It is a surprisingly common phenomenon.  A beloved parent dies, and a grieving adult child looks for solace.  Then something happens – an otherwise mundane event, but linked to the memory of the departed.  It is linked in a way that seems either to be a highly improbable coincidence or a direct communication from the beloved one. Often these events are encounters with music, with birds, or with a stranger of the type our religions have taught us to befriend.

What are we to make of these experiences?  When the rare bird comes to your window the day of your dad’s funeral, and sings to you for a minute, leaving you with feelings of comfort and serenity, what are you to think?  A religious type may hold them to be proof of an afterlife.  A spirit medium might describe in detail the five steps that a soul goes through after dying. A skeptical scientist might put it all down to coincidence.  Like many people, I am none of the above. I want to be scientific, spiritual, and a bit religious— I can’t simply file these episodes away as unexplained. 

My mom died in 2005 after a long, painful struggle with breast cancer. She had plenty of time to prepare herself for death and she did this in a courageous, peaceful way. The death itself was difficult, but the whole family surrounded Mom for days and nights on end, providing such comfort as we were able to do.

My parents were living in Sun City West, Arizona. I live in upstate New York. After Mom’s death and ten days on the watch, I needed to get home to my own two small kids. My plan was to stay home for three weeks and then go back to be with my dad. At home, I was a wreck. I knew that my dad was in such agonies of grief that, honestly, I dreaded going back to him. I had enough grief of my own to manage.

One of my consolations was music.  Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – the old German faves that my mom loved.  For some reason, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony stuck with me. In particular, the slow second movement of the Fourth. It is a throbbing, pulsing, heartbeat of a movement, probably the most romantic thing Beethoven ever wrote. It played over and over in my mind for the better part of those three weeks.

As my return to Arizona drew nearer, I grew ever more anxious. How could I help my dad in his grief when I was suffering so much of my own? The prospect of facing that much pain seemed more than I could handle.  Beethoven had the answer with the repetitive heartbeat of his Symphony No. 4: just love, just love, just love, just love. Everything else would take care of itself.  The omnipresence of the symphony in my mind was a wondrous gift that kept me going.

When it was time to return I got into my car , a welter of conflicting emotions, to leave for the airport. The radio was preset to WMHT, our local classical station. As I turned the key in the ignition – truly at the exact moment that I turned the key – the opening chord of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony came on the radio. I was stunned for a moment, then I smiled and just said, “Thanks, Mom.”  For the rest of the trip I relaxed and I was able to be present to my dad when he needed me most.

Did I simply imagine this phenomenon?  Does my memory exaggerate?  Was it an uncanny coincidence? Or was it a sacred epiphany?  Taken in isolation, I might have written it off as a freak event, or maybe a byproduct of my overwrought emotional state.  But this was followed in subsequent years by three more remarkable events when my other parents died – in turn my father, my mother-in-law, and finally my father-in-law.  Two of those happenings, like my mom’s, involved music. The outlier was my mother-in-law Agnes.

Agnes and I were very different people. We had a teasing, sometimes fractious but always loving relationship. I was neither Irish nor Catholic – strikes one and two – and many of my attitudes varied widely from hers. But we were usually able to turn our disagreements into laughter. Agnes never did call that third strike on me, and in the end we were very close despite our differences.

At Agnes’ wake, my wife Mary sent me out to the drugstore to pick up a few items. As I walked out of the funeral parlor on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, a pigeon sitting on a nearby fence took off into the air. I remember something being odd in the way the pigeon went airborne just then – pigeons in New York City are rarely shy of humans – and the next thing I knew, the pigeon was directly above me, dropping an enormous load of poop onto my head and onto my best suit.

This was precisely the way that Agnes would have chosen to leave me a farewell message on the day of her wake.  When the pigeon took off from the fence, it was almost as though a hit man had compared me to a photograph, saying, “Yeah, that’s our guy.”  I had a great laugh over the pigeon crap caper. I wasn’t even very surprised.  Sharing the story since then with friends and family has not only brought a lot of happiness, it has helped to keep the memory of Agnes warm and alive. I could hear Agnes laughing her head off then, and I still do hear it. 

Was it a visitation?  Again, taken in isolation I would probably say, “No, just a whacky coincidence,” but taken in conjunction with my other experiences and the reports of countless other people, I have to wonder.  And wonder, I believe, is the key to living with these experiences.  Jung called them examples of “synchronicity,” meaning events that are closely connected in meaning but utterly disconnected in causality.  One is not supposed to understand synchronistic events, at least not in the way that we can understand a causal chain of events.  For Jung, synchronicity represents a movement of the world that is disassociated from, but no less important than, causality.  Rather than scientific understanding, these events motivate self-examination.

This is not to rule out altogether the possibility we may one day grasp “visits from beyond” in a scientific way.  Many scientists want to say that visits from beyond are impossible, because the whole notion of an afterlife is impossible.  A thoughtful scientist, though, knows that the word “impossible” has no place in the scientific vocabulary.  Science must follow the evidence, wherever it leads, rather than superimposing a theoretical framework that rules out certain types of evidence.  Most of the great scientific discoveries have occurred in opposition to prevailing theories, when the evidence against the old theories became finally too strong to ignore.  For centuries it was absolute dogma, for instance, that animals could have no meaningful emotions or inner lives.  Every dog owner knew this to be false, but somehow every scientist insisted on its truth, until Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall proved otherwise.  The leaders in their field resisted their conclusions for a long time, insisting that only humans have inner lives, until the weight of the evidence grew too heavy to ignore.

At the other end of the interpretive spectrum, many religious people take these visitations as proof that there is an afterlife—an afterlife that exists on terms familiar to us (populated by conscious individual souls with thoughts and language). This, I think, is erroneous as well. A theoretical religious framework is superimposed onto the experience, and this is a framework that has many, many flaws to begin with. It all too often abandons mystery and seeks to insist on detailed certainty of the “other side.”

These visitation episodes occur to individuals – fallible, vulnerable, maybe gullible individuals. If they could be proven, if they were subject to the certainty of religious doctrine or the rigors of scientific repetition and verification, they would be much less remarkable. Things that happen spontaneously in the real world often cannot be replicated in a laboratory, or reduced to a dogma. In fact, their value depends in large part on their mystery. To understand these events, in a scientific or a religious way, may be to strip them of what makes them most alive.

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of my four parental “visitations.” I do know that my memories of these epiphanies are deeply personal and leave me a far richer person. I do know that each time they occurred, I felt a great overwash of comfort and happiness that has often recurred to me through the years.  I do not know how to fit these experiences into my understanding of the world, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Once I feel I know something, I tend to move on to other things. Others might feel differently, but for me, to dwell in the mystery of an event greatly increases its value. It opens my emotional response in a way that understanding cannot. “Knowledge” seems to have a kind of arrogance to it, while “wonder” comes from a place of humility.  And for my spiritual journey through this bewildering life, I will take the humility of wonder over the arrogance of knowledge every time.

The Gospel of John says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”  I have no such gnostic faith. I have noticed that those who do tend to cause a lot of trouble in this world. My faith is more like the shepherds in Luke’s Christmas story, marveling at things I can scarcely begin to understand.  I have faith that my sense of wonder is a reliable guide through the spiritual life – or as reliable as any guide I am ever likely to have.