Common Spirit Mitch Finley Finds Similarities In Experiences Involving The Dead

Early one Sunday morning in 1976, several hours after he had died, my youngest brother reappeared in my parents’ living room.

Don’t cue “The Twilight Zone” theme just yet. Take a moment and consider the possibilities.

See, after helping get my parents through that terribly difficult evening, my then-wife and I had decided to spend the night at their house. We figured that was the best way both to continue providing them what comfort we could and to help find our own sense of solace. And so we bedded down on their living room sofa-bed.

I was grief-stricken myself, and I remember lying awake for a long time. When I finally did fall asleep, though, I slept soundly. Nothing could have awakened me.

But sometime during the night something did awaken my ex-wife. She sat up as if compelled and, as she later explained, looked across the room. And there, as if nothing had happened, stood my brother.

My dead brother.

He said nothing, my ex-wife told me the next morning, but he seemed at peace. It was as if he’d come back to let us know that he was OK and that we shouldn’t worry.

Then he left, and she fell back asleep.

As bizarre as that story sounds, I accepted it at the time without question. If nothing else, it made the loss of my brother easier to bear.

At the same time, I know how hard it is for people to accept such stories as literal occurrences. There must be some logical explanation.

And maybe there is. At the same time, consider the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

If that is too literary for you, then consider the various tales that are included in Mitch Finley’s new book, “Whispers of Love” (Crossroad, 177 pages, $19.95). Bearing the subtitle “Encounters With Deceased Relatives and Friends,” the book is exactly that: a collection of experiences involving the dead.

They aren’t as rare as you might imagine. During a recent public reading, for example, Finley asked for a show of hands of people who’d had such experiences. Maybe 15 of the 50-some people in attendance raised their hands.

“It’s one of those things where a lot of people have these experiences but don’t tell anybody about it,” Finley says. Why? “Because they’re concerned that somebody is going to think that they have a loose screw or something.”

Take Kathleen, for example. The 70-year-old Spokane resident doesn’t want her last name publicized, she explains, because some people just wouldn’t understand - or accept - her story. Even her family.

Maybe even especially her family.

And her story is this: A couple of months after her father’s death in 1978, she was sitting alone in her garden.

“Of course, I was praying and grieving for my father,” she says in the book. “Suddenly, I heard his voice speaking to me. His voice had been remarkably deep and resonant for a man as ill and weak as he had become.”

He said only six words, but Kathleen knew instantly that they had come from him: “Little daughter, I’m proud of you.”

“I wasn’t asleep; I wasn’t lying down,” she now says. “I was working outdoors with no one around. I just did hear a very brief message, and I would say that it was the most intense and most healing experience that I’ve ever had.”

Kathleen is a devout Catholic. And part of her reluctance to tell her story stems from her religious upbringing.

“Many things are happening today in the church and outside,” she says. “People are believing in these things more. But as an older Catholic, we were taught to mistrust these manifestations from the afterlife. Even though we believed that the saints would help other people, it just never was in our culture at the time that ordinary people would have a message for other ordinary people.”

It is exactly those kinds of messages that fill the pages of “Whispers of Love.” Some of them involve what have been reported as real visitations from the dead. Others involve dreamed visitations. Still others involve particularly strong feelings.

All, though, contradict the notion that these experiences are the devil’s work, that they are anything but good. As Kathleen explains, “I haven’t been the same in the sense that my faith will never weaken again.”

Finley, a nationally renowned writer on Catholic issues and the author of several books, is just the kind of person who you would ordinarily expect to ridicule such tales. And, in fact, he did approach the subject with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“If anything,” he says, “the fact that I have an academic background in theology, for example, makes me even more skeptical.”

But a couple of things changed his mind.

First, he found research from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center that indicated such experiences are more common that you might believe.

When asked the question, “How often have you felt as though you were really in touch with someone who died?” 53 percent of those who had been widowed answered yes (compared to 42 percent of the non-widowed respondents who said yes). Some 38 percent of the teenagers interviewed also answered yes.

Then, when he began advertising for individual stories in newspapers, magazines and on radio talk shows, Finley began to see some common patterns. One of the most prevalent was a sense of hesitation by the storytellers.

“I think the fact that people are so reluctant to talk about stuff like this is a healthy sign, that they’re not just trying to attract attention to themselves,” he says.

The most convincing aspect to the stories, though, was the spirit of good will that they seemed to instill in the people experiencing them. More than anything else, that sense is what sets this phenomenon apart from, say, UFO sightings.

“I would be reluctant to compare this to UFOs,” Finley says. “The UFO experience tends to be automatically sensational and kind of frightening. But these kinds of experiences (afterlife visitations) are almost invariably not frightening and not terrifying, and people will treasure them and share them with a few other close friends because it was such a good, positive feeling and comfortable experience.”

That kind of feeling, in fact, is contagious, as Finley can tell you. Collecting these stories, and writing the connecting “reflections” to serve as spiritual meditations, has given Finley his own sense of newly found spiritual acceptance.

“It has given me a heightened sensitivity to how thin the veil is between this life and whatever happens next,” he says. “It heightens my sensitivity to questions such as what keeps a person’s heart thumping along from one minute to the next.”

And then, of course, the book has given Finley his own story to tell. It goes like this:

About two weeks before “Whispers of Love” was published, Finley had a graphic dream about his late mother. Never one to dream and remember it, Finley was surprised by the dream’s clarity. It had come amid a time of financial anxiety for his family, and the dream was flavored by a feeling of angst.

“My wife and I were sitting on the side of this hill, no place recognizable, and my mother came walking up the hill toward us,” Finley says. “She looked the way she did when she was about 35. As I saw her walking toward us, I said, ‘Mom, will you pray for us?’ And she came up and handed me a dollar bill and said, ‘Everything is going to work out beautifully.’ And that was it. I woke up - end of dream.”

But it was only the beginning of his good feeling, not to mention a perfect conclusion to this story.

“It was a matter of not worrying because it’s all going to work out one way or the other,” Finley says. “At the same time, I thought, ‘Gee, this is great. Now if anyone asks me, I’ve got my own story to tell.”’

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