Mark Wagner is the founding director of the Binienda Center for Civic Engagement at Worcester State University.
One summery Friday, as I mowed the lawn, I’m pretty sure my dead sister, Caroline, appeared to me as a peach. On a tree that had in five years never borne fruit, a single, perfectly ripe peach nearly touched my nose as I bobbed my head under the boughs.
How and why Caroline became a peach is a story that begins in August 1985. As part of her wedding ceremony, we sang “Amazing Grace.” At 30, Caroline was no shrinking violet. She’d been hired as a technology analyst by the CIA. She insisted that she would not sing, “To save a wretch like me,” demanding instead that we sing, “That saved a peach like me.” So we sang Christianity’s most notable hymn with new words. No divine punishment ensued. In fact, Caroline went on to have a healthy family and succeed in her career in higher education.
After her wedding, she embraced all things peachy. We called her “Sweet Peach.” At our “Yankee swaps” at Christmas, each year a niece or nephew would give her a peach candle, and they would all sing the SNL carol — “It’s a candle, that same peach candle.”
When I delivered her eulogy, I ended by declaring, “Our big sis weren’t no wretch.” And her remaining seven siblings, her three children and her many nieces and nephews led the hymn, using Caroline’s emendation of the famous line.
And here I was, two months later, staring at a peach dangling in front of my face. I pulled it clean and ran into the house to show my wife and son.
We went out to check. There were no other peaches on the tree. We have another peach tree, one that’s actually fecund, but those peaches were weeks from being ripe.
What else could we do? My son and I made a smoothie, and I called my siblings.
And I told the story to friends. To my surprise, many shared a similar tale: After a death, a special bird appears. Or the loved one arrives with surreal lucidity in a dream. Or they catch an unexpected whiff of cinnamon, or lilacs, a scent the person had loved the most.
My friend Tim shared his story: The flagpole on their boat dock had a wooden ball on top. The day after his father’s death, the ball had been neatly set on the ground beside the flagpole. Was this his father, lowering a flag in his own memory? “There is no other explanation,” Tim said. “But it’s hard to put into words.”
A 2023 Pew Research study that found 34 percent of Americans report having felt a dead family member’s presence in the past year, and 15 percent report having received a more straightforward communication from the dead. The University of Virginia School of Medicine has a department that studies these phenomena. The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), which researches the possibility of consciousness surviving the body, calls them ADCs — after-death communications.
Fatma Wise, a faculty member at DOPS, has learned how to tread carefully about her work. “We believe these ADC experiences are meaningful and significant, especially to the person who has had them,” she told me.
I was very close with my sister, and her quick death from pancreatic cancer was terribly challenging. Grief is complicated. I can accept that my interpretation of the singular peach on a barren tree might be a story I tell myself because I am unable to accept that she is gone. In our last conversations, even as some of us suggested there are examples of “miraculous” recovery, Caroline accepted her passing and reiterated that she wanted us to celebrate. “I had an amazing life,” she reassured us.
In Caroline’s studies of science and knowledge networks, she maintained this belief: The more we know of the world, the more we know it is a wonder, that our lives, this earth, are themselves improbabilities — miracles, if you will. Science enables this awe, so we can wonder at this beautiful world. My sister’s peach returned me to wonder and interrupted my understanding of what is possible.
Was the peach Caroline? Perhaps Shakespeare said it best. As Hamlet instructed his friend Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. I would suggest the working word at the tip of Shakespeare’s pen is “dreamed.” Our philosophies and models of what is possible are dreams. The true reality of our lives and deaths is something other, something we struggle to put into words. Sometimes, it tastes sweet.
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