The Great Spirit: My glimpses of the afterlife mean I no longer fear death

There were many questions I asked my mother when I was little. I suppose they are the ones asked by most children. Do we just stop when we die? Why am I alive? Is there a God?

Now I am in my ninth decade and, both my mother and science having failed to answer any of those pressing childhood questions, I have come to a few of my own conclusions.

Do we stop when we die? 'Of course we do,' say the scientists, yet my experience makes me doubt it. So many people have reported near-death experiences, can they all be deluded?

I've had a couple myself, which have made me rather more certain that there's some kind of afterlife. The first came when I was 17 and under anaesthetic for a knee operation. I felt myself hurrying down the tunnel of death towards a light at the end: the feeling of euphoria, or being united in companionship, was so vivid as to be unforgettable, and convincing.

So many people have reported near-death experiences, can they all be deluded? I've had a couple myself

Physiologists assure us that this experience is just what we feel as the dying brain is deprived of oxygen. They may be right, but it hardly seems a complete explanation for the ecstasy I experienced back then. Something spiritual had certainly occurred.

I had a rather more complicated experience of death when I was in my 70s and my heart unexpectedly flat-lined. Under anaesthetic in hospital, I saw the gates of Heaven, in garish colours rather than pearly white.

They were double-glazed, and opened for me. I was being dragged throughwhile others - I couldn't see their faces - tried to hold me back.

Staring through a haze, I caught a glimpse of the other side. I had a clear impression of the same old familiar struggle going on there as here, good and evil mixed, one step forward, half a step back.

Waking up in intensive care, I heard myself say: 'Oh I see, just more of the same!' Whatever it was, Heaven or Hell, it didn't seem too bad, and it led me to the notion that death was just the continuation of life by other means.

Do I think more about death as I grow older? Yes, of course, but I'm not afraid of it. Oddly, the near-death experience I had at 17 - oxygen deprivation or not - left me with the feeling that the Universe was essentially benign, and I've been afraid of very little since.

If there is no afterlife then at least I'll know nothing about it. And if there is something on 'the other side', as I suspect there is, I dare say I will cope. I've done it in this life, so why not in the next? Growing old is for me far more frightening than the unknown.

I know what you're probably thinking. What kind of old bat has a near-death experience? Well, I'm not easily deluded. I'm not superstitious. I don't believe in lucky charms or crystals. I am rational enough in all other respects. I don't want to know my future, though I might pick petals off the odd dandelion to find out if he loves me or he loves me not.

I sometimes read my horoscope in magazines, though I know every 12th person will have the same 'fortune' as me, and I wouldn't dream of acting on its advice.

'Oddly, the near-death experience I had at 17 - oxygen deprivation or not - left me with the feeling that the Universe was essentially benign, and I've been afraid of very little since'

I was brought up to believe that the laws of physics were immutable, eternal and the same throughout the Universe, and so spent a lot of my life dismissing all evidence of the unexplainable as hokum. But as cosmologists tell us about the existence of multiple universes, and quantum physicists about time-travelling particles, I find I am no longer so hooked on common sense.

I am, after all, an habitual creator of alternative universes, which is what novelists do for a living.
And the longer I live, the more prepared I am to accept that the unusual happens. For example, that the man in the preacher's hat whom I saw winking in and out of nothingness at the end of St Andrews pier in 1951 was, indeed, the parson from Dundee who drowned, according to legend, on his way to preach to the students one Sunday in the year 1551.

I felt spooked, but only after I realised that the laws of physics had been broken. At the time he just looked as a man would have looked 400 years earlier.

I no longer feel the need to deny my own experiences. When someone I know has died, I'm not surprised if they visit me within a day or two and say goodbye. They make the rounds of family and friends, in order of your importance to them, not them to you, so you have to be patient.

You're lying asleep or walking down the street when they make themselves known, as if tapping you on the shoulder and saying: 'Hi, it's me. I've come to say goodbye.'

You look round and there's no one there, yet you heard them clear as a bell. It's a kind of brushing of spirits that puts grief to rest; a sudden, clear, unexpected awareness of their presence for a second or two before they go off somewhere else.

I have no idea where the 'somewhere else' is and yes, of course I may be imagining it. No one can prove there is an afterlife, but no one can prove there isn't.

In this awareness of an afterlife, I find myself in the company of many perfectly intelligent and rational people, the late, great Arthur Balfour, born in 1848, for one.

Politician, philosopher, Prime Minister (a very good one) and 'the cleverest man in all England', he believed in the existence of an afterlife and the scientific possibility that the dead could communicate with the living. He was even one-time president of the Society for Psychical Research.

Balfour moves as a real character among the fictional ones in my new novel, Long Live The King, caught up in the quest to sort out truth from superstition, the fake medium from the genuine. My heroine, a 17-year-old, is a medium who assumes she is fake but isn't.

As to my girlhood question of 'Is there a God?', I was in my 70s and a lifelong agnostic before deciding I might as well behave as if there were a God, become a Christian and join the Anglican Church. If it was good enough for my ancestors, it's good enough for me.

It seemed the least I could do was to align myself with the forces of good, rather than evil. Perhaps I had just read Paradise Lost or seen Lord of the Rings, or heard someone quote Edmund Burke's 'all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'. I can't remember.

Certainly I know I had just written an essay on St Paul's letters to the Corinthians for a publisher, and had been so swayed by the language and story of the New Testament that a new religious conviction came with ease, rather than with difficulty. Enough of all this intellectual sitting on the fence, I thought.

As St Paul wrote in the first century: 'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly... And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.'
These are the conclusions of eight decades. After nine, everything may seem different. I'll let you know.