My wife sat in the room where her grandmother, lying unconscious in her bed, was breathing her last weak breaths. The nursing staff had called earlier that morning and told my wife that grandma was fading fast. “Come quickly if you want to say goodbye,” they told her. My wife rushed to her unconscious grandmother’s side, and now sat helpless, watching death slowly take hold.
Predictably, grandma took one final breath and exhaled one last time. Across the room, my wife sat up in her chair, alert for another breath – a breath that never came. It was over.
Just then, the picture that hung over grandma’s bed, fell to the floor.
It’s hard to explain that incident as a coincidence. A more likely explanation is that the energy that departed grandma’s body when she took that last breath, somehow interacted with that picture and caused it to fall. It was an energy that our human form finds difficult to detect, but exists outside the normal range of our five senses.
Because that energy is undetectable, we seldom give it consideration, but it surrounds us at all levels. While we have developed tools and instruments to detect other invisible forms of energy, we have yet to find a means of sensing the life energy that seems to exist after physical death.
It appears that animals are more sensitive to that energy. Stories abound of dogs and cats reacting to an invisible presence that humans seldom detect. While we might find their reactions amusing, we fail to appreciate that those animals have other highly developed senses that exceed our abilities. Perhaps they can detect that life force that eludes our effort to detect.
Humans do occasionally demonstrate the ability to sense the realm that is usually inaccessible to us. Stories abound too of people who, in their final moments of life, seem to be able to see images of those who have gone before. Those comforting visits seem to be detectable by those who are gradually approaching that moment when the transition from life to death is imminent, and the previously departed are offering comfort and guidance to the failing and fearful human spirit.
As our science and understanding of our universe continues to expand, we have learned that all we are and all that surrounds us are forms of energy. Much of that energy goes unnoticed because it is a part of our daily existence. We don’t feel the weight of the atmosphere that surrounds us, or the constant collisions of the molecules of gases that make up our atmosphere. We don’t feel the processes that convert the food we eat into the energy that propels our bodies. We don’t feel the nerve impulses that transmit information from our eyes to the appropriate portion of our brain.
Surrounded by the variety of energy forms that define our world, perhaps that mysterious life force that seems to be the core of our being is just another note in the symphony of God’s creation.