. It was this memory of Friskie’s return from the dead—implanted by my own family’s lore—that led me to be fascinated by near-death experiences later in my life.
If I was the town’s baby, I was also the apple of my Grandfather Waddleton’s eye. Frankly, no one expected my father to return from fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Everyone had seen the newsreel footage at the Porterdale Cinema and been shocked at the savagery and brutality happening on islands they had never heard of. Because as far as anyone knew I might already be fatherless, Grandfather Waddleton insisted that I call him “Daddy.” That is what my mother told me. She said that it would keep me from feeling fatherless in case my real father didn’t return. I knew no difference. I didn’t really understand the concept of fatherhood at that point, and Grandfather Waddleton would certainly have been my choice of a father if I’d had such a choice.
I can still see his deep blue eyes and bright smile as he held me close and read to me. Sometimes he would drive me around town in his Model T car, the wind blowing through my wispy hair. I can remember the feeling of the wind and know from photos that I was squinting from the glare of the sun. It feels good to look at those photos now, which is why I think I was feeling good at the time, riding in a jet-black Model T with the man I thought was my father.
Years later my real father told the story of being on a remote island air base in the Pacific when all the men were told to come to the flight line. They stood there until a silver B-24 touched down with a squeal and revved its way to the hangar where they all waited.
The name of the plane was Enola Gay, and the pilot, a small slim man with a puzzled look, had the name tag “Tibbetts” sewn to his flight-suit pocket. A number of civilians and high-level military officers were standing by, and when Tibbetts approached them, a brief speech was made and he was immediately awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
My real father’s vocabulary expanded that day. He heard the words “atomic bomb” and went away wondering just what such a device was and why the military was making such a big deal out of dropping only one.
Back home, the people of Porterdale were also figuring out what an atomic bomb was. Pictures in the paper showed a mushroom cloud and cities fried right off the map by this new invention. Whatever the atomic bomb was, they welcomed it because it brought the end to a brutal war.
I am told that there was jubilation in the streets and tears of joy. Everyone had expected that an end to the war would come only after a costly invasion of Japan. By some estimates, 500,000 American lives would have been lost in such an invasion, along with the deaths of millions of Japanese, truly the mother of all battles. But this atomic bomb had stopped the war in its tracks. The people of Porterdale were elated.
My mother started reading the newspaper avidly now. Soldiers didn’t know when they were coming home, but they did know the number of the ship they would be on. My father sent that number in a letter to my mother, and now she would scan columns of type looking for the ship that would carry my father to California, where he would be transferred to a train to Georgia.
I remember vividly the day we went to Atlanta to pick up my father. We all piled into Grandfather Waddleton’s Model T and drove the sixty miles to the train station. The place was chaotic, with families milling around nervously waiting for the trains to arrive. Finally a long troop train pulled into the station, and the crowd pressed in, nearly spilling over the platform.
My mother searched frantically for her husband, and when she saw him she pushed her way through the crowd and flung herself on his chest. I was right behind her, held in the arms of my grandfather. I remember to this day a panicked feeling as my grandfather handed me off to my rightful dad. He pressed me into my father’s scratchy woolen coat, and my dad held me tight and close until I began to cry and push away. Dad held me tighter, and as he did the woolen coat felt even rougher on my infant skin. I squirmed and cried, and as I pushed away harder my father held me tighter until I could barely catch my breath.
With my free arm, I reached to my grandfather, and when he didn’t reach back I twisted around and held my arms out to my mother, who snatched me away from this intimate stranger.
“It’s going to take him a while to get used to you,” she said to her husband. “He doesn’t quite know what’s going on yet.”
And she was right. Even at such a truly tender age, I knew a lot was going to change.
Looking back, I can visualize this entire scene from my father’s perspective. As a medic in the Army, he had seen some of the most god-awful injuries that modern warfare could dish up. All the while, in what little spare time he had, Dad was dreaming of a homecoming in which he would be reunited with a loving family in Georgia and be able to get on with his life.
And what was the first thing to greet him? A child who was spoiled by the entire town and didn’t want to be hugged by a father he had never seen.
Now I can look back and cringe at my behavior. At the time, though, I felt very displaced. I had been the center of my family’s universe. Now I was being supplanted by a man I was suppose to call “Dad.”
Frankly I had difficulty with this new dad. The man I had been raised to call Daddy, my Grandfather Waddleton, was a smiling and kindhearted gentleman who paid careful attention to me. My new dad proved to be very difficult. He had been a military officer and as a result had developed a sort of crew-cut military bearing that would become his trademark for his entire life. Plus, he would eventually become a surgeon, a personality type that is usually rigid, uptight, and wanting to be in charge of almost every situation. I frequently heard stories in my teenage years about my father yelling in the operating room at nurses or other support staff. I wasn’t embarrassed when I heard nurses swear about my father. Rather, I could sympathize with them because I too was frequently on the receiving end of such anger.
One example that sticks in my mind came only months after my father had returned from the war. He was outside my grandparents’ house planting some peach trees when I ran into one of the tiny trees with a tricycle and snapped the trunk. It was an accident, and no big deal since there were plenty more saplings where that one came from. Still, my father flew into a rage, yelling at me with such vehemence that I began to cry at the anger that boiled over. And then the yelling continued, until my grandmother came outside and rescued me from the unwarranted tirade.
These angry outbursts took place frequently and were disturbing for everyone who witnessed them. My mother tried to dismiss them by laughing them off, but nobody found them forgivable. I remember after one of his outbursts, my Grandfather Waddleton became very pensive. After a consultation with my grandmother, he went outside and with great animation began to talk to my father. I couldn’t see my grandfather’s face because his back was to me, but I could see my father’s and knew he was hearing something that he didn’t like. His jaw was clenching and his face was turning red as his eyes narrowed their gaze on my grandfather.
I couldn’t hear what the two men were saying, and it probably would have meant little to me if I had. For me the tone of their voices told the tale of dueling styles, a sharp battle between a gentle man supporting his grandson and a gruff, newly returned veteran who would never admit he knew little about dealing with children.
When the two men stopped talking, with no clear agreement, my grandfather turned and walked back toward the porch. That was when I could see how much the conversation about “tough” versus “love” had taken out of my grandfather. He looked withered as he crossed the lawn, and when he reached the porch he scooped me up and took me inside, his arms trembling as he set me down in the living room and then fell onto the sofa. Grandmother brought him a drink of water, and we sat in silence for a long time.
That was the first of many confrontations between my father and grandfather, and the fact that we all lived together in one house didn’t make things easier. My father’s years of military training prevented him from backing down. His way of getting what he wanted was yelling and intimidation, attributes that might have worked well in combat but weren’t very effective with a two-year-old child. And Grandfather Waddleton wouldn’t back down either. He had always been a gentle man, and he wouldn’t allow quick anger or gruffness to become the new environment in his home. Since we lived with my grandparents until my father could get into medical school, we all had to live by their rules. But the standoff between my father and grandfather created a lot of unhealthy tension in the family.
I remember once when my father was studying in the living room and I was playing with some toy soldiers not far away. I was standing them up in a line and knocking them over one by one with my index finger. Suddenly, with no warning, my father began to swear loudly. I thought he had slammed his finger in a book, but when I looked at him I could see that the swearing was directed at me.
“Can someone get this kid out of here!” he barked. “I don’t need the noise. I’m trying to study!”
He slammed his book down on the wooden floor and stood up. Without saying a word, my grandmother swept through the room, picked me up, and took me outside to be with my grandfather.
I am sure my father and grandfather had words about the incident later, because I saw them talking in the kitchen and could tell that both of them were uncomfortable with the conversation. Still, it was a conversation between them that was repeated many times before I was four years old. And it was the type of conversation that wore heavily on my grandfather, who never anticipated that the return of my father from the war would bring such tension and anger into his household.
Gradually, my grandparents began to shield me from my father, acting as a protective wall from his anger. They were sympathetic in knowing that he had been changed by the horrible traumas of the war. But they were also afraid that he would traumatize me. Because of that, they made a conscious decision to become the buffer between the two of us.
This buffer wasn’t a bad thing, at least not in the beginning. I heard and saw a lot that I wouldn’t have experienced had they not taken such a great interest in me. Even though I was so young, they truly fueled the fires of thought for me.
One day, for example, an elderly man died across the street from my aunt’s house. Rather than conceal death from me (as so many people do with children), my grandmother walked me down the street and into the house, where she paid her respects to the man’s wife. As she did so, I wandered into the family room and discovered the deceased man laid out on a couch.
The sallow look of his skin and the angle of repose of his head showed me the distinct difference between the appearance of death and the appearance of sleep. Even at the age of four, I could tell that this man was dead, although I touched his cold chest with my hands just to make certain.
“Dead people look different, don’t they,” said my grandmother, coming up behind me. “It’s like something has left them and gone somewhere else. Must be the soul.”
This may have been the first time I ever heard the word “soul,” and it was certainly the first time I thought of anything “leaving the body” upon death. I didn’t think of the concept of “soul survival” as being religious in nature, since we never went to church anyway. But I do remember that the idea conflicted with what I assumed happened at death—a complete wipeout of consciousness.
I KNOW IT sounds ridiculous to think that a four-year-old might have a philosophy about death, but I did. It was a philosophy that was originally formed by all the talk of death that revolved around World War II. Most of the soldiers who died in that horrible war didn’t come home. They were either buried in foreign graveyards or totally decimated. The ones who did come home were sealed in a box and were never seen again.
The notion that something might survive bodily death was not something I even thought about. The dead were simply gone.
This was not such a pleasant thought to me as a child, because I always felt that I was going to die. That belief was also a holdover from World War II, where a sense of doom pervaded each and every day. It seemed as though death was always around the corner, and I would stumble into his hooded presence at any time.
On one devilishly cold night I did get a glimpse of death. I was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in my grandparents’ home, intently reading a comic book while trying to stay warm. Next to me in chairs sat my mother and grandmother, chatting away about my father, who had just been accepted into medical school in Augusta. It was an exciting time for all of us because it meant that my father would begin that long journey through medical education that would lead to him becoming a doctor.
The two women were so deeply engaged in conversation that they hardly noticed my grandfather as he opened the front door and shivered his way to a spot close to the fireplace. He was wearing his turtle green wool coat and a cap, but it didn’t seem to be doing the job of keeping him warm. He just stood there and shivered, standing as close to the fire as he could.
“What’s wrong, hon?” asked my grandmother.
“I don’t know,” said my grandfather. “I’ve never felt colder in my life than tonight.”
The two women continued to talk, and my grandfather continued to shiver. Finally, at my grandmother’s suggestion, he went to bed, where he could bury himself beneath piles of blankets.