The Afterlife of Billy Fingers & My Life After Death – Only if you listen

“Beliefs are big on earth. People collect them. Some of these beliefs are helpful, but others just keep you running around trying to follow rules that others have laid down. They don’t have a lot of personal meaning. It’s a good idea to sort through your beliefs now and then and throw out the ones that don’t serve you.”
― Annie Kagan, The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved to Me There’s Life After Death

“[I realized] that a lot of the pain I suffered when I was alive was a result of not listening to my heart and my emotions and letting my brain run away with itself. As soon as I was able to think with my heart instead of my head, I got it. I even understood the true nature of suffering. I understood that suffering is caused by resisting what you’re struggling against or stamping it down or ignoring it. Thinking only with your head makes you resist stuff.”
― Erik Medhus, My Life After Death: A Memoir from Heaven

One book is about a brother and the other about a son. In both cases, men who passed into the great unknown… afterlife. Also, both communicated to the living… one a sister, the other a mother, who were left behind.

Believe it … or not … doesn’t matter and isn’t even the point. Is it? You tell me.

The women who received the messages and wrote about them for posterity were, I think, presenting legacies… of two guys who weren’t yet finished telling their own stories. And so, they took pen and pencil (laptop and desktop?) and put what they learned onto paper. 

And so, we have these two books.

I admit to being a bit of a softie about such things because I have long-believed that I get messages from the dead. I am not a psychic or soothsayer… no!… I am, quite simply… curious and open.

I have had some things happen to me – and to me, only – that have given me pause. Mostly, it is through something I smell. Could be coincidence, like perfume that anyone might wear and reminds me of someone… or more specific,  like funeral flowers. I mean, I hope nobody is wearing a scent that smells like funeral flowers!

But more than once, it has been so specific that it could be only one person, like the the scent of apricot jam and white vinegar that came straight out of my long-gone grandmother’s kitchen. I suppose it could be a kind of olfactory memory but again I would ask… does it matter? To ME, when these things happen… it is like a warm hug from someone I miss.     

That said, both of these books have their detractors, of course. Any time someone dares to mention death and communication there’s gonna be pushback. (Even pets who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge communicate! I’ve written about my friend the animal communicator and other books on pets and how they speak to us HERE.)

In fact, you may be one of those folks who think this is a bunch of hooey. It’s okay… and I’d suggest that perhaps this is not the post for you. 

The Afterlife of Billy Fingers by Annie Kagan is about a man who lived a rough and tumble life of bad choices that ultimately led to his death. When Annie began to receive messages from her brother Billy, she wrote them down and they ultimately became this book.

My Life After Death by Erik Medhus with Elisa Medhus, MD is the second book about Erik. The first is My Son and the Afterlife: Conversations from the Other Side by Elisa Madhus, MD. What’s different about this newest book is that it is channeled to her by Erik, in his voice. It’s like an autobiography – except (of course) the writer is from another realm.

In both, we go along on a journey of transcendence and transformation… or we don’t. I mean, that is the bottom line and goes back to how you feel about such things.

Now, you may wonder why I share books like this on a blog about self-help. Here’s why: Comfort and healing may be found in myriad books, beliefs and things.

I know that for me 2014: The Year of Pain would have been insurmountable had I not believed that I could have conversations with certain people and pets in heaven. This implies, of course, a back-and-forth, two-way. Am I crazy? Maybe. But, I don’t think so.

That year and the four that followed were a time of reckoning for me. I was brought to my knees in agony and worship… and in the end, knew that I would always believe and be open to spiritual realms we cannot see with the naked eye.

So, if books like this interest you, I recommend these two in particular.

My long-time dearest friend recommended Billy Fingers to me and I hope she won’t mind me saying that it reminds her of her soulmate-husband who passed (also in 2014! What an awful year!). For that reason alone, I hold the book in high esteem.

The other, My Life after Death, was found on one of my thrift store jaunts. I remember passing it up several times, even though it reached out to me with it’s beautiful ivory, pearlized cover. But something kept nudging me to buy it, so I finally did. It’s a nice companion to Billy Fingers, I think, which is why I’m sharing about them together.