T H E

O T H E R S I D E

E X C E R P T S

NOTES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Stories From the Afterlife, Wisdom For the Living

NED - CPA dies at the hands of a disgruntled client
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    "Your wife will still need you, Ned," I heard. "In fact, she will need you now more than ever. Her heart will hurt for a long time. But if you believe in the God who created us, Jesus, you can come back and become her Earthly guide."

ERICA - Young woman and her grandparents reflect about life on both sides

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Stopping to catch my breath I saw my uncle on my dad's side appear. He had died of an aneurism when I was in my early teens. Just like that, he was dead. After dying, he told me, he saw himself the way I was seeing myself, and advised me not to feel bad about anything. "Just learn your lesson that no matter what, you are someone very, very special," he said earnestly. "It's up to you to uncover that. No one else's job. Just yours."

RAYMOND  - Older physician dies and is surprised by an afterlife
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    It was a remarkable passageway to come through, I must say. I never thought dying would be like floating over an ocean of fear. That's what our minds are like as we get older and older, at least for most of us. An ocean of fear more and more turbulent due to reasons that never really existed. Just fear they could exist.

PEPU and TIAN - Chinese brother and sister reunite after years apart
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    My day had come. I had died. My sister, Tian, who had died as an infant, was the first to greet me in The Light. I knew her instantly because she had my mother's face and my father's smile. She held out her hands to me, to help release me from my body. She was like an angel. Beautiful, like silk, she shown in The Light.
     When I took her hand, she showed me my body below as we rose up, and suggested I bid it farewell, to bless it one last time. Upon doing so, I felt a final release from my body. I was free!

NICK - Dies saving an old woman in a house fire
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     As I ran around looking for a cloth to cover our mouths, I realized I had lost her in the kitchen. Calling out, I got no response. By then she had surely submitted to the smoke and died. Oh God, I thought, what have I done? What if I had just called 911?

At that moment a smokey white light entered the room exactly where I was standing. It was a beautiful white being! An angel, I think. It smiled calmly at me and asked if I was ready to come into The Light and be saved.

ELIZABETH - Orthodontist falls off the platform onto the tracks
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Humble. I was humble and trembling. Because my experience in this place so bright with light was new, I felt myself being calmed by the presence of Olivia, my mother's old housekeeper from my childhood. We were close then. I regarded her more as a mother than my own. Together we stood beaming into one another's eyes, and then I broke into laughter with the delight that at long last we were reunited.

JESSE - Young boy slips through the ice while skating
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    "I love you," I remember telling Jesus as he looked at me softly.
     "I love you too, Jesse," he said without a moment's pause. "Jesse, I need you to know I am very proud of you. It's important to me you know that."
     "Proud of me for what?" I was almost afraid to ask.
      "For being you," he told me. "There were many times you were confronted by others to become someone you weren't. Sometimes it was hard to say no, but you did it. You stayed true to yourself, which meant you stayed true to your nature as my child."

HENRY - Janitor in a boys' school faces death
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So quiet now. Stillness like the dawn. A deep, deep calmness mercifully came over me. No longer did I fight my feeling about being selfish with the couple who bought my place. I'll rest for a minute, I thought, and then it happened: the string of lights!

ANGELA and SUSAN - Best friends in life and in the afterlife
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     So there I was on the operating table with my best friend, Susan, at my side. Background sounds of the anesthesiologist asking for more time filtered in. As the surgeon urged him not to be too long, he pushed into my veins something powerful that completely knocked me out...of my body. No more drifting back and forth. No more visualizing images.   Beside me stood Susan looking like she used to in our thirties! Her hair, shoulder-length and full, so unlike the thin patches she once had due to cancer treatments. At seeing her like this, I knew I had made it all the way out.

MARCUS - Irish spindlemaker from the 1820s
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     Suddenly, I drew into it without knowin' how I was movin'. At the speed of light I was comin' faster and faster into the realm of Heaven! Pulled long, but still me'self, I knew I was comin' into the realest place that ever was.
    Caressin' me with joy, The Light itself picked me'self up and then put me back into me body, but in this place I was young again. Life had not ended!

RALPHIE - Fifteen-year-old mildly retarded boy, reborn after a near-death experience
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     Suddenly there was a jolt. It stopped. The elevator came to a complete stop. How can that be? I wasn't even on Earth a second ago and now I'm in the elevator again and am perfectly fine.
     When the doors opened to the third floor I realized I had dropped almost fifteen floors without so much as a second in between. But in that time I had shot out of my body, made my way into the upper levels of Earth, and was rewarded with the promise of a new world.

JEANIE - A young mother learns the hard way how to protect her children
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     Coming into The Light was like coming through a sunlit doorway where all the love in the world is on the other side. It was beyond whatever you might think. Instantly I knew I must have been forgiven by my own children to have made it there.
     "That's right," Jesus said. "Your children, each of them, has come to see me. Each has prayed I take good care of you, and you be their mother forever and never be apart from them. They each want you to be their guiding angel from Heaven."

DANNY - Fourteen-year-old comes to a life and death decision
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At the hospital I was awakened over and over by the staff. They kept calling my name, "Danny..." "DANNY!" It was torment knowing my folks were dead, yet these people wanted me to wake up. I wanted to be left alone. Couldn't they figure that out?

RAVEN - Native American comes into peace via 'the old ways'
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    Softly, I came from my body that night as I stretched out on my couch watching TV, but mostly daydreaming of my day. As I thought about my friend the squirrel, the image of a beautiful black raven flew directly over me, and suddenly I came free from my body without so much as a heart attack or stroke.

GRACE CATHERINE - Dies in a car accident as a young teen
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What I now know is we are all occupying the same space, but only some of us can see some of us. While some on your side can see some of us on this side, unless you believe you can, you don't. And unless those of us on this side believe we can see those left behind, we don't.

RICHARD - Student, desperate for rent money, resorts to something stupid
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     Cameras in the prison caught it all. I was carted off by my cell mate and made to look like I was asleep, so by the time the prison officials figured it out, I was long gone. L-O-N-G gone.
     Elastic rubber bands. You know how they have that funny smell? Well that's what I first sensed while coming out of my body. Strange, eh? Why would I smell rubber bands considering my surroundings?

AMANA - A near-death experience brings a couple back together in their home
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Incredible events then began to unfold. As I stood there looking into each of their eyes, I saw the events putting us into each others lives. I felt the reasons we crossed paths and knew then none of these people came to me through happenstance or accident. Each of us had something important to share enabling the other to become a better person.

ANTONY - Bright young man swerves his family's SUV and dies in the O.R.
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      I was glad I went to the funeral even though it was hard. Many of my high schoool friends stood up and spoke, even the ones I never would have thought would do it because they were so private. It's funny how something so awful can bring out something so imporant in people. What I also learned is how many people on my side attend funerals on your side. They want to support their friends and loved ones as they close the door to their mortal life.

ENZIO - Wealthy retired businessman swallows an overdose of pills
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Time, it seemed, was completely still now. I was not old or young, wise or naive. I just was, or am. I wasn't sure. But I did know the soundless pitch of nothingness carried me to an anxious place within myself because it wasn't what I had expected. I felt sure if I killed myself I would be free of myself. But instead, I was alone with myself. Me. That's all there was.

FREDRICK - A deceased grandfather visits a Navy officer, changing everything

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Amazed he was speacking without ever moving his mouth, I realized he had said it all directly into my thoughts. It was as clear as if he had spoken aloud, only without any of the background noise. This was spectacular!

I was about to reply aloud when he asked me to answer him from inside. He insisted it was better communication bacause we could feel the words as well as hear them as they were being expressed.

ALFRED - The flu cuts short a contractor's retirement plans
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Looking around I saw nothing unusual until I spotted my childhood dog, Skippy, running for me. Anchors came flying off my feet, and suddenly I was running for him. His eyes were alive and his head up high. He was there and I was with him, no doubt about that.

- end -

by Gabriel Publishing.

Notes From the Other Side