I describe a wide range of unusual experiences I have been privileged to live through.
The near-death experience is a life-changing event, charged with drama, beauty and spiritual depth. Fearlessness, freedom,knowledge and gratitude are some of the gifts the experiencer often brings back, for the enrichment of his/her own life and the lives of others.
Most of the topics I deal with in my book, such as the near-death experience, after-death communications, angels, miracles, dreams and healing, seem to be in the public eye now more than ever before;television and radio programs, books, newspaper articles,workshops and seminars on those subjects are in great demand. Libraries, too, have seen an increased interest in these topics among their patrons.
The book also tells of living and traveling in Colombia, the Congo, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere. CHAPTER 29 A Soul Call for a Good Man Approaching my twenty-fifth birthday, I started to ask myself what I wanted to do with my life, and found two things at the top of the list I would like to tackle: traveling, which I had day-dreamed about many times in my youth, and finding an ideal man to share my life with. After a close inventory, I couldn’t find a truly suitable man among my few wooers of the last three years. Two were too conservative, one too rude, and another, my cousin, had a wandering eye for other women; I knew a marriage to any of these men wouldn’t last long at all. (My thinking wasn’t far off; to this date my cousin, the only one I had heard about since then, has been married three times). I settled for traveling first and seeking a husband later. I asked God to send my way the best possible husband, and then made plans for traveling within a year, first to Peru to see Machu Pichu and then to Europe. I purchased a ticket on the installment plan to make it easy on my pocket and to give myself time to save a little more money for expenses. I had a good job in the publicity department of a well-known international Dutch company, and the work was varied and satisfying, but my “itchy feet” could not wait much longer; I would leave for Peru by December 1966. The love of my life (my husband Cliff) showed up in June 1966, a few months before my departure date for Peru. Born in Detroit and raised in Florida, he too had had plans for traveling. After graduating from Florida State University with a major in German, he had taught high school in southwest Nebraska for one year and then had gone to Germany to work during the summer of l965. But the cold, gloomy weather he found in Nuremberg that year was not exactly to his liking. Remembering that he had friends with the Peace Corps working in Colombia, he decided to go pay them a visit and enjoy the warmth of the tropics at the same time. He promptly quit his job, went to Antwerp, Belgium and caught a German freighter bound for Colombia, arriving in Barranquilla in the fall of 1965. Inquiring about his friends, in Bogotá, Cliff found out that they had already completed their assignment in Colombia and had left the country. Still it was tempting for him to stay a little longer and see more of the country. But with money running out, he would need at least a short-term job. Why not try that? He found cheaper accommodations at a boarding house owned by an old German and his Colombian wife, a clean place frequented by Peace Corps volunteers and other wandering foreigners with little money. In no time he also found a part-time teaching position at the U.S. sponsored bi-national center, the Centro Colombo-Americano, where nine years earlier I had studied English. Cliff’s roommate happened to be an English teacher at the Institute of Foreign Languages where I was doing my third year of Russian and beginning German at that time. Teachers talk among themselves about their students, and after five years of taking classes with some of them at the Institute, they liked me well. I had the reputation of being a good student and a serious young woman. Harold Schuller told me one day that his roommate (Cliff) was from the United States, handsome and single, spoke German and was “like a monk.” He then asked me if I would like to meet him. The part about being handsome and speaking German sounded interesting to me, and I agreed to meet his friend that weekend. That Saturday afternoon in early June 1966, Harold introduced me to Cliff at a soda fountain, had a glass of juice with us and quickly disappeared. The first thing I noticed about Cliff was his deep, resonant voice and his slightly sad eyes. Conversation was easy, in a mixture of his rudimentary Spanish, my not so fluid English and probably a tad of German, not a problem at any moment. We walked to a park some ten blocks away and there walked some more, talked some more and took photographs. The next day we went to a museum he had some interest in seeing and did a few more miles of walking and talking. That became a routine for us in the following weekends. It was not love at first sight for either one of us, but the love bug got to us very fast; I know it did to me. Being a veteran of falling in love and not telling, having the man so close to me this time, and doing all that talking and sharing was an improvement over the countless times I had been contented with a greeting and a smile from the men I secretly loved. My cousin I had held and kissed many times, but there was no soul communication to the degree that Cliff and I were finding together. A tragedy that touched both of us in a slightly different way was the catalyst that brought our lives together faster in a more dramatic way than we had intended. In late August 1966 a terrorist bomb went off at the Centro Colombo-Americano where Cliff taught. Six people were killed, one American among them. The bomb had been hidden in a women’s restroom on the first floor. Two minutes earlier, on the way to his classroom on the third floor, Cliff had just passed the area where the bomb went off. He was handing out papers to the students when it went off, shaking the whole building badly. All the windows on the first floor and many on the other floors were blown out. One of his students, arriving late, was hurt by flying glass. When the classrooms were evacuated, those on the two higher floors had to walk past the torn bodies of the dead. I was working at my desk that afternoon, with the radio on as usual, when the normal program was interrupted with a news bulletin informing us of an explosion at the Centro Colombo-Americano. I thought of Cliff and prayed to God, “let him be well,” or something of that sort. But mostly I thought of my friend Maria Eugenia, a few doors down the hall, whose husband was also working at the Colombo-Americano. I went to her office immediately to tell her about the news on the radio, but she thought I was pulling her leg. When she saw I was not kidding, we then searched for more news on the radio; the news was everywhere. After several telephone calls, my friend learned that her husband had been “badly injured.” (He had actually been killed instantly, as she would learn later.) Such grief for a wife, a bride of five months, as she was. The young man was a promising playwright and poet, in charge of the office of cultural activities at the Colombo. I tried to locate Cliff and finally succeeded about two hours later. I wanted to see him to make sure he was okay. I saw him after work; so happy to hug him once more. My friend Maria Eugenia was a secretary and an amateur theater performer. I had known her for about two years at work and had gotten to know her rather well with our frequent chats while riding the company bus to and from the same neighborhood. I don’t remember if she called me, or I offered my help to make the funeral arrangements (after all I knew something about that from having lost my father a year earlier), but the next day the two of us were at the funeral parlor doing just that; it all seemed surreal. The important thing is that she got all the presence of mind she needed to deal with her situation. The tragedy made Cliff realize how ephemeral life can be and the importance of making it worthwhile while it lasts. Marriage might have entered his mind already, but there was no urgency about it for either one of us, after only three months of knowing each other. Now that death had just shown its claws in front of us, it was time to make a choice for life, a life of sharing and discovery. A few days after, he proposed. Three months later, on Thanksgiving Day l966, we got married. The sale of the airline ticket I had been paying for got us some home utensils and a coat for my husband. I knew I would be traveling later, since Cliff had no plans to stay in Colombia permanently, just one more year to get to know some of the country, and my family, a little better. My plans for traveling had been reversed; by a divine twist I had gotten a husband first and through him, without knowing it, a ticket to see the world. More than thirty years later, I can’t complain about that change.
-- Gloria Gieseke
