The man who told his son not to let him die

Call him Sol. He was a rich and successful Jewish businessman who came to one of my programs at his wife’s insistence. His veneer of cynicism cracked when he spoke of his father. He described how his father died in his arms in hospital, and that his father’s last words were, “Don’t let me die.”

Sol rarely remembered dreams, and recalled no dreams of his father in the decade since his death. But he confessed that he often felt a crushing sense of guilt and heaviness. In discussion, he also told me that, in his family and his religious upbringing, the afterlife was never discussed. His father’s belief was that life ends with death; after death (to quote Harold Kushner) we just become “soil”.

I worked with him and a woman who served as a second tracker. I asked him about what his father had loved. Travel and his tropical fish aquarium were two of the main things. I could feel that the father was not far away. We agreed we would set a location for a dialogue: the basement of the old house where he kept his fish tanks. It seemed promising that in recent years Sol had also been keeping fish.

We all found the father right away and had three overlapping and unfolding experiences. Sol had his first conscious encounter with his father since his death - a loving and ultimately very clearing and unburdening encounter which opened his heart tremendously. They had a very specific exchange about the father's surviving wife, who recently suffered a heart attack. The father confirmed that he had helped to send her back from her NDE in the ambulance because she "wasn't ready yet".

In conversation with the woman tracker and me, the father was initially confused by a number of things - what was this drumming noise? Where was Sol's wife? Who were these people in the basement? What was Sol doing on the floor with a pretty woman the father did not recognize?

Sol's father - in dialogue with me - proved quite eager to learn. Having absolutely no preparation for an afterlife, he had checked out without ever leaving. Like many Jewish people, he had been taught that there is nothing on the other side of physical death. The body decays until it is "earth" and that is that. Sol's dad now recognized that he was alive on the other side of death, but he had been living with the family all this time.

We discussed the risk that he might be transferring health problems he had suffered to his son (he had cancer, as well as other serious symptoms), being so tightly enmeshed in the energy field. He agreed to support an action to separate and relocate his dense energy so that his higher consciousness could move free. We explored this together and came up with a plan. He would not go to the expensive mausoleum where his body had been stored; he found that idea disgusting. He would be willing to have his dense energy transferred to a ring - one he described in specific detail - that was in the son's possession. Because of his love of fish and the water, we agreed that the ring would be placed among the "angelfish" (his favorites!) in the tabletop aquarium in the son's study. And he wanted Sol to eat some halvah in his honor.

In the sharing we learned that Sol had recently added angelfish to his collection. He also told us that he had an "inexplicable" desire to buy halvah the previous day - and that his father had left him a ring that perfectly matched the description I was given. We had the makings of a "sea burial" in a fish tank. Sol proceeded to place the ring in the aquarium, and we all felt we had launched a tremendous healing.

The next day (without knowing what had happened), one of the other women in the workshop presented me with a wonderful little carved fish fetish, very like an angelfish. Then yet another woman in the workshop presented me with a copy of a book with an almost identical fish on the cover. Synchronicity will tell us whether we are in the right waters.

Postscript: In some parts of Europe, an April Fools prank is known as an "April fish." However, this fish tale is no joke. I have described exactly what happened, just as it did. If I haven't published much fiction in recent years, it may be because it is hard for fiction to compete with what I encounter in my practice.