The Other Realm

What Started It All

My introduction to the paranormal didn't start off with having an experience. It started off as a mission to prove to myself that the afterlife existed. I was seven-years-old when I was formally introduced to death. I lost two loved ones and a kitten that year. While I was very sad about all three dying, my uncle Chris' death hit me the hardest. It still hits me the hardest thirty-six years later to be perfectly honest.*

I still remember the day as if it was yesterday. I was at home playing with my brother, a neighborhood kid that was close to us, and my best friend at the time. We were outside and my mom had come out on the balcony crying that our Uncle Chris had died from an apparent heart attack. He had literally dropped dead while he was playing tennis with my Uncle T. She had run back into the house crying because she saw my uncle as a little brother of hers. The very first thing I thought of when I heard of my uncle's death was that I was never going to see him again. It is interesting when I think back on it because I didn't know what a heart attack was when I was seven. I turned out to be right about my intuition that I wasn't going to see him again.

To give some background: My Uncle Chris is the youngest child of my dad's parents. They had seven children. My dad is the oldest of his siblings. My dad is seventeen years older than my Uncle Chris. So, you could say he was a kid brother of my dad. My uncle was thirteen at the time I was born, though he would've turned fourteen later on that year. I considered my uncle to be more than just an uncle. I saw him as an older brother of mine.

He was twenty when he departed this world on May 6th, 1989. He would've been twenty-one later that year in September. My grandparents had an autopsy done on him to know why he had cardiac arrest. The autopsy immediately ruled out that it wasn't a heart attack like we initially thought. It ended up being cardiac arrest. A heart attack is when your heart fails because of blockage in the arteries. Cardiac arrest involves something electrical within your heart. There weren't any blocked arteries.

His autopsy results ended up being inconclusive of what caused the cardiac arrest to happen. There was no high blood pressure. There was no indication he had any type of heart disease. There was no indication that he had drugs in his system that caused his heart to fail. You can all imagine how these inconclusive results caused worry among our family. It was terrifying how you could seemingly be healthy and still die from your heart failing without knowing what caused it.

The family had gone into theories over the years about what could've caused his heart to fail. A few suspected that he died from d**g use that my grandparents kept quiet about. Others thought that my uncle had Marfan Syndrome since he was very tall and thin.

The suspect nowadays of what caused his heart to fail suddenly is Hypertrophic Cardiomypathy (or HCM). Sudden cardiac death is a major complication of HCM, especially if you don't have this diagnosis given that you may have no symptoms of it. This has been known to take down athletes on the field and on the court...like it did with my uncle.

I have learned some lessons about my uncle's death despite what caused him to have sudden cardiac death. One lesson is that you don't have to be young to have your heart fail on you. The second lesson was that you didn't need to be fat or unhealthy to die from your heart failing on you. My uncle was skinny and athletic.

I didn't react immediately to my uncle's death. I had one of my famous delayed reactions. It was four days later that my uncle's death set in, and I reacted to it. I started crying in this space between the wall and the back of the couch in the living room, a place I would hide in. I became afraid of death the more I thought about how I wasn't going to see my uncle anymore and how things would be after death. I thought an eleven-year-old was amusingly old when I was seven, despite knowing that my uncle was twenty and twenty was more than eleven. My dad found me and sat me in his lap on the rocking chair. We talked about death that day, and he made me feel less afraid of it.

My uncle's funeral was in an open casket. This means that you can see his body. My grandma thought it was a good idea that my brother and I wouldn't come to the funeral. My grandma and my mom didn't think that our last memories of our uncle should be of him in a casket. I was mad at this decision when I was seven. I thought they were preventing me from saying goodbye to my uncle, who I saw as an older brother. I understand though why they made that decision as I have gotten older and have become a mother myself to two children. I still have a lot of lingering guilty feelings though about not going to his funeral all these years later.

I don't get why. The reason I don't understand why I have these feelings of guilt is that I know now that all of our loved ones are watching over us and are there in spirit. My feelings for that definitely increased when I started believing in Pagan beliefs in 2010 and had Paganism as a secondary belief system starting in 2014 (my primary belief system is being a Unitarian Universalist). One major holiday in Paganism is Samhain. It was initially marked by Celtic Pagans as it marked their New Year. It was the celebration of the end of summer and the harvest season as well as the beginning of winter, which they associated with death. I do a ritual every Samhain (October 31st-November 1st) to honor my loved ones and ancestors that have passed on. I had a drink in their honor. I have found that I feel more connected to the loved ones that have passed on since I became a Pagan. Yet there is that lingering guilt that I didn't go to my uncle's funeral in 1989 that I find having trouble letting go for some odd reason.

A big one could be that I felt the only way you could say goodbye to someone was to go to their funeral. I don't understand how I came to believe this at seven. I had never been to a funeral before this point. I actually didn't go to my first funeral until I was twelve. I don't even remember if this belief was taught to me or something that I developed. I find it to be a negative belief regardless of how I came to believe it, because it causes guilt if you can't attend one's funeral for whatever reason. The ironic thing is that I have missed all of my grandmothers' and step-grandmother's funerals. I couldn't go because I live in Sweden now and couldn't afford to go. I don't have feelings of guilt because I know they would understand why I couldn't come.

I have yet to apply the same logic to my absence at my uncle's death even though I know he would've understood why my brother and I couldn't come. The guilt keeps hindering that logic from sinking into my brain to absolve that guilt. It doesn't matter how many rituals I do to honor his death on May 6th, October 31st, and December 25th. It doesn't matter that I have accepted that the afterlife exists and that lost loved ones are watching over you. I still feel the guilt thirty-plus years later.

I wanted to find evidence of an afterlife when I was seven though. The evidence of that for my seven-year-old brain was ghosts. I figured if ghosts were real, there was an afterlife. If there was an afterlife, I could be reunited with my Uncle Chris when my time comes (preferably somewhere after early March 2082 because that is when I am turning a hundred). I would get to tell him I am sorry for missing his funeral and catch up with him in the afterlife.

Of course, a lot more paranormal stuff would happen down the road that would solidify my belief in the aftermath till the point where I had no question that the afterlife and the paranormal existed.