Life, Death, and What Comes After with Patricia Pearson
Hosted by Neil Wilson
In Person Big Ideas
Your life is over the moment you die. So I used to believe, with something like religious fervor. And then I read Opening Heaven’s Door, and such is the power and art, the passion and rigor of Patricia Pearson’s writing that I’m not nearly so sure of myself. This is a splendid book in all the ways a book can be splendid. It is a book to be read and re-read and urged upon friends.
Award-winning journalist Patricia Pearson reveals the widespread and underreported phenomenon of receiving consoling messages and visions from people who have recently died—before the news of death has even been sent.
Science may be unable to “prove” that there is life (or something else) after death, but countless people continue to experience these unexplained coincidences when a loved one dies, while others experience such visions while they are dying themselves. Prompted by her family’s surprising, profound experiences around the deaths of her father and her sister, the hyper-rational Pearson sets out on an open-minded inquiry and discovers that roughly half of bereaved persons—as well as nurses, hospice workers, soldiers, and others who constantly observe the dying—have had uncanny, transcendent experiences. These intimations of enduring bonds can radically help people process their grief and their fear. Her new book, Opening Heaven’s Door recounts deeply affecting stories of messages from the dying and the dead in a fascinating work of investigative journalism, pointing to new scientific explanations that give these luminous moments the importance felt by those who experience them.
