I want to write a homage to him but I have an urgent matter at hand. I thought I might make note of a few things that I have learned from the dead that comfort me when someone I love passes.
On the other side everything is complete. We say that "life" is "eternal" but there is no death on the other side, and no time. You have already lived, and you are about to live, and you have never lived. So your own spirit comes to meet you, and the spirits of all the people you love and care about also come to meet you.
A part of you is still here as a kind of "ghost". (Until the funeral, as far as I can tell, and sometimes longer, and in the case of really hard core empiricists, only long enough to experience "brain death".) But there is another part of you-- a more enduring part--that is already in "heaven" or the afterlife, or whatever you think of it as.
And you do seem to have as much choice in what you believe and experience in your after-life as you do here. However, I will comment that a family member that was a very strict religious person in life, encouraged me to use my gift as a Medium with her family. And then also a client's deceased friend that was an atheist dropped in with a message that she had been wrong in life to not believe in an afterlife. (Although she did not regret, nor was she in any punished for not believing this while she was in this life.)
If you have lost a loved one I can tell you it is like in the tv shows and movies. They are standing right by you, trying to comfort you. For them, it is just a blink of an eye until they will see you again.
Just remember them and speak out loud. Light candles, and place flowers, and pictures about. Tell stories about the person. The dead can come back to this dimension through our memories of them. (That is why happy memories are best-- so they don't have to journey through the bad ones to get to you.)
And all is forgiven. The number one thing the dead say to the living is "I love you." Love is what makes us live forever.
In Los Angeles spirits of the dead can get the white cabbage moth to do their bidding year round, although I also know a guy who comes with a rose beetle. And indoors in winter fruit flies are often the carriers of the dead.
Sometimes it is a little breeze, or a branch or twig snapping. Every now and again a bird, or small animal.
I'm sorry I don't have time to write more! Karl, you are celebrated, and you are missed!!!!
Rae