Death, Near Death Experience, Spirituality

He Speaks to Me with Electricity

My atheistic philosophy professor father found a way to communicate with me after death

I had four bars of cell service. The navigation apps on my car and on my iPhone should both have been working. Yet, here I was, driving south from Sedona, Arizona, across the desiccated Cottonwood Valley, headed towards the mountainside town of Jerome, and then home, to Southern California, and both of my nav systems were on the fritz.

It was no coincidence to me that today was the anniversary of my father’s death.

My father, a professor of philosophy, specializing in artificial intelligence, spoke the language of math. He was the smartest person I’ve ever met — that guy who maxed out the score on his college entrance exam and then graduated in three years with degrees in physics, philosophy and mathematics and yet who sometimes double-booked his classes because he didn't really need to attend them. He already understood the material better than his professors.

Most of the time, you could find him perched in front of six computer screens stretched out across his desktop. His equations would reach from one glowing square to the next. And all of it was incomprehensible to me.

For all but a week of the forty-two years I had with my father, I would have said that he, a devout atheist, was the least likely person I’ve ever known to reach back through the curtains of the physical realm and pull them wide apart. And yet, he did, and still does, communicate in the way that he knew best, with computers, phones and other electrical devices.

Driving up the hairpin road into the historical mining town of Jerome, I passed rickety hundred-year-old house after house, their front porches perched on the edge of the mountainside, facing out across the Verde Vally and looking for all the world like they were about to slip over the edge. I searched for a parking spot to slide into for a few moments to try again to reset the navigation systems.

I had no luck with the car, but my phone did find a route. I didn't look all that closely at the directions though because I’ve done this drive many, many times and it always takes me through the town square of Prescott and then across a high plateau before dipping back down through a tumble of rounded boulders to the desert floor on the other side of the mountains.

When my grandfather (my dad’s dad) died, many years ago, he came to visit me while I was in savasana, the “resting pose” at the end of a yoga class.

A blindingly bright vision of bubbles floating over my little angel-topped birdbath in the backyard had filled me with an urgency I did not understand. The bubbles spun and danced in the air, rising up into the sun before morphing into rose petals falling from the sky.

Although I came home and told my husband about what I had experienced, we did not comprehend what it was all about until the next day, when my dad found my grandfather dead in his apartment.

My grandfather’s time of death was right about the same time that I had the vision. And the symbology of it was evident. My grandfather and I used to blow bubbles together off the edge of his balcony in Bella Vista, Arkansas. It was our “thing” that we did together when I would visit him. We would watch them float off into the sun, their iridescent skins spinning with hidden fire.

My grandfather also came to my grandmother, who lived in a nursing home, the day he died. I was the one who had to tell her that he was gone. To my surprise, her response was, “I already knew. He came to me last night.” And when my grandmother died a few years later, she sat up in bed on the day before she left us and had a conversation with my grandfather.

I, too, personally had a direct experience with death when I was twenty years old and was run over by a truck. Covered with a sheet by bystanders and assumed dead, I was eventually put into a pressure suit by the paramedics to bring some blood pressure back into my body. I wasn’t aware of any of that though. I was floating in the treetops, engrossed in the most beautiful birdsong I’d ever heard and floating ever closer to the sun.

My dad did not buy into any of this though. To him, death was the end.

“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour…” — William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Although he did not believe in any existence after death, my father lived life to the fullest. Nature, really, was his religion. And he shared that with me.

He did see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. When he wasn't working out complex equations, he either had a camera in hand or was out on his mountain bike. He distilled in me the love of nature that I have today.

When I was eleven, we moved from Upstate New York to Tucson, Arizona. One summer day, my dad loaded us up in his new yellow and white-striped Ford Bronco and drove us all up a “back way” to Sedona. I’ve always vividly remembered picnicking en route under cottonwood trees alongside a river.

In the forty-two years since then, I’ve actually lived in Sedona for a “sabbatical” year with my husband and have driven back and forth from California to Sedona countless times for vacation. But I’ve never again found that route we took that long-ago summer day.

A week before he actually died of esophageal cancer, I think that my father had a near death experience (NDE). But rather than bringing him comfort, it terrified him because it directly opposed everything he believed in.

He described being in room of light and said that there was someone else there, but he wasn't sure who it was. As he slipped further and further away from us over that last week, I could hear him talking to this person, whoever it was.

Immediately after his death, all sorts of electrical things began to go haywire. His university website crashed. Then his personal website crashed. His main graduate student’s (the one who would carry on his work) brand-new phone went kaput.

But the weirdest thing is that a photo I wanted to use in a slideshow for his memorial kept misbehaving.

When I was just a kid, we went on a trip to Moab, Utah. He took a picture overlooking the valley floor. It became one of his best-sellers at the art shows he used to sell his work at. Years later, my husband and I went on a mountain-biking trip with my dad to Moab. We “re-created” that photo, except this time the two of us were in it.

As I was preparing the slideshow, this photo just kept continually flipping onto its side for no apparent reason. It was the strangest thing.

And in the years since his death (he’s been gone almost twelve years now), every year on the anniversary of his death he seems to be trying to communicate with all of us in the way he knew best — with electronics. He’s the last person I expected to hear from after death. But I think that maybe he’s trying to tell us that he was wrong, that there is more to this world than meets the eye.

We’ve had dishwashers break, WIFI systems stop working, and phones doing bizarre things. Even in those years when I’ve forgotten that it was the anniversary of his death, he’s reminded us with weird electrical disruptions.

On this trip home from Sedona, on the 11th anniversary of my father’s death, I was driving home alone because my husband had to fly to a meeting in another state. I found myself climbing out of Jerome and winding along a country road which did not seem like the normal route that we take. But I hadn’t checked the directions on my phone. I just assumed that I would soon pop out into the historical town square in Prescott.

Instead, I found myself meandering along a back route, driving down completely empty roads bordered by fields of golden hay made even more golden by the slant of the late afternoon sun.

Alongside a stretch of that road, I noticed a river, lined with cottonwood trees. Could it be the same place we had picnicked when I was young? The stretch of road I’d never been able to find again?

I’m not sure. But I highly suspect that it was.

I felt for a while like I was driving in an alternate realm somewhere between heaven and earth, with my dad as my pilot. Thank you, Daddy, for reaching back through the curtain to show me that there is something “more,” something bigger than can be described by equations and numbers.

I’ve always felt that this is where I would find you, in the floating specks of hay dust dancing in the last rays of the afternoon sun, or in the glint of the river water where it tucks around a bend, or in the brush of leaf against leaf in the canopy of cottonwood trees.

As I was looking through photos to use for this story, I came across the photo of me and my dad in Moab. I decided to do a little editing to brighten up this old picture. And guess what happened? iPhoto crashed. Hi, Daddy.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem, or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

You might also enjoy:

Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.