The Fun of Dying: Book Overview

Book Overview: The Fun of Dying: Book Overview by by Roberta Grimes

- Dying Can be Fun! However, most people have a fear of dying and thus tend not to think about it. The Fun of Dying by Roberta Grimes was written to change that attitude. Originally she wrote the central chapters (6 – 8) to be printed in large type for use in nursing homes and hospices. They are titled, The Death Experience, The Start of Your After-Death Life, and Some Enjoyable Details.

Her objective was to educate dying people in order to help ease their fears and better prepare them for what, according to her, is “life’s most enjoyable adventure“. She soon found, she says, that to write for the dying and make the whole account credible required that she tackle the rest of the book. The resultant text is one that is very much for the living.

This book is an easy read…very accessible. It’s obvious the author has spent a great deal of time researching the often overlooked information that currently exists about death and the process of dying. I too have read many of the same source materials that she, a trained lawyer, has read in order to build her case for the existence of the Afterlife and the fun that can be had in dying once proper understanding replaces the fear factor. Nothing in The Fun of Dying is based on the teachings of any religion; however she does reference the words of Jesus as well as other world teachers to back up her findings.

Roberta Grimes had an experience of light when she was eight years old that started her on what became an all-consuming hobby: she spent the next half-century researching the afterlife in an effort to better understand her experience. Roberta Grimes, the author, is a lawyer who is clearly familiar with the rules of evidence and the best evidence for the survival of consciousness falls into the area of courtroom science, not laboratory science.

The author starts by saying, “Some things about the period soon after death are reported so frequently that I am confident they are true. They amuse and often delight me, so perhaps they will do the same for you.” She says that the evidence reveals that most people make their transition easily and find themselves in a place many philosophies call “The Summerland.” As the name suggests, it is often imagined as a place of beauty and peace, where everything people hold close to their hearts is preserved in its fullest beauty for eternity. It is envisioned as containing wide fields of rolling green hills and lush grass. This definition, in the author’s opinion is true but can be different according to the beliefs and expectations of the individual.

Now for a few fun facts to give you a foretaste of your Summerland life:

• You may wish to “attend your own funeral.” When the ties of love are strong and a death has been relatively easy, there is evidence that many of us enjoy this last earth-party of our lives.

• We live on the middle post-death levels in a constant pure white light that is brighter and more diffuse than sunlight, although it doesn’t affect our eyes in the way that sunlight would.

• There is no sun, there are no stars, there is no night, and it never snows or rains, but if you want to enjoy a sunset or night or snow or rain you can have them. Temperatures remain in the mid-seventies, but cold-weather sports are available. Indeed, some accounts suggest that the Scandinavian Summerland includes snow.

• Although we don’t need to eat or drink, if we want to eat or drink we can have what we like and enjoy feasting for as long as we like. We lack digestive organs, so our illusory food and drink disappears. Apparently, nearly everyone soon decides that food and drink are too much bother.

• After the post-death nap that most people take, we never need to sleep again. Our lives in the Summerland are repeated periods of activity followed by periods of doing quieter things. Our bodies and minds never tire

• We can appear at whatever age we prefer. Most people choose to be the person they were in their prime of life, but that is up to them. There is evidence that we can learn to change our appearances to suit ourselves, so someone might first appear to you as an old codger that you knew in life, and then seem to grow progressively younger.

• If you were disabled in your earth life, those disabilities and infirmities will gradually be gone.

• We can dress as we like. For some, it feels important to retain the clothing that they wore in life, so you can see people in nineteenth-century garb and maybe in 1920s dress and in almost anything else. Most people eventually stop caring how they dress, and they revert to wearing long-sleeved tunics that we associate with angels.

• Most after-death communication is telepathic. Somehow this does away with the problem of different earth-languages, so once we are accustomed to telepathy, we can converse with anyone we like!

• We can read the minds of those we left on earth, and we can communicate with them by thought, but living people seldom notice our messages. A few of the dead are able to manifest on earth physically under certain conditions, and some can manifest coins or feathers and affect electricity, but some of the dead are unable to do more than produce a whiff of some distinctive scent.

• Colors in the Summerland are not limited to the visible-light spectrum, so there are colors here that are impossible for the living to imagine. This comes up especially in reference to flowers, many of which are in unearthly colors.

• Flowers are everywhere in the Summerland. Each blossom is permanent and gorgeous and fragrant, and gardening is fun because it consists of setting full-grown flowering plants and forever just enjoying them, with no need to water, feed, or weed them.

• Water is abundant here. It is crystalline and it sparkles like earth-water, but it is rather different. Many accounts say that it seems to be alive, and it gives off the same sort of adoring and enlivening energy and subtle music that come from the vegetation. What most astonishes new arrivals about the water is how different it feels, like touching silk, and they are amazed that you can bathe in a lake fully clothed and walk out of it dry.

• About Pets. If they are especially important to us, our pets might come as our deathbed visitors. They may wait with our other loved ones, and sometimes the people waiting for us find it hard to get through all the dogs and cats overjoyed to greet the new arrival. Like people, our pets are now young and healthy. Like people, they neither eat nor eliminate. And it isn’t only cats and dogs that await us, but our beloved horses are here for the riding and there are farm and circus animals.

• It appears from many accounts that in the Summerland we can have what we want. Any long-lamented article, any lost toy, any work of art or piece of clothing: we need only think of it, and we have it. The point may be to get us past all sense of material longing or lack; but when we first arrive, it is thrilling simply to think of something and find it there.

• Many after-death accounts include a wonderful library where we can read about literally anything.

• There is a lot of evidence for reincarnation, but linear time is an illusion, so apparently our lives on earth somehow are being lived all at once. We cannot begin to understand the reincarnation process before we die, so researching how it happens and retrieving events from our past lives and also our lives to come is high on many people’s lists.

• There is evidence that we can choose to experience any event in the history of the earth. We can walk with dinosaurs, attend the Continental Congress, and generally satisfy all our curiosity.

• We need to be taught how to do it, but travel in the after-death levels is mostly by thought, and it is instantaneous. We can walk if we prefer walking, but if we choose to dispense with walking we can go anywhere instantly. With thought-travel, we don’t need vehicles, but those who in life enjoyed cars or boats or planes can have and use them for as long as they matter.

• As we become more spiritually advanced, we can travel to any place on earth and any place in the post-death reality that is at or below our own vibrational level. With the assistance of very advanced beings, we can also journey to higher levels and taste the greater joys awaiting us there.

• Our minds are so much better without the interference of a material brain that we can learn with amazing ease. We are told that it is possible to learn to play piano with the greatest composers and learn to paint under legendary artists.

• Music here seems to be a near-obsession. Many accounts exist of vast amphitheaters very like those in ancient Greece, where it seems to each of the audience members that he or she is sitting in the middle of the first row. And we don’t only hear the music better than we heard it on earth, but we also see it as colorful clouds and shapes above the performers. Classical music is favored, but modern artists also perform, and three names that I have seen mentioned are Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and John Lennon. I have read that Elvis has decided to stay at an accessible level and keep performing until all his fans have died and had the chance to see him in person. Not sure if that is true, but it makes a great story!

• Structures here can be built in two ways. We can construct them board-by-board, or we can enlist the help of more advanced beings and have them mind-created. I once read an account of a farmer who was having a house built for his daughter on a heavenly replica of the family farm. Advanced beings helped him design it, and at the appointed moment, they concentrated their energies so the planned building shimmered into existence.

• God is as happily taken for granted in the Summerland as life and light. All the mentions of God that I have seen say that He is at the Celestial Level, and His energy is such that for anyone to get even close to God without first maturing spiritually is impossible. They say He is the source of all the light on the after-death levels, which is why the lowest level is dark and the levels above it grow gradually brighter. He is never seen, but no one minds that since there is a general understanding that each of us is spiritually advancing and eventually we all will join Him. No throne, no beard, no vengeful anger, and of course no human gender, but instead an infinitely powerful, infinitely loving, and all-pervasive energy: that is what they tell us God is. (I apologize to atheists, but I am not making this up. You might read some of the accounts by people who have made this trip ahead of you. And please try to be open-minded whenever your own death starts to happen, because there probably is a hollow heaven for people who are adamant atheists—and emphatically, you do not want to go there!)

In summary she says, “Learning to live so that when we die we can have the most possible eternal fun is an exercise worth the effort later, and it pays great dividends now. Fortunately, the rules seem simple… People who study afterlife evidence are struck repeatedly by the extent to which the way we live our lives on earth affects our post-death happiness.” What she means by this is that if we are loving and forgiving during our Earth lives, this vibration will set the perfect tone; not only for how we will experience the Afterlife, but also for the way we will experience our life while still in body.

“Afterlife evidence tells us that the purpose of our earth-lives is this: we are here to learn to love each other perfectly and learn to forgive completely in order for us to advance spiritually.”