The Author's Corner: Tears in Heaven

When we pass from this life, is there an afterlife? It is something that has crossed everyone’s mind at one time or another. The answer is unknown because no one has come back to tell us. If you believe in a soul, does it even know?

As we grow there are times when some of us have had a near death experience and it shows us what is waiting for us. At these moments the answer is there, or could it be what we see just our minds trying to make sense of what is happening? I have experienced this near death once in my life. I was shown my lifeless body lying in my hospital bed and who I would say God/the Creator was standing beside me. He asked me a question of either do I want to be in the spirit world or continue to live?

In that moment in January of 2005, I had to make a choice of what was going to be my life, dead or alive. My question now has been what did I choose? The reason for that is because when I awoken from that experience, I felt different. Over the next five years I would run from the acceptance of my schizophrenia diagnosis with the hope that I was still in that moment of my choice.

It would come to an end in February of 2010 when I would find myself in hospital once again because of suicidal thoughts, at least I knew something was wrong and that I needed help. On the second or third day I was there I was given a wake-up call from the nurse that managed my case. She showed me where I could end up if I did not change direction. That night in my sleep I awoke seeing my body that same way I did in 2005, however this time the figure that I saw handed me a feather for writing and said, “You made you decision, now write.” When I woke up that next morning I had the idea for a book, I would write about the stories of the mentally ill in the hope to break the stigma around mental health.

My life had a meaning once again. Before that stay in the hospital, I felt that I did not have a reason to live. In the following weeks after I would return home and back to work, I started to put my pen to paper. It took six years of finding time to write and edit until I would take it to my publisher. In 2016 I published An Individual’s Innocence: The Silent Screams.

Now it is the fall of 2025, and I have published five books. I know that the tears that I shed so long ago in 2005 have been tears from heaven. The change is that I have reason to push onward. Did I choose death and this would be what heaven really is for me or is it the staging ground before I move into the afterlife?

Do we truly know what this life is?

Stay safe.