'The Guidance Had Been My Faith All Along:' How I Found Solace After Devastating Loss (Exclusive)

One of the many things I love about being Jewish is that the faith generally focuses less on what happens after we die than it does on how we should live. There’s nothing transactional about being a moral person in this life, because the benefits for being a good human are enjoyed here on earth, not in some gauzy heaven. As for an afterlife? There’s no consensus on it. It’s something we debate — we debate everything; we are Jews, after all — but not something we really dwell on.

Which is great for grounding one’s morality in the here and now. Less great for equipping a relatively young person with a massive dose of death.

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That’s what happened to me in my early 30s, when four very close friends — an entire family — died in one horrific car accident. I was left to process the mind-warping, sucker-punch surreality of witnessing an entire family — poof — cease existence in a single day. I also had to deal with the pain of the sudden and forever absence of people who were woven into my life. I had very few spiritual underpinnings for processing this, which only added to the devastation. Because being a rational, agnostic, Jewish person raised in the United States, I simply assumed that was it for my friends. They were gone forever. There was a binary: alive and dead. Here and not here. They were in the latter category of both. I would never again see them. Not in this life. Not in any life.

So I was unprepared for what happened next. First of all, about a month after the accident, I had a dream where one of my dead friends — the mom — was packing up her house with her oldest son, who was eight when he died. How to explain how much this little boy meant to me? First of all, I’d become friends with his parents — the first among my friend group by many years to have children — when they were pregnant with him. The first time I babysat for him, a guy I had a crush on, who was also very good friends with the parents, came over to hang out with me. When my friends came home, I later learned, they said they could feel the sexual tension between me and the guy.

They weren’t wrong; we got together a few weeks later and are still together 33 years later. My love for this little boy was already deep, connected as it was to my love for his parents and my now-husband, but the kid himself was hilarious and charming and one of my favorite people. So his death truly hit hard.

In the dream, as my friend calmly folded and boxed clothing as if for a move, she told me about the accident. They had never seen the car coming. She had felt no pain. Also, there was no afterlife. But then she let me hold the little boy in my lap, so I could nuzzle his blond head as I had so many times before. In the dream, I began crying, wetting his curls with my tears. I woke up with tears streaming down my face.

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The scientific part of me, the Gayle who’d taken a few psychology classes and written articles about dreams, recognized that this was just my subconscious showing me what I needed to see, telling me what I needed to hear. But I awoke feeling shook, and that sensation would not go away. It hadn’t felt like a dream. It had felt like a visitation. It had felt like my friend, knowing how very much I loved this little boy, had brought him to me so that I might get a proper farewell.

When I told a friend about the dream, she recommended I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was revelatory. Of course, I had some rudimentary understanding of faiths outside the Judeo-Christian realm, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism’s beliefs in reincarnation. But this was my first exposure to a cultural belief where the divide between life and death was a bit more porous. According to the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, souls enter Bardo Thodol after death, a 49-day period between death and reincarnation when the soul prepares for its next cycle.

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In that context, the dream felt like something else. My dead friend was clearly preparing for the next cycle. I mean, she was packing boxes; usually my subconscious is a little more subtle than that. And the timing of the dream, less than a month after the accident, fit in with the calendar. Though I have occasionally dreamt about my friends since then, it’s always been vague and hazy, nothing as keen and clear as that visitation.

About a year after that dream, my husband and I were at the beginning of a long-planned round-the-world trip. We debated cancelling it — he was as heartbroken and reeling with loss as I was, and also 9/11 had happened in the months after our friends’ death, further destabilizing us and the world — but we decided to forge ahead. On the second leg of the yearlong journey, we were driving a rented camper van through New Zealand’s North Island when both of us simultaneously felt the presence of our other friend — the dad — at the exact same time. Not for nothing, this was happening on Maori land. And the Maori, I later learned, believe in something called wairua, the nonphysical presence of a soul after death. We felt our friend’s presence a few more times over the year until we arrived safely home.

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The psychological reasoning for this is pretty obvious: a one-two punch of suggestibility and wish fulfillment. We wanted to see him in that moment, and so we did. Then, as soon as one of us vocalized feeling this “presence," the other one felt it, too. But a more spiritual interpretation might be that we encountered a soul in transition, or perhaps a guardian angel, or even a curious wanderlusting stowaway ghost.

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Several months after that, in Jaisalmer, India, I was feeling ill  and wandered into a restaurant, where I was befriended by its owner, an older Indian woman. She fed me lentil pancakes and yogurt and we began chatting; eventually my husband and I wound up confiding in her about how broken we still were by the loss of our friends. She told us that in Hindu belief, we could request the souls of my friends be reincarnated in our as-yet-unborn children’s bodies. You will see them again, she promised me.

And I did. But not the way she predicted. I found them again in writing. I found them in memory. I found them when I wrote a book that fictionalized their tragic accident and plumbed the spiritual questions it has raised for me. The main character was a fabrication, but her family consisted of my friends, reanimated on the page.

I wrote that book in an ecstatic three months, pulling the memory of my friends from the recesses of my mind and pouring them onto the page. As I wrote them back into existence, I felt them in the room with me, their presence palpable.

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And that was when I began to finally understand that this thick curtain I’d assumed permanently separated the living from the dead was as much a construct as the idea of heaven or ghosts or wandering souls. It’s something our culture has decided is true — much to our detriment, if you ask me. And so, with each keystroke, with each memory relived, I punctured so many holes in that curtain that it became a sheer veil, one I could cross whenever I needed to.

Did my friend come back to me with her son because they were in some spiritual bardo, or because my subconscious bid them? Did I experience the other friend in wairua, or was it just a vulnerable, hurting brain conjuring the dead? Did writing about my friends summon their spirits, or had they been in there all along, twined with my love?

The answer to those questions, I have come to realize, is yes. Whether my friends reappeared in some liminal state or just as an electrical impulse in my brain, they were there. Call it spirit. Call it subconscious. Call it a turkey sandwich. It doesn’t matter what it is, only that it is.

Many years later, when my older relatives began dying, I noticed that at the funerals and shivas people didn’t say, “Sorry for your loss” as often as the customary Jewish phrase, “May their memory be a blessing.” It was then I understood that the guidance had been in my faith all along. Love is stored in memories. By holding onto them, we hold onto love, and in that love we are all immortal.

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Gayle Forman's newest book, After Life, is on sale Jan. 7, 2025 and available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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