Is There Life After Death?

After UFOs and Who Killed JFK: The Ultimate Question

When my grandfather died, I stood by his hospital bed watching something I'd never seen before: the moment a person becomes a body.

His chest stopped rising. His mouth stayed open. His face relaxed in a way I'd never witnessed on a living man—not peaceful exactly, but empty. Like a house after the family moves out.

And something left.

I felt it more than saw it. Not with my eyes, but with the back of my spine, with the hairs on my arms, with the part of me that knows things before my brain catches up. He was gone. But not gone.

Later that night, I looked in the mirror and whispered, "Where'd you go, grandpa?"

He didn't answer. But somewhere deep in my gut, I felt him say: "Farther in."

That was fifty years ago. Two weeks ago, I lost my sister-in-law Claudine and last month, my friend Mark Kaplan lost his sister Ina. Both lovely souls who expected to see another day. Their deaths have brought that hospital room flooding back, along with the question that's been humming in the background ever since: what exactly left my grandfather's body that June afternoon?

Science would tell me I witnessed neurons shutting down, electrical activity ceasing, the biological machine powering off for the last time. Consciousness, according to the lab coats, is just chemical soup simmering in gray matter. When the power goes out, the tune fades. Nothing survives.

But here's what science can't explain: how does a Ben Webster solo crack your heart open? How does A Love Supreme feel like prayer made audible? If we're just meat computers processing data, why does music move us like messages from another dimension?

I've heard live recordings where Coltrane's saxophone seemed to come from somewhere beyond his fingers—from the space between breath and silence, from a place where sound becomes soul. He wasn't just performing. He was channeling something eternal into the temporal world of jazz clubs and recording studios.

Listen to that opening prayer on A Love Supreme: "A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme..." It's not entertainment. It's transmission. Music from a realm that doesn't fit in our scientific model of consciousness as brain activity.

Maybe that's what leaves when we die. Not our Netflix passwords or our Social Security numbers, but whatever it is that turns sound into meaning, notes into transcendence, silence into the space where something sacred lives.

Thousands of people have flatlined and returned with stories that sound like fever dreams directed by Salvador Dalí. Tunnels of light. Dead relatives in radiant color. Voices saying "It's not your time." Sometimes even hell—endless bureaucracies of the soul populated by regrets.

The skeptics call these hallucinations, dying neurons throwing a final party. Maybe they're right. But I've noticed something about near-death experiences: people don't come back talking about random neural fireworks. They come back changed. Humbled. Less afraid. More loving.

They describe encounters with deceased family members who share information the dying person couldn't have known. They report accurate details of medical procedures performed while they were clinically dead. They return with a consistent message: love is what matters, consciousness continues, death is not the end.

These could be the brain's final fantasy. Or they could be evidence that whatever makes us us isn't contained in the three pounds of tissue between our ears.

Here's what I think about when I'm trying to understand what might persist beyond death: the moment an artist touches something universal. When Coltrane played, when van Gogh painted, when Rumi wrote—something flowed through them that was bigger than their individual selves.

That something doesn't die when the artist does. It keeps moving through the world, lighting up other souls, inspiring new creation. The music outlives the musician. The painting outlives the painter. The words outlive the poet.

Maybe that's how consciousness works. Maybe we're not containers for awareness but conduits for it. Maybe what we call "self" is actually a temporary focusing of something infinite—like light passing through a prism, creating the illusion of separation before merging back into the whole.

When my grandfather died, maybe what left wasn't his individual consciousness but his unique way of focusing the larger consciousness that flows through all of us. His particular refraction of the eternal light, returning to its source.

I don't know if there's life after death. Nobody does. Not the physicists with their equations or the priests with their certainties or the mystics with their visions.

But I know what I felt in that hospital room. I know what happens when Coltrane's saxophone finds that perfect note. I know the look in people's eyes when they come back from the edge of death talking about unconditional love.

And I know this: something in us is larger than our bodies, older than our thoughts, deeper than our fears. Call it soul, call it consciousness, call it the music between the notes. It's the part of us that recognizes beauty, that reaches for meaning, that loves beyond reason.

Maybe death is where that something goes home.

Or maybe—and this thought comes to me in the quiet moments—maybe death is where it finally gets to play its full song, unfiltered by the limitations of flesh and time.

The question isn't really whether there's life after death. The question is: what are we doing with the life we have? What music are we making? What love are we channeling? What light are we focusing into the world?

Because whatever leaves when we die, whatever part of us might continue—it's shaped by how we live now. By the kindness we show, the art we create, the truth we speak, the love we give.

My grandfather's voice still echoes in my head fifty years later. Not because his brain survived, but because his love imprinted itself on mine. He lives in the way I treat people, in the stories I tell, in the moments when I choose compassion over convenience.

That's not metaphor. That's continuation.

So maybe the afterlife isn't a place we go. Maybe it's what we leave behind. The ripples of our choices, spreading outward long after we're gone. The music we added to the world's eternal symphony.

Listen. Do you hear it? That's the sound of something that never dies.

Play your note. Make it count. Someone's listening, even after you're gone.

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Until we meet again, let your conscience be your guide.