Who would have thought that a single picture and a poem could spark a journey into the afterlife?

After losing the single most important person in my life in unimaginable and traumatizing circumstances, I felt like this person's presence, personality and energy could not have simply dissapeared into nothingness.

My head kept thinking about these awful words like 'death', 'dying' and 'gone'.
I was trying to get a grip on reality but these things did not seem possible:
'Did this really happen?'
'Is he really dead?'
'He can't be gone...'

My heart desperately wanted and needed to believe something else:
'He is still around'.
'We will see each other again'.

My mind could not bring it all together.
In our society, we are taught the way things are supposed to go and how we should deal with someone who leaves this world. Believing something different is considered wishful thinking, just the grief talking or simply being crazy and unlogical. I felt like I was failing at everything and also failing at dealing with this.

Everyone in my environment talked about how I should 'be strong' and 'deal' with what happened and 'process it' or 'get through it' or that I should 'move on'. Very few understood that that's an impossible task because of the soul connection I have with this person that I lost. No one - except one single person - understood that this soul connection would turn out to be so powerful that it would go beyond the material existence that we know.

This is how my heart and my soul started looking for their own truth, no longer listening to or worrying about how others felt I should be dealing with my grief.

Every time I looked at this picture (called 'First Day in Heaven' by Kerolos Safwat), it brought a brief nanosecond of relief from the gutwrenching pain and sadness that I felt.

The following poem (by Henry Scott Holland) is what sparked an interest into another way of thinking.
It's something that would eventually turn into a search for more stories, more examples and more proof that consciousness - and life - goes on. That there is just a transition of form, of energy, into something different.

Death is nothing at all
(Henry Scott Holland)

Death is nothing at all. It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.

There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near, just round the corner.

All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!