Tapestry @ 25: Patricia Pearson
Originally published in 2015.
The writer Patricia Pearson has spent years investigating what people have to say - what they've experienced - in the realm of life after death and other unexplained events.
Pearson is a serious thinker and a woman who describes herself as a rational Scot. But when you vow to approach your topic with an open mind, you never quite know where you'll end up.
According to Patricia Pearson, about fifty percent of the bereaved sense the presence of the dead. Her book is called, Opening Heaven's Door: What The Dying May Be Trying to Tell Us About Where They're Going.
Book Excerpt: Opening Heaven's Door: What The Dying May Be Trying to Tell Us About Where They're Going
AN UNEXPECTED VISION
My father died in his blue-striped pyjamas on a soft bed in a silent house. He wasn't ailing. At three or four in the morning he gave out a sigh, loud enough to wake my mother. A sigh, a moan, a final breath escaping. She leaned over to rub his back, sleepily assuming that he was having a bad dream, and then retreated into her own cozy haze of unconsciousness. Morning arrived a few hours later as a thin suffusion of northern March light. She roused herself and walked around the prone form of her husband of fifty-four years to go to the bathroom.
Downstairs to the humdrum rituals of the kitchen. Brewing coffee, easing her teased-apart English muffin halves into the toaster, listening to the radio. I was being interviewed about a brand-new book. There I was, the youngest of her five children, going blah blah blah with impressive authority about a lawsuit that had been launched by a man who had suffered incalculable psychological damage from finding a dead fly in his bottle of water.
Excerpted from Opening Heaven's Door. Copyright © 2014 Patricia Pearson. Published by Random House Canada, which is a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.