Death and Dying

In addition to Merlin Zauber's own death, in the nine chapters dealing with past lives there are twelve descriptions of bodily death:

   Alexander (Chapter 2)

   Eric (Chapter 4)

   Maria (Chapter 6)

   Pictus (Chapter 7)

   Gianni (Chapter 8)

   Margaret (Chapter 9)

   The Druid (Chapter 9)

   The Priestess Iona (Chapter 9)

   Son of the African witch doctor (Chapter 9)

   Frosty (Chapter 10)

   The orphan (Chapter 11)

   Rudi (Chapter 12)

While this is a novel dealing with the immortality of the spirit, physical death is a recurrent theme. Merlin Zauber's own bodily death is described at the beginning of "Chapter 1: Moving Beyond":

At that moment, Merlin sensed that there was someone at the top of the stairs. He glanced up to see a boy holding a bright red stick of dynamite. It was thirteen-year-old Eric, a patient of Merlin's, who had recently committed suicide. The stick must have gone off in the boy's hand, because Merlin Zauber never saw him throw it.

In the white radiance of the blast, Merlin watched himself shatter into fragments. Tiny pieces, like bits of an unglued mosaic, flowed to the ground in extreme slow motion. It was so graceful as to be almost beautiful. Afterwards, there was no pain, just darkness.

When he came to, Merlin looked down to see himself in a hospital bed. Nurses came in and out, checking on the IVs and the oxygen tubes, and writing on the chart at the end of the bed. "Odd that no one notices that I'm here, not there," he thought, looking down at himself from the ceiling. Just then, a doctor and several nurses entered the room. After examining the part of him that was lying so still in the hospital bed, the doctor pulled the sheet over the patient's face and everyone left the room.

"Just like that," thought Merlin. "I may as well leave also."

Moving through the closed door and down the long, brightly lit hall to the hospital waiting room, where no one noticed him, Merlin floated out the front door into light so bright that he lost consciousness momentarily.

Of course, this passage interweaves dream and memory, as does the entire novel. For that matter, mythic, literary, and religious versions of the afterlife do the same thing. It seems to me that much of our collective view of the afterlife is based on dream. I suspect that purported recollections of the afterlife might well be recollections of dreams experienced in the afterlife, and taken subsequently for waking experiences.