“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it,”
Edgar Allan Poe
Hopefully I have achieved this with the non-macabre stories I have written. Many of them are ‘spiritually’ inspired, I am a one hundred per cent believer in life after death and I have been of this persuasion for over forty years.
No one truly knows what happens after death. There are so many worldwide beliefs that you can’t see the life after death wood for the many spiritual belief trees. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I do believe in the afterlife. In my opinion, Frederic Myers (one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research) put the definition of the life hereafter in a nutshell when he once gave a message, through a medium, during a séance many years ago. ‘It’s Myers here. Keep up the good work, I admire what you are doing, but if you ever discover the truth, no one will ever believe you.’
On this premise, I have given different interpretations of what could happen to you after death and many of the stories tell a different tale. You don’t need rocket science to realize that if life after death exists for you then it is the same for those people you loved and lost in life. One theme runs throughout the spiritual stories and that is if you have been a good person in life then you get the just rewards in the afterlife and meet up with those you loved in life.
For several years I organized spiritual medium venues in a local village hall that seated a hundred and twenty people. It was low-roofed, with a nice interior, and ideal for ‘An evening of clairvoyance’. I booked a medium for a demonstration, her name was Janet and I have used her as a guide, in several of my stories. The following example of mediumship I have not written about but it shows that it is possible, for the likes of Janet, to make contact with the surviving personalities of those deceased.
Janet was going to give a demonstration in the hall. It was winter and it had snowed outside but despite the bad weather, the hall was over half full. An elderly gentleman sat at the back on his own. It was obvious that his wife had passed away and he had attended the venue in the hope of getting a message from her via Janet. Janet never communicated a message to him and when she finished her demonstration I remember thinking at the time: how disappointed the elderly gentleman must feel. The hall emptied of people and a little later I stepped outside to get some fresh air. I saw Janet talking to the elderly gentleman who was sat in his car, the door window wound down. The conversation ended and Janet stepped away. I noticed the gentleman was wiping away obvious tears with a handkerchief which prompted me later to ask Janet the reason why?
Janet told me that during the latter part of her demonstration she kept linking up with a woman in spirit, but the clairvoyance was poor. She kept appearing and disappearing and always dimly seen.’ This changed when the demonstration was over. Janet went outside and told the elderly gentleman that the lady was his wife. He verified this by the description of her Janet gave him. ‘There was no clairaudience, but I knew it was her.’ A wedding ring on her finger was glowing golden. The reason was obvious. The gentleman told Janet that when they married, he couldn’t afford an expensive wedding ring, even though she loved it, and he promised her an expensive golden ring when he retired.
Over the years, I have written one-page stories that, I feel, tell important stories. This one I wrote about thirty years ago and gave it to a friend of mine whose six-year-old daughter had tragically died. It helped him and his wife, in a way, to get over their grief. It is included in my book, Tales to Warm The Soul.
A Moment in Passing
The service had been beautiful. It couldn’t have been any other way. Now the mourners walked solemnly out of the church, and the hearse drove slowly down the road towards the cemetery.
A woman, man and teenage girl looked into the open grave. The coffin was small. Too small the man thought. Grief had moulded itself into every inch of his wife and daughter’s faces. He placed an arm around his wife’s waist, and she leant her head on his shoulder. He stroked his daughter’s hair as she wept.
Two men were walking down the footpath on the other side of the road. They were both old, the lines of their long lives etched into their skin around their eyes, and the grieving father was struck by how cruel life could be.
One of the old men said, ‘It’s terrible – someone so young meeting her death like that. She should have had her who life ahead of her.’
The other nodded. ‘Yes, it is. But wouldn’t it be terrible if there were no lovely children in heaven.’
The father looked at his wife and daughter. It was a glimmer, and a fleeting one at that, but just for a moment some understanding, some hope, broke through the sadness.
Article by Richard Adamski
