Afterlife

I had this customer in the other day. He’s a perennially cheerful guy who I did not think much of when we first met, but is the kind of guy who grows on you, and he has earned my respect and a feeling of friendship over the few years I’ve known him.

One of the things that has impressed me most about him in this time was the fairly recent revelation that he’d hit the skids big time only 10 years or so ago, but managed to pull himself up and out again quite successfully. He’d descended from a functioning alcoholic with a highly successful business, complete with a wife and daughter, through divorce to bankruptcy to total estrangement from his immediate and extended family, to living on the street to full-on alcoholism and drug dependency, to a stint in jail. I mean, this guy really took a noser -- he didn’t just hit bottom, he cratered through the surface like a cheap Mars probe.

At his lowest point, my customer said he had found himself in court, telling the judge he’d given up altogether and did not care anymore. He’d resigned himself to his living hell, and was ready to be put away in prison for good, if that was what society wanted. But the judge evidently saw prospects in the broken shell of a man before him, and instead sentenced him to six months in a recovery house. He was released from jail on Christmas Eve, 1997, with six dollars and fifty cents jail earnings, and nothing but prison garb for clothing when he checked into the rehab house.

About three months into sobriety, when things were starting to look up and he was riding that pink cloud of hope and possibility familiar to those who have begun recovery from addiction, he was located by credit agencies looking for the five grand or so he owed the government for a student loan… plus the $45,000 he owed his vehicle insurer for property damage he’d caused while driving intoxicated. So intoxicated, in fact, that until he got the bill he’d not even been aware the incidents had ever happened. That, he told me, is the only time he really came close to taking a drink again in the last decade. He wasn’t starting from zero after all, daunting enough as that was. He was fifty grand below zero, and things looked hopeless all over again.

But he managed to stay sober, he told me, and related a story about what helped him manage to get through it all.

One day, he said, while he was still “drinkin’ and druggin’” and sleeping in cold, grimy alleys, he went a tad overboard and damn near killed himself with a lethal mix of alcohol and drugs. He was rushed into emergency as what little life remained in him drained away, on the brink of running dry altogether and forever.

“You know,” he told me matter of factly, “it’s true what they say about when you’re almost dead.” “Your life really does actually flash before your eyes. And suddenly I was looking at all the good things and all the bad things that I’d ever done in my life – and I mean all of them, and the whole time I was just washed in this overwhelming sense of forgiveness.

“And it wasn’t just forgiveness for me. It was forgiveness from me, for people I’d decided I’d hated in my life. At the time, my whole family had long given up and turned their back on me, and I hated them for it. And suddenly I felt this giant sort of …understanding, and I could hear myself saying ‘Really? Really?’ as all these things went by and I realized that none of it actually mattered. I understood that I was completely forgiven, and completely forgiving at the same time. And I got the strong sense that all of life was like an illusion. All that had happened to me to that day did not matter. Instead I felt that the only thing that really mattered at all was that there was this higher power, and that the higher power cared about me and loved me.

“Now remember, at the time I hated everybody, and even myself, so this was a major revelation for me.”

I asked him if that revelation stuck with him, or did he go back to bitter feelings with his family or anyone else. He said no, actually, and that the memory of the remarkable experience incubated inside him, and in time became the well from which he drew when he found himself faced with that huge financial setback right at the beginning of his attempt at recovery.

“And you know,” he said, “it always works out in the end. I got a bit of a break on the insurance in a settlement; not the student loan though – the government always gets their money in full, you can always bet on that. But I eventually paid it all off, and boy did it hurt, though in the end you know, when I looked back from the top of that mountain, it seemed all worthwhile. I felt really good about it all. And now here I am, I have a good job, a new wife and daughter, and I have two houses in my name – one I live in, one I’m renting out – that today I am able to afford to pay for.”

So I asked my customer whether, if he could go back then, would he do it all again the same way? Was his experience along such a hard path that worthwhile?

“It wouldn’t matter if I did or didn’t,” he said, shrugging, “you’re going to learn the lessons you need to learn one way or the other. And it’s you that has to do it. That’s part of God’s love for you. The whole experience has led me to believe I have a connection with God, but no direct communication. So while I have God’s love and forgiveness, there just isn’t the kind of individual connection where I can ask for any special favours. It’s up to me to get things right, even if it takes a couple of tries.”

I shared with him my own, similar feelings on the subject – that this life is a place of lessons, and that in my experience, if you don’t get a lesson don’t worry about it – it will come around again and slap you a little harder next time, just to get your attention. I told him I also shared his belief that there is a higher power, and we both agreed we described ourselves more as ‘spiritual’ as opposed to ‘religious’. My customer talked about some experiences he’d had in a church he’d joined in recent years, with too much political squabbling and a revolving door of pastors, and how he’d found petty human issues within the church distracting him from the real reason he went there – to be with his God.

“So I haven’t actually been to the church in a long time,” he said. “But I still talk to God all the time.”

I told him I spoke to God pretty much every day too, and that on the occasions when I want to ask God for something, or for some help dealing with something, I have a ritual of making sure to first thank God for all that I already have, and have going for me in my life. “And by then,” I said to my customer, “I usually feel too blessed already to actually ask for whatever I’d first set out for. I start to feel ungrateful, or that I’d be asking for too much.”

My customer laughed and said, “Hey, it wouldn’t matter if you did. You ask God for patience, let’s say, and God’s going to say, ‘Lemme get back to you on that.’ The lessons are all yours, pal, and if they have to be learned the hard way, then that’s the way it’s going to happen. Simple as that.”

We parted company, and I thought about our conversation later that night, and I woke the next morning dwelling on what he’d said about absolute forgiveness. Somehow it seemed too easy that we’ll all be forgiven for the bad things we do, no matter how heinous or how often we do them. If that were the case, then why do people who have near-death experiences like his seem to always come out the other side trying to live a better life, with deeper resources of patience and understanding? Why instead don’t they just resume whatever bad practices they were drawn to before, with the added comfort of knowing that in the end they’ll be forgiven for it all anyway, no matter what? It bugged me enough that I fired off a quick e-mail asking him to elaborate.

Here, paraphrased somewhat, was his reply:

“The revelation is that if you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always got. Or put another way, what you reap is what you sew. There are lots of expressions around to the same effect, because it’s true. So, then, the reward for a living a ‘good life’ is just that: a good life. With God's abundant love and grace, all is reciprocated in kind, or more like returned ten-fold.

“Imagine a homeless dog roaming the alleyways behind restaurants, foraging for plate scrapings, plagued with pests and matted hair, living in fear, anger, and despair. Wouldn't his life be so much better if he bowed down before a good Master and followed?

“Wow! Grooming... fresh water, good food and exercise, all in return for just guarding the house, chasing the ball when it’s time to and being happy to see him every day. That’s a good deal! Obviously, though, an initial leap of faith is going to be critical to getting it all rolling.

“And it’s going to be hard at times all the same. But as they say, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I like to say I grow at the speed of pain, and I often don’t get things right the first time around, resulting in that pain. I relate that to my human nature. But more often than not nowadays, I am open to the truth, and to living the right way, and holy cow with a new set of glasses to see through I might even learn from your mistakes, instead having to make the same ones myself.

“Anyway, gotta go pick up my daughter. Wife says now. Talk to you soon.

“God bless... You know.”

John