What if you could talk to people you love who have died?

This is the question I posed several years ago in my book, A Communion of Saints: Dreams of Happiness on the Road to Life. 

Admittedly, it’s a hard book to classify. It’s not autobiography although it contains many autobiographical elements. It’s not fiction in the ordinary sense of the term, but it’s not exactly factual. I call it a work of imagination that I hope is true to the Catholic vision of life after death.

In the book, I set up an imaginary situation in which I have been in a car accident and am lying in a hospital bed in a coma. I can see and hear the people around me (my wife, Sharon, our children, doctors and nurses) but I can’t communicate with them in any way.

As I lie there, I drift in and out of sleep. While sleeping, I dream and in my dreams I encounter people I love who have died. We engage in conversations about life, death and what happens afterward. Some of the talk is very serious (as you might expect from conversations with dead people). Some is humorous (intended to be comic relief to keep the narrative from becoming too grim). But mostly, it’s simply an encounter between two people who haven’t seen each other for a long time.

Why write about death, about people who are long gone?

The older I get (and the closer I am to my own death), the more I wonder what it’s like to surrender to this unwanted but inevitable fact of human existence. Like it or not, each one of us will die. It doesn’t matter who we are, what we have done or failed to do, what we own or the circumstances of our life and death. Every one of us must die. Alone. Once and for all.

And yet, we have hope. Something deep inside tells us we are not alone in death. There is, we believe, a communion of saints. “Life is changed, not ended,” we pray at funerals for those we love. But what is this change like?

We can only imagine it. We have no empirical evidence, no scientific proofs. We are free to imagine that when our life on earth ends, nothing happens and we return to dust and ashes. Or we can imagine  becoming part of a cosmic life force, or a cycle of birth and rebirth, or a heavenly home with angels and pearly gates. The truth is we don’t know.

But the people I write about in A Communion of Saints all believed that there is life—a better life—after death. They were convinced that love is stronger than death and that God cares for each of us and wants us to live with him in love. Now and forever.

I enjoyed writing this little book. It gave me a chance to remember how much I miss the family members, friends, mentors and extraordinary teachers I was privileged to know and love during my formative years. I can’t say that this experience helped me fully understand the mystery that death is. But it helped me to face it more honestly, and it allowed me to share more fully in the belief that “hope springs eternal in the human breast”!



A Communion of Saints: Dreams of Happiness on the Road to Life is available at danielconwayauthor.com.