Until I was nine, my family lived on Mary Street in Gadsden, Alabama. A widow lived directly across from us. I have no memories of interacting with her but considering the proximity of our homes, we likely at least saw each other.

Her last name was pronounced JEE-ro, and that was all I knew of her. Mrs. Jeero had died, or so my child’s ears had heard the adult voices say. Not until I was older did I learn that her death was not discovered for a day or two and that her body was found in a bedroom (presumably in bed).

I don’t think she and my parents were close, but my mother, nonetheless, planned to attend the funeral. I begged to be taken along.

Against her better judgment, Mother relented, and we headed for Collier-Butler Funeral Home on South Fourth Street. It was a large, white, columned building that looked more like an antebellum slave owner’s mansion than a mortuary.

My attendance turned out to be a mistake.

While time no doubt has shaped my memories of the actual scene, I recall the room as dark save for bright illumination around Mrs. Jeero’s unnaturally still body where it lay in a casket banked by flowers. Music, creepy as only an electronic organ can make it, emanated from somewhere.

In the weeks and probably months that followed, I often woke up screaming from nightmares. This was new behavior and Mother concluded that the funeral was to blame. I was simply too young for the experience. Hindsight, then as now, remains twenty-twenty.

Which raises the question: exactly how old was I? I had pondered this over the years and finally decided to find out. The dusty archives of the Gadsden Public Library, in combination with the glories of cyberspace, gave me an answer. Several answers, in fact.

To begin with, the phonetic spelling of her name did not match the actual. The lady’s full, correct name was Ela May Gero, nee Oakley, and the date of her own death was given as April 16, 1953. So, after decades of mild curiosity, I finally knew that I had been six years and two months old. This surprised me as I thought I had been younger.

But while my nightmares faded with time, someone else’s began.

If my parents shared only a passing acquaintance with Mrs. Gero, there had existed another relationship that meant far more to them, particularly to my father. I grew up hearing Daddy speak fondly and often of Wilson Parris, a friend who died in the early spring of 1950 when I was barely three and my brother, Bruce, was not yet one. But occasionally until I was ten or eleven, usually following Sunday church, Daddy would insist on driving the family to Crestwood Cemetery to visit Wilson’s grave. The frequency with which we did so is difficult to say. Perhaps once or twice a year. Perhaps less or more.

I don’t remember dreading these visits. Having been admonished that it was disrespectful to step on a grave, I carefully meandered here and there to truly dreadful music, worse than the funeral home’s, coming from a tinny outdoor sound system while I read names on headstones and asked the occasional question. By that age I fully understood that dead bodies were buried beneath, but Sunday school had taught me that people’s souls live on beyond death. Childlike, I accepted this.

One detail that caught my attention was that certain headstones had a photograph embedded in the granite. For me, this left no doubt that the people buried in that place (not just the ones with pictures but all of them) had been real individuals who lived and died in history and not imaginary creations of fiction. This realization did not particularly distress me, but I was a serious child in any case, and it made me even more pensive. Eventually these visits to Wilson’s grave became fewer and faded entirely when we moved farther away.

During this period in our lives, Mother and Daddy were still as busy as young adults typically are. Young adults’ days are dedicated to getting an education, scrambling for jobs, buying homes, and both starting and rearing families. Once they securely establish themselves and began the slide into early middle age, these same adults often find themselves with greater opportunity to mull the meaning of life. Maybe they realize they chose the wrong career-–or not. Maybe they decide they love their spouses more than ever or are prouder than ever of their children-– or not.

Maybe they continue to believe in an afterlife-–or not.

This last possibility befell Daddy, and it did not play out to a happy resolution. In his forties, my father began a slow descent into alcoholism, chaos, and despair. I was then, and am still, persuaded that while his increasing awareness of death’s inevitability was not the sole cause of his escalating pain, it certainly played a role. And this awareness was coupled, not coincidentally, with a loss of religious faith.

And so, in tandem with his drinking, Daddy’s mid-life crisis expressed itself most forcefully in his increasingly derisive and vociferous attacks on religion and religious belief. If he never stated flatly that he no longer believed in the existence of God, his behavior certainly suggested so.

Yet Daddy’s prior religious and other values were also mine. In particular he valued education, having struggled mightily as a poor boy to get one at the University of Alabama during the depths of the Depression. Bruce and I happily, and unquestioningly, followed in his and Mother’s footsteps on that score. There were no academic dropouts in our family.

But as for his no-God, no-future-life, religion-is-bunk positions, I’ve taken a different path. I was a founding member of my parish, have attended church regularly throughout my life, and praying daily. But I make no claim to an unshakeable faith arising from a numinous experience of God’s presence and guidance. And if my faith leans a bit to the rote variety, it nonetheless has been shaped by science as well as spirituality.

When I was little, Uncle Allen gave my family a copy of Religion and the New Psychology by Alson J. Smith, first published in 1951. In my early teens, I found it on the shelves in the den, and I still possess the same worn copy, held together by an elastic band. It instigated the beginning of my lifelong interest in psychical research and parapsychology.

I learned that the earliest psychical researchers (beginning with the Cambridge Ghost Society which ultimately morphed into the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR) were focused on the question of survival: whether consciousness and personality survive physical death. The triumphant scientism of their day smugly declared survival to be impossible and the query itself absurd. Death is the end, so no point in wasting thought or ink over the matter. Case closed.

As psychical research became parapsychology and moved from the séance room to the laboratory, it was inevitable that this earlier focus was regarded as, if not exactly an embarrassment, something that needed de-emphasis. Extrasensory perception and psychokinesis in the living became the new epicenter. Zener cards and dice throwing machines edged out mediums.

But as Freud reminds us, the repressed idea returns. Thanatos, certainly no less than Eros, cannot be denied for long. If survival research (or, as it is properly termed, survival-related research) was déclassé for decades, it is respectable again, and researchers are once more listing it on their CV’s. A good sign, I think.

All of us fear death, but simple observations from everyday life reveal that many have a greater fear than others. Reluctance-–and outright refusals-–to draw up a will, buy pre-need burial plots, attend funerals and memorial services, and so forth often betray this dread.

Daddy, however, did not noticeably display these rather obvious signs. Wills, life insurance, burial insurance, paidfor cemetery space and all the rest he had taken care of. But even so, his fear was boldly betrayed by his words rather than his actions.

Frequently, he admonished, “When you’re dead, you’re dead!” And once when the two of us were in the yard while he mowed the grass, he declared, pointing at Tippy, our pet collie, “The same fate awaits you that awaits that dog!”

True enough. But exactly what is the fate that awaits us? Daddy didn’t bother to finish the thought and no doubt figured he didn’t need to. As he saw it, the answer was obvious to anyone with two brain halves to rub together.

I have collected fifty or so books on extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, near-death experiences and related phenomena. All are authored not by cranks and crackpots but by prominent scholars and researchers. I have delved into far more than those fifty, and will continue reading in future. Those by physicists are usually too difficult for my understanding, and I slog my way through as best I can.

I wish Daddy had done the same because long before he died at age 74, he was a tortured soul, bent double by the fear of extinction. The literature on survival, like the subject itself, is particularly vexed and complicated territory. I have read and re-read Alan Gauld’s Mediumship and Survival with partial comprehension and explored other sources.

All this has provided me a rational, evidential, empirical basis for my expectation of a future life, the expectation that at the death of the body our minds, memories, and personalities-–our consciousness-–continue. Scoffers who assert that consciousness is a purely physical/mechanical/ materialistic phenomenon, nothing more than electronic impulses fired off by brain cells, have some tall talking to do in the face of telepathy, remote viewing, precognition and psychokinesis.

Uncertainty is the human condition, and my expectation is not and cannot be 100 percent. It falls somewhere on the continuum between pure belief and pure certainty, but exactly where varies. On good days, my ratio of hope to despair is 90/10, on bad days 51/49, but unlike my father’s, it is never zero.

I doubt that my father ever read anything by Jacques Monod, the 1965 Nobel laureate in biology, but he would have assented to Monod’s bleak assessment, paraphrased as follows:

“Because nature has no intention or goal, we must accept that we are alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe out of which we emerged only by chance. Neither our destiny nor our duty is anywhere spelled out, and our very existence is pointless and absurd. We are merely chemical extras in a majestic but impersonal cosmic drama—an irrelevant, unintended sideshow.”

Daddy would have been better off by far (and, for that matter, so would Monod) to have paid serious attention to the writings of Charlie Dunbar Broad, internationally renowned philosopher and author, professor of logic and epistemology, don of Trinity College, Cambridge, president of the SPR 1935-36 and 1958-60, and lifelong model train and yo-yo enthusiast. Broad once told an interviewer, “Don’t you see? Because these phenomena are real, they change everything! Everything!”

I cast my vote for Broad’s perspective on this issue and am at leisure to ponder the delicious paradox that the rationally-based anticipation of a future life changes absolutely nothing while it changes absolutely everything.

Faith stronger than mine may well have no need for any of this, and individuals so favored might advise that I read the above-referenced literature less and the Bible more. I understand and respect their viewpoint, but not everyone has been privileged by unalloyed union with the divine. For such as us, empirical backup is most welcome. It rolls away the tomb’s sealing stone just enough to admit the beams of a star shining brilliantly against Monod’s–and Daddy’s–dark, dark night.

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