Excerpt taken from Lee Nelson’s Beyond the Veil, Volume III
Chapter 7: A Positive Knowledge, pg. 59-63
by Juanita Brooks
As told in a letter of consolation to a Brother and Sister Esplin who had just lost their son, Max.
September 11, 1939.
Dear Brother and Sister Esplin:
When I heard of your great loss, I felt that I must drop everything else and come out. I knew there would be little that I could do when I got there, but I did want to let you know of my sincere sympathy. But I did not get word of the accident until the morning of the services, and too late to get anyone to stay with my babies before Brother Schmutz left at nine o’clock. So I must use this poor way of substituting.
When death comes at the end of a long and useful life, it is beautiful. When it comes as release from hopeless suffering, it it a blessed release. But when it snatches one in the full flower of splendid young manhood, it is hard to understand. We cannot understand. If we try to get at the great “WHY” behind it, if we blame ourselves and think that if we had only done some things differently it might not have happened, we only add suffering to our sorrow. We must accept and trust, knowing that we cannot understand the purposes of God.
Dear Sister Esplin, I know you faith. In all my life I have never seen its equal. I am sure that your husband also has faith in the goodness of Him that doeth all things well. I know that you will receive comfort from that source, and assurance that all is right with Max, that he is well and happy, and in a condition to advance and accomplish things that he might not have had here. Be glad that his passing was swift and painless. He merely stepped out of this body into a new and beautiful life.
I am tempted to tell you an experience of my own which has changed my whole attitude toward our passing from this life. I have told it before, especially immediately after it happened, and even wrote it then, so that I would not forget it.
It happened when I first came here to teach. I was not well, and I gave myself so completely to my work that I was completely exhausted every night. One evening I climbed the hill to my home, and was so tired that I went right to my bedroom and lay on the bed on my back.
Soon I had the sensation of being away from myself. Without any pain whatever, I was just separate from my body. I could see it, and wished that my mouth were closed. But I just kept thinking, “How strange! So this is what it is like to be dead!” I remember how I wondered at it and how surprised it made me.
“Francis will soon be here and find me, and he will call the folks,” (I thought,) and so my mind ran on.
Then suddenly, without the lapse of any time, I was at my father’s home in Bunkerville. I thought how sad (it was) that two who had had so many children should be there alone now. They were in the living room; there was a fire in the fireplace, and mother was stirring some mush in a saucepan over the coals. The house was so large and cold that they had not come into the kitchen to make a fire, and Daddy liked mush for his supper.
He was shaking some cream in a two-quart jar, because their one cow did not give enough to use the big churn. And he was telling her how one of the horses had got another into the manger and was kicking it.
“The old fool would have killed him if I had not gone out,” he said.
I remember little things like the fact that the lamp wick was not even and the flame was blacking the chimney a little on one side, and some ashes from the big log fell into the mush and when mother tried to get them out Daddy said, “What won’t fatten will fill.” I’m telling you all this to make you see how very real it all was to me.
And then in another flash, I was back in my bedroom in St. George, and on the bed, and able to move. But through it all I was filled with wonder, and kept saying, “So this is what it is like to be dead. I didn’t think it would be like this.”
And when I was looking at my parents in Bunkerville, I thought, “Soon they will get the word that I am dead.” I even wondered if the funeral would be in St. George or Bunkerville.
Well, Francis came just after I had come to and turned over. I told him all about it right then. That was Friday night, and on Sunday we went home to visit, and I told my folks, and every word of their conversation was real, even to the slang word mother used when the cinders fell in the mush, the churning, the horse in the manger, the smoking lamp, and all.
Dear friends, I didn’t expect to write this when I started. I don’t know why, except that the experience took the horror out of death for me. It gave me the positive knowledge that we are alive and conscious and intelligent after. I think that the Lord probably had things for me to do here, or I never would have come back.
This is an awkward expression of what I should say to you, but I do want you to know that you have my love and sympathy, and that I am sure all is well with your son. And I want you, Lucy, to know that more than any person I have ever met, you have been an inspiration to me.
The Lord bless you both, as I am sure he will.
Sincerely,
Juanita Brooks
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