Psychologist Morris Netherton, a pioneer in Past Life Therapy, has this to say about death:

Death is the great unresolved trauma. Death is the moment when we leave everything unfinished. If death comes suddenly we take the unresolved situation into another life. Unconsciously we try to solve the past life problem in the present.

The death of author Margaret Mitchell had certainly come suddenly, fatally struck by a car as she crossed Peachtree Street. Was my task to untie the knots of the unresolved parts of her life, which were somehow linked to mine? I didn't realize it at the time, but more insights on death and a deeper perception of life's cycles were soon to follow.

A flower played the pivotal role. It was Easter weekend, and the culture was immersed in the theme of death and resurrection. That Saturday an old friend brought me some purple iris, one of my favorite flowers, for my birthday. Their deep shade serendipitously matched my plum-colored blouse, so I pinned one on like a corsage before heading out to dinner. While enjoyable, a simple gift of flowers was not a life-changing event. What followed a day and a half later, however, was.

For exercise that winter I'd begun swimming at the Martin Luther King Center’s indoor pool. On Monday morning I went there as usual. The day seemed quite ordinary until after my swim. As I got into my car to head home, I suddenly sensed that familiar intuitive pull. This time the prompting directed me to Margaret Mitchell's grave at nearby Oakland Cemetery. Since I still had time before my first client, I decided to follow this strong inner directive, so similar in tone to past guidance, which had always led to something significant.

I walked through the gate and began crossing the tiered landscape. I had only been to Oakland Cemetery once before, following my interest in history more than in Mitchell. Therefore it took me a little while to find her grave in the old cemetery’s maze-like design. The stunning Atlanta spring’s peak was already past, but the sylvan atmosphere and aged brick walkways still created an appealing scene. And temperatures had yet to create the oppressiveness of summer, so I didn’t mind wondering about that late April morning. As I finally approached Mitchell’s gravesite, having been pointed in the right direction by a maintenance man, I noticed some fresh flowers on top of her tombstone. Purple iris, almost identical to those I’d received thirty-six hours earlier, decorated the grave.

I immediately sensed this was the reason I’d been guided here. I knew it viscerally. Yet I still felt a bit queasy, like I do when the awe of something starts pulling me away from my logical mind’s comfort zone, which wants to scoff and declare such things a mere coincidence. But from that place of deeper knowing I could see that these iris, which matched the ones I received for my birthday, meaningfully linked a celebration of birth and this place of death. Birth and death, I mused while absentmindedly picking off one of the iris’s spent blossoms. Are they really so far apart or are they two points joining the spiral of life together?

In those flowers another link was being offered...a link in the ineffable chain of events that connected my life to a woman who'd lived in a time other than my own. I wondered what answers were waiting to be discovered in the folds of these gossamer petals. Could peeling back each curved lilac arch and peering into that fertile waiting center reveal the solution?

The word solution implied a problem, but this didn't feel like a problem. It was more like a puzzle, and here was one more piece. This experience seemed to be more about making connections rather than solving a dilemma. As I stood there it was as if I were glimpsing a design that already existed. I chose at that moment to merely embrace it. It was only later that I was struck by the significance of the flower being an iris, also part of the eye's anatomy. This experience was definitely about vision...seeing in a new way, not as the mind sees, but as the soul sees. A tulip would not have done.

To come face to face with this inner beauty of the cosmos, mirrored in those flower petals, rendered me speechless. I could hardly comprehend it. So I stopped even trying and shifted into sheer experience. For a moment I lived beyond why or wherefore. I felt as if I were being gently pushed outside myself, yet safely embraced by a sensation of ecstasy. I had to expand because there simply wasn't enough room in my body to contain this awareness. I spilled over into the trees and sunlight. I felt myself suspended in timelessness, cognizant of an existence outside of what is generally perceived as ordinary time and space. Giggling erupted spontaneously, even as tears of joy welled up. Part of me felt like cavorting all over this seemingly somber place, but another self-conscious part refrained. Instead I allowed this spiraling dance of life to flow through and around me in an exquisite pulse of vibrancy.

While my mind occasionally entered in to grasp for some label, the feeling was so exquisite and all consuming that I had little difficulty simply staying with the sensations. To search for a rational explanation felt like contorting my body into an uncomfortable and distorted posture when I was already in the most natural position possible. I felt in harmony, in alignment with something bigger and grander than everyday reality. Pulling myself out of that amplified space in order to stuff my being into a much smaller drawer of measurable understanding seemed foolish.

At one point I grinned and looked skyward, addressing whatever or whoever was behind this wondrous feeling of connectedness. "I got it," I said silently. "Thanks, I got the message." Tears continued to flow softly out of awe and gratitude. "Tears for God," I later heard them called. I felt a deep inner peace. I was unmistakably aware of the love behind this mystery we call life, the love that had led me here on this day. I knew then that, instead of life being meaningless, life had so much meaning it was nearly impossible for us to grasp, at least with our rational minds. This living message, sent to me through the language of strategically placed flowers, showed me that. The significance of this morning's messenger being an iris flower was to become even more intriguing. Soon afterward I read that the Greek goddess Iris was a courier of the gods who traveled between heaven and earth with divine dispatches.

The ultimate surprise for me that day was the touch of humor intermingled with these feelings of awe. I recalled my earlier insight about the words cosmic and comic differing by only one letter. The dual feelings I was experiencing there in the cemetery had reminded me of it. While I don't fully understand why, I sensed a fine line between the awesome and the comic there in Oakland Cemetery. An awareness that death may only be a temporary phase came to me, along with knowing that our souls just might continue, returning in other bodies to complete the unresolved, with numerous opportunities for life and growth. This epiphany triggered by the iris was one of the most deeply moving, yet also most amusing moments I'd ever experienced. Perhaps my sense of humor had improved.

For years I had clung to my doubts about reincarnation. I had allowed reason to repeatedly pull me out of the evidence of my experiences. Now the spontaneity of these mixed feelings of light-hearted giddiness beside profound solemnity was shattering my skepticism once again. This time my disbelief was being eroded more thoroughly. I wondered what had I done to achieve the grace of this peace I was currently bathed in.

Then I began to look around me at the grand and humble memorials. In place of sadness the cemetery took on a sparkling air of movement in the filtered morning light. Rays of the sun separated into soft white ribbons connecting heaven and earth, spirit and matter. My thoughts turned to our beliefs of death and the grief associated with cemeteries. I marveled at the idea of these people laid to rest here, possibly being alive again in new bodies with new names and faces to explore life another time.

Finally I shifted my vision to the more immediate tomb in front of me and questioned... What about Margaret Mitchell and myself? Had Mr. Elliott been right about this being a reincarnation experience? It was as if I'd been gathering puzzle pieces for years, wondering when the whole picture would become clear. On this morning a most significant piece had been added to the image. I was now able to see the larger scheme, through the lens of soul, beyond the range of finite, linear time.

Once again I felt a chill go through me, a sensation which, I'd come to realize, showed me when I was unwittingly working within the larger groove of my soul's agenda. Even my rational skepticism couldn't discount a decade’s worth of cumulative evidence, which had just crescendoed in this epiphany. I giggled again and thought, what is death if one could return to pick dead blossoms off flowers on their own grave? Oh, it was awesome all right, but it was also one of the most comical moments I can recall. Was this the meaning of a cosmic joke?

Looking back at that day, I saw how that first glimpse of iris on Mitchell's grave triggered a lightning-like flash of revelation that changed me forever. As with any conversion experience, like Paul's on the road to Damascus, it is bound to do so. While the intensity faded with time, the message delivered to me that morning offered me a new wondrous strength for living and a surge of faith and gratitude that emanated from the core of my being. I had temporarily been transported beyond the need for explanation by the divine garbed in purple petals. At that moment I had penetrated a mystery. Only my tool was not a sharp-edged sword, but the softly folded petals of a flower.

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