“You have helped me very much by believing that I lived,” he told her, at another point. “It is very hard for us to be put aside.... We know here how intimately our life and yours are lived together, and the one almost intolerable thing is to have our dear ones live and believe that we do not. It defers things so.... It hurts us when the apparent separation is made real.”
“I hope you won’t get so far beyond that I can’t catch up,” she said.
“Never! You will begin farther along than I did. We shall go on together now, for eternity. Since you know that I am with you, and especially as we live and work consciously together, we shall grow together.”
“Did I do all I could for you, at the last? Did you feel my fear?”
“No, I did not feel your fear. But when one knows that the step is coming, there is one blinding moment of dread.... You kept me a little while,” he continued, when she said that she had tried to hold him here, “but the thing had gone too far.”
“Was there anything we could have done that was not done?”
“Nothing. It had to be.” But when she inferred that the time had come for him to take up work in the next plane, he protested. “No. Nothing like that is ‘intended.’ There is no foreordination. It is all a matter of forces, constructive and destructive. My material energy was too little to withstand the material forces of destruction. My flesh yielded. That has no real relation to eternal force.... One serves one’s purpose, here or there. I am doing better work here than I could have done there, but that has no relation or part in death. It is entirely a physical thing.”
“Did —— make you nervous?”
“No mere man could make me fail to respond to your call to courage. I knew and you knew, that it might be the end of life there; but there was no possible thing that you could have done, mentally, physically, or spiritually, that you did not do. It was your courage that kept me calm, even through that dread moment; your spirit that met me when I woke here; your tenderness that soothed my first bewilderment; your purpose that roused me to better, broader, finer work than I had ever dreamed before. It has been you—you and I, one always—that have helped and upheld me, as your faith has enabled me to reach and uphold you.”
This interview took place in the afternoon, and with a good deal of incidental conversation, covered several hours, leaving me very tired. But after dinner the familiar summons warned me that my services were again in demand. I took up a pencil, and Mary K. announced the second Lesson, which followed rapidly, with the same unhesitating flow that had characterized the first one.