WTF Just Happened?!: A Sciencey Skeptic Explores Grief, Healing, and Evidence of an Afterlife.

1

How Hard Can Time Travel Really Be?

When my dad died, I lost one of the few people who cared for me unconditionally. I felt abandoned, betrayed, and isolated in my grief. Being an only child added to this pain. You are a parent’s number one in the way you will never be anyone else’s again. A husband can divorce you. Your friends can outgrow you. And your kids, no matter how much they love you, depend on you to care for them. They do not take care of you. Now I just had my mom. That parental, unconditional love was suddenly reduced by 50%.

I was shattered. I missed my father more than I even knew was possible.

Most of my friends had not yet experienced such a significant loss and no one knew what to say or do. I had no idea how I would begin to navigate this new world where I felt significantly less safe, less loved, less supported.

Memories of him kept circling in my mind. Memories? It was impossible to think about him as a memory. My father loved to read. He always bought me books, which we would have long in-depth conversations about for hours. We both loved to try new restaurants. The Four Seasons was his favorite. And he loved dessert. He would always ask for a small bite of mine, which of course was a huge bite. You just think I took a big bite because you are so small, he always told me when I complained. I actually took a little bite, but it looks big to you. His defense stopped working by the time I was ten years old.

When he had been moved into hospice, no part of me believed this was really happening. How could I lose this vibrant, supportive, often-to-the-point-of-indulgence person in my life?

But the doctors had said they couldn’t do a thing to change it.

My dad had always told me I could do anything. If there was a problem, he taught me to go solve it. So, I needed to DO something. I didn’t believe in God and had no one to pray to. I did believe in medicine, but still nothing the doctors did had been able to save him.

What was left?

Science. I believed in science. When I started to think about it, I realized how science and technology can create actual miracles—inventions like airplanes, personal computers, cell phones and Zoom have transformed our definition of time and space. Not too long ago, those technological break-throughs would have been considered Sci-Fi fantasies.

One thing the Sci-Fi movies always showed was time travel. If science had turned these other Sci-Fi dreams into reality, could science show me how to time travel? I imagined ways my great-great-great-grandkids could come retrieve my dad, and eventually me, when civilization finally had DeLorean time machines. As long as my (future) kids had the date my dad (and all of our family going forward), got sick or died, and our locations, our future family could know when and where to grab us and drag us into a future when advances in medicine would save us.

I decided to Google Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, the smartest people I could think of, combined with time travel. I downloaded books and videos on Einstein’s theory of relativity, read articles published by the top astrophysicists, and brushed up on my knowledge of black holes.

I had studied Einstein’s theory of relativity in high school, but I had never realized its significance. That our conception of time, something we experience as linear, was not. That the laws of the universe could have a lot more to them than we perceive. To help explain his theory, Einstein offered a thought experiment about a pair of twins, one who traveled through outer space at close to the speed of light and another who remained earth-bound. When that traveling twin returned to earth, according to Einstein, they would be physically younger than their twin, as well as everyone else on earth.⁠ ¹

If the very nature of time was not as definite as I had thought, then what else was possible?!

The other beyond mind-blowing thing I discovered was what is referred to as Spooky Action/Bell’s Theorem⁠ ², which Einstein (as well as others) are also responsible for demonstrating. Because, on a quantum level, tiny atomic particles act REALLY weird, scientists remain baffled by this spookiness. This was a huge insight into the fact that our consciousness seems to play a bigger and more inexplicable role on our physical world than I had ever imagined. Could our own consciousness actually affect how matter behaved?

Before going further, here is a bit of a high school science class refresher. Electrons are subatomic particles with a negative charge, protons are subatomic particles with a positive charge, neutrons are a subatomic particle with no charge and photons are tiny particles that transmit light. Protons, electrons, and neutrons make up atoms, which make up matter.

Spooky Action was discovered when scientists wanted to study whether electrons or photons behave as either waves or particles. To find out, they shot photons through a vertical slit on a screen to land on a wall behind it. When these photons passed through the screen, they behaved like a particle. That means that the photons passed through the slit as a single particle—creating a vertical line of dots on the wall behind the screen. When scientists shot the photons through a screen with two parallel slits, however, the photons then behaved like a wave, undulating like ripples in a pond. This showed up in the pattern created on the wall behind the screen. Since waves in ponds interfere and often cancel one another out, there were not the expected neat lines that particles passing through one of two slits would create. There was something called interference patterns when the ripples of the waves would interfere with one another.

Then it gets really crazy. When we observe which slit the photon goes through, tested by a detector set up to measure whether the photon travels through one or the other slit, the photon changes its behavior and acts like a particle. It chooses which slit it will travel through. When the detector is turned off, the wave pattern shows up. THE PHOTON ACTS DIFFERENTLY BASED ON OUR OBSERVATION! The very act of observing, or our own consciousness, affects the behavior of the most basic level of matter. And sometimes these photons entangle, where the spin or behavior of one affects the spin or behavior of another. Change the spin of one photon and the other changes. To make this happen, photons have to communicate faster than the speed of light.

So apparently sometimes there are exceptions to the scientific laws of this world?

Scientists can’t explain any of this. Nobody can.

Suddenly, my mind was open to the possibility that the things I previously knew to be 100 percent true were not so 100 percent known at all.

I was still getting pummeled. I never knew grief could be so brutal. So physical. As soon as my dad went into hospice, it was as if a fluid metal weight was settling into my stomach weighing me down, and pushing into my organs. It poured into my limbs, congealing and making it close to impossible to move them. When I did move, everything just hurt. It all escalated the night my dad passed away. When we got the call at 2 a.m., while I was huddling against my mom in my parents’ bed, I felt as if my body exploded into heavy little bits all over the floor. I understood what it meant to feel shattered. This was not MY life. I could not identify ME in a life without him. Everything that had once seemed exciting—growing my career, falling in love, starting a family—now had an emptiness and sadness attached to it.

The only thing that made existence worthwhile were these wondrous hints that there was more than this material world. These at least gave me a little hope and curiosity.

So, I dove back in. I had had good luck with Einstein and time travel, so I Googled other names I trusted, combined with words like alternate dimensions. And crazy shit presented by trustworthy people came up. First of all, Stephen Hawking was talking in a serious way about shadow people reflecting into our universe from other dimensions?! When I thought of people talking about shadow people from other dimensions, I pictured either ghost stories at summer camp or late nights with my friends in high school and college, when we had drunk or smoked way too much of something. I was sure Stephen Hawking didn’t mean it in the way people meant it when they told ghost stories, but his theory at least hinted that our world was not the simple mass and matter that we think we understand.

What else could be possible?!

Determined to find out, I streamed videos about the fourth dimension (fifth, if you are calling time the fourth) and the Tesseract, a mind-bending 4D cube that follows the fourth-dimensional laws of the universe. I watched a movie called Flatland⁠ ³ about a creature existing in a two-dimensional world, who then started to learn about our own three-dimensional one. This opened my mind to the possibility that we perceive only a tightly edited portion of what’s out there. That was always partially obvious to me, in the sense that we don’t know what exists billions of miles out in space, or that dogs hear noises we can’t, but I had never thought how we might be seeing a minuscule portion of the reality immediately around us. This all offered a spark of hope, which in my darkness, I clung to with desperation. I knew I needed to be careful, though, not to draw any quick conclusions based on wishful thinking. I needed to remain neutral and tell myself I would accept whatever seemed to be true (or not true), whether I wanted it to be or not.

But even if it seemed nuts or completely unrealistic, I began to hope that any form of an afterlife might exist.

However much I tried to imagine though, I could not see how a person’s consciousness could be anything more than a function of their living brain. Gone when a person was gone. But just because someone’s consciousness was most likely the result of a particular set of firing neurons and brain cells, why couldn’t that result happen again? While I might not be able to experience it as Liz and my dad would not get to experience it as my dad, we could at least have an experience of consciousness as some future human being. We would have no ties to one another, or our previous selves, but we would still get to experience living. That option was not as good as actually being the me I am now, being my dad’s daughter, but it was better than total obliteration. And maybe if this was the case, somehow, somewhere, someone had stored and now had access to a memory of a previous me or them that they had been?

I knew it was a long shot, but I went ahead and Googled, careful to word everything in the most scientific way possible: Scientific evidence that people can live more than one time.

Then… this popped up: Searching for the Science Behind Reincarnation on NPR with the following description: Jim Tucker, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, studies hundreds of cases like this and joins NPR’s Rachel Martin to share his research on the science behind reincarnation.⁠ ⁴

WHAT!!?! This was NPR, not some woo website.

Before clicking, I calmed myself down. I was sure this would turn out to be some new-agey crap. Or a Sci-Fi theory, true in concept, but not realistic, just like time travel. I took a breath and clicked and read and then… I discovered something, that if true, hinted that our entire scientific understanding of life, death, and consciousness was wrong.

A reasonable, scientific-minded psychiatrist and professor at the University of Virginia, Dr. Jim Tucker, was studying cases of kids with past-life memories. AND he seemed to be getting valid results? From his interview, I learned that Dr. Tucker had a mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who also had been a psychiatrist and worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years before he passed away in 2007. He had even been chair of the school’s Department of Psychiatry.

I kept trying to calm myself down since this must have a catch, but my heart pounded. Past life memories were being seriously studied by psychiatrists and professors at a major university?!

I immediately downloaded Dr. Tucker’s first book, Life Before Life.⁠ ⁵ My heart pounded as I began to read. Waves of tingling ran up my body, poured through my stomach, and paralyzed me for a second. It felt like when an unexpected twist ending in a movie is revealed, but much more intense since this was real life and I had a lot more at stake. I got Dr. Tucker’s next book and a few books by Dr. Stevenson and devoured them all. These two psychiatrists used a detailed scientific method to carefully study children from a variety of cultures and belief systems who claimed to have memories of previous lives. They had accumulated thousands of cases and they never talked about karma or good deeds or tried to make anything fair or work the way we would want. It was facts—just facts. Well researched and carefully studied facts.

One thing that stood out about these kids’ stories was the everydayness of their memories. Nobody was a hero or royalty. They remembered things like leaving their backpack on the table when they got home from school, or a small neighborhood candy store—things we really do remember when we think of our childhood. I found websites where people shared their own past-life memories. Ninety percent of them (aside from the few expected nuts) matched the tone and patterns of Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Tucker’s research: Kids would stop speaking of these memories around age five. There were intense emotions attached to the trauma of their past-life deaths, and feelings of love and longing were attached to the memory of their previous families. Like the kids in Stevenson and Tucker’s study, they recalled everyday things from their past lives in a steady and factual tone.

What the fuck was this?!

I had to share this discovery with my mom, a skeptical and logical, consciousness-is-a-function-of-neurons-and-belief-in-an-afterlife-is-wishful-thinking psychiatrist.

Me: Mom! You have to come check out this person Doctor Jim Tucker. And his mentor Ian Stevenson. They are actual psychiatrists. And they seem to think there IS evidence of past lives.

My mom had been handling my dad’s death differently than me. While I was ready to spend the rest of my life in bed, trying to discover the answers to the universe’s greatest puzzles, my mom was not so interested in trying to turn back time or learning about other dimensions. After a week, she was out of bed and back at work.

Mom: There have always been people talking about helping people uncover some past life memory. It was big in the seventies in Greenwich Village among really lost people.

Me: MOM!! I know that kind of thing. This is different. Really. Doctor Tucker is a child psychiatrist.

Mom: Unfortunately, the mental health field can attract some flakey people. Not all are licensed, and they can just say they are therapists.

Me: He is an actual psychiatrist, and works at UVA teaching psychiatry. NPR did an episode on him and Scientific American wrote an article. Even Carl Sagan said that his mentor Doctor Ian Stevenson’s research on kids with past life memories was worthy of further studies. And this is the craziest, JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, even said reincarnation is the most likely explanation for some of these kids’ past life memories!

I showed her the articles and websites and books.

Mom: UVA? Child psychiatrists? Hmmm. I would be curious to hear what he does say. But there are a lot of people studying out-there theories.

She did not sound surprised and still very much expected to find the catch.

Me: When you start looking into their research, though, it is pretty astonishing. There really seems to be something inexplicable going on.

My mom may have been skeptical to protect herself (and me) from any wishful thinking and ultimately crushing disappointment during such a vulnerable time. But I wasn’t so cautious. I dove in, full force, full of curiosity to see if there really was any valid hint of an alternative to my deeply painful new reality.

2

I’m Not Done Talking About Reincarnation

This research of past lives gave me enough hope that I had the motivation to leave the house and meet a friend. A close friend I felt safe with.

When I stepped outside, the world felt surreal. So, this is the world without my dad in it. This is what it feels like to be me in a world without him. I was now a different person. I was someone who had lost a parent. I could go to his hangouts, even scour the entire globe, and he would not be there. And he wouldn’t be there tomorrow or next week or even next year.

The world felt like a strange dystopian universe, bright and sunny with cheery people walking around in the midst of tragedy and despair they did not see or pretended not to see. And every inch of my body hurt. A lot.

I walked past my old nursery school. I remembered how my dad would push me down the block in my stroller. Faster! Faster! I would giggle as he raced down the block faster and faster, but probably nowhere near as fast as it had felt at two years old. I now hurried past the school before the kids came out and I would have to see them being picked up by their moms and dads.

Despite wanting to cocoon back under the covers, I continued on to meet my friend Christine. She was one of the few people I knew and respected who was into new-agey stuff. She gave me a huge hug and told me that sometimes life is just shit. I decided to tell her what I had been exploring.

Me: Warning. This will sound so weird. I found these scientists who say that we live more than one life.

Christine: Sure. I always thought that.

I told her the rest. She listened, then she shared her experiences of meditations, where she had visited other dimensions. I can’t say I considered it valid, but I listened in a way I never had. Maybe? Maybe that hinted at something?

Then I opened up further.

Me: But I… I have to be honest about something. I don’t know if I want to do this anymore. Be here anymore. I just hate the world without my dad. The rest of my whole life will be second best, even on the best days. I can’t purely enjoy anything again. And I haven’t just lost him. I lost my mom, too, because she is so depressed and transformed. And I lost me—because I don’t know me and my life without him. I honestly don’t like my life anymore. I can’t see liking it again. I… don’t freak out… but I just want to die.

I will be forever grateful for Christine’s non-hysterical, calm response. Some part of her must have known I didn’t really mean it (even if I didn’t know that at the time) but I had no other frame of reference to express how awful I felt.

Christine: You know what? That is your choice. And I respect it. But I think you are an amazing person and you have so much going for you. There are people who I would say, I think they should go ahead, but you are exceptionally kind, and it is rare to find truly good people. So, I think that would be a waste. Why not give it a year, then if you still want to, go ahead. It will always hurt, and you will always miss him, but you don’t know yet if it will be worth it to stay alive or not. You never tried to live in a world without him.

True.

I listened quietly as Christine continued.

Christine: I know you feel like everything is over, but I actually think you are at the start of this incredible journey with all you are exploring. Like when a movie opens at the very beginning with this huge dramatic and often traumatic event that the character thinks is the end of everything, but it turns out to be the beginning.

After meeting with Christine, I went back to my parents’ place—I could still call it that, right?—And climbed back into bed. What Christine said stuck with me. I was too curious about the results of my research to back out now.

I thought back to a night towards the end when my dad was in hospice, when I was too scared to sleep. Or actually, the sleep part would have been fine, but I was too scared of waking up and remembering all over again. I had been lying in my parents’ bed with my mom under the same brown sheets and cream blanket that they had had since my early childhood. The same small Oriental rug and Chinese antique vases on brown wooden dressers were still there. I remember thinking how strange it was that our home, witness to our entire life together as a family, was completely oblivious to what was happening. Shouldn’t it have reacted… somehow?

Mom: Sorry I could never raise you with any belief in God. I’m so jealous now of people who believe. But if I had, I would have felt as if I was lying to you.

Me: I would have seen through you.

Mom: I know. You have always had a way of seeing right to the truth of things. It could be a major pain in the ass when you were little, but I’m glad you are that way.

I wished I wasn’t. I wished I could be the kind of person who believed. No evidence needed.

Now, here I was discovering a possibility, however minuscule, that we could get just that. Not a god or anything, but that is not what we cared about. I only cared about seeing my dad again, no matter the terms.

I was scrolling through Netflix to find something that would take me anywhere but where I was, when I saw the following blurb about a movie called Wake Up⁠ ¹: Jonas Elrod was leading an ordinary life until he woke up one day to a totally new reality. The documentary follows this fascinating story of an average guy who inexplicably developed the ability to access other dimensions.

I called in my mom in to watch it with me. With a sigh and a slight eye roll, she agreed. Burrowing under the cocoon of covers on her side of the bed, she took two of the four pillows and settled in next to me. Her side on the left, my dad’s side on the right. Me in between, when I had been much smaller and they let me. I rested my head on her shoulder. That had often eased the ache when I was sad. This time it did nothing.

In the documentary, Jonas Elrod is a typical, slightly hipster, 20-something guy, living a pretty normal life until the sudden loss of a close friend prompts voices in his head telling him to, Spread the word. We don’t end after we die. He also started seeing what he could only describe as ghosts. A psychiatrist couldn’t find anything wrong with him. My mom even knew who the psychiatrist was and he was considered serious and was well-regarded! I looked over at my mom’s face. She looked genuinely baffled.

From there, Jonas went on a journey to make sense of all of this. He met some remarkable people along the way. A few of the experiences and people he encountered were exactly what I expected, such as an ashram spiritual center that had bathrooms with no doors where everyone could just… watch?

And a few were nothing like I expected. There was Dr. Gary Schwartz, a Harvard-educated former professor of Psychiatry at Yale and current professor at the University of Arizona. I later Googled him and learned that he conducted scientific studies on mediums. So, a scientist was actually taking people who claim to talk to DEAD PEOPLE seriously?

Another fascinating person Jonas Elrod introduced us to was Dr. Roger Nelson, a professor of science and part of Princeton’s (Princeton! As in the Ivy League, very credible non-woo Princeton!) Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab, which studied non-normal views on consciousness and how the mind can affect matter from 1979 to 2007.⁠ ² Dr. Nelson demonstrated something called a Random Number Generator (RNG), a machine created to randomly generate 1s or 0s. It generates these numbers from a process that does not use an algorithm, making it truly random and completely unpredictable. When people who were brought in as test subjects, mentally focused on having the RNG show a higher number of 0’s over 1’s for example, more 0’s would show up in statistically significant numbers?! Weird!

Dr. Nelson is currently working on something called the Global Consciousness Project,⁠ ³ an experiment where a group of Random Number Generators (they originally started with around 11 and are now up to about 70) are placed around different parts of the world. They run 24 hours a day and send data to a centralized location. As stated, these generators usually show the randomly expected pattern of 0s and 1s, but when there is a global event that gets a large percent of the population’s attention, the patterns shift, and the results seem to show no longer random patterns of activity. Instead, the number patterns move from random to orderly with higher and organized groups of 1s and 0s. It moved past the expected random number pattern to a more orderly pattern during Princess Diana’s death, and on New Year’s Eve 2000. The craziest of all was on September 11, 2001, when it not only moved from random patterned results to orderly results, but started to react and change BEFORE the tragedies occurred. Really, really weird!!

As Jonas Elrod met these people, he remained grounded. He was not a believer in anything, and some of the things he encountered, if true, were absolutely without rational explanation. Feeling a tiny twinge of hope, and noticing a flash of—was it also hope?—on my mom’s face, we snuggled under the covers to escape. Her into sleep and me into the possibilities.

3

A Class With Someone Who Believes All This Afterlife Stuff

I was sitting with my mom in our kitchen at a small round wooden table below the Cézanne Dish of Peaches painting. She was in the same chair she’s had for as long as I could remember, and I was in the chair I always had sat in since I graduated from a highchair. My dad’s chair was empty. My mom looked over at me with an odd combination of bafflement and a kind of sympathy reserved for the very gullible.

Mom: Well, you won’t believe it but apparently Doctor Berger knows Jim Tucker.

Dr. Berger is a psychiatrist in my mom’s network whom she respects.

Me: KNOWS Jim Tucker? What do you mean knows? Like read his books or knows knows?!

Mom: Knows personally.

Me: WHAT? Is he normal? Is he sane? Did you ask her? What did she say about him?

My mother set down her cup of coffee.

Mom: That he is smart and sane and very nice.

Me: Oh my god!! Ask her. Can I meet him?

Mom: I am not sure I can just ask for her to have him come hang out.

Me: Get him to do a talk at your institute!

Mom: No.

I knew there was no negotiating that one. Under no condition would her institute have someone come talk who studied anything to do with past lives.

Mom: But… Doctor Berger asked if she could hold a series on some parapsychological research and because of you I said okay.

Me: REALLY! Will you go with me? Please?!

My mom begrudgingly agreed to go, but she made it clear she was doing it as a big favor to me.

So that was one of the hardest things I was noticing about grief. That my mom and I, who were both grieving the loss of my dad, had very conflicting needs. I wanted her to be excited about Dr. Berger giving a talk. I desperately needed to talk over everything I was studying with her. My mom is rational, logical, and healthily skeptical, and I craved her opinion to see if I was genuinely onto something or if I was falling victim to delusion or wishful thinking. But she did not want to go there.

When Dr. Berger’s talk started, I listened intently and took detailed notes, even though I felt like I could barely move. Grief was so heavy. It was hard to sit upright in a cold folding chair in this fluorescent lit room. My body hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt.

Dr. Berger mentioned William James, the brother of author Henry James, and the experiments he had conducted back in the 1800s on a psychic medium named Leonora Piper. William James himself had not believed any of this could be true, but was so intrigued when he saw her do a reading for some friends of his, that he was driven to investigate and find the catch. He had taken proper skeptical precautions such as carefully hiding the identity of who Leonora Piper was going to have a session with until the reading started and having spies follow her to see if she was trying to cheat and get any information in advance. William James never found a catch.

Was there actually something to mediumship? Did mediums still exist today and take clients? How would I even find one?

Dr. Berger brought up something called remote viewing, or the ability to see areas and locations you were not at physically. She mentioned Ingo Swann as someone who was apparently very accurate at it. Remote viewers like Swann would close their eyes and travel to or psychically view these places. Controlled experiments were conducted and some people accurately described details of the location significantly beyond chance!

In another talk, a well-respected therapist, Dr. Kleinman, spoke about his experiences working with patients in India, a culture where it was widely accepted as fact that our spirit? Consciousness? Lives on after bodily death. He told us about a patient whose grandmother passed away. The grandmother had collected statues of a rare