230.00 people died in that Deadly Tsunami, and then this Happened

Standing up against a Tsunami and The incredible Power of Choice

Over 230.000 people died that day, in that deadly Tsunami in 2004

The earth shook on the morning of Boxing Day. Deep beneath the ocean, the earth’s tectonic pressure released violently, creating a gigantic wave, striking hard, taking hundreds of thousands of lives instantly, and sucking souls out of their bodies. The vast ocean has taken with no mercy. We watch hundreds of thousands of bodies dragged ruthlessly into death from the place where my lover Umberto had lived. The earthquake cracked open the world — taking all that was built, all that had grown, and all that was alive — and effortlessly washed it away.

It is so unreal to sit in my white apartment on the twelfth floor in Honolulu. The sun is blazing down, and everything is coming to a stop as we watch, in slow motion, all the images: houses gone, faces frightened, wailing, screeching, and howling. The room is filled with a strange silence while images and voices blast out of the new Sony widescreen.

Reporters appear, popping up in a hurry. CNN, BBC, and NBC have the common pictures of every disaster: the military, improvised hospitals, the wailings of lost, big-eyed children, whole houses almost instantly disappearing into raging rivers. For the first time in my life, the pictures become alive. It is not a distant, surreal picture that I can shut off with the remote, close my eyes to because it was too big to grasp, too big to understand, and too far away to feel real. I had learned to become numb to reports of shootings, bombs, earthquakes, and natural disasters.

“We lived right there!” my lover says as he points hesitantly at the screen.

Three weeks after this happened, Umberto’s parents went back to Indonesia to help to look for survivors. Seeing the devastation gave his mother an instant heartattack and she died. Another three weeks later it is his father’s turn. Sick from grief, having lost each one of his family members in Indonesia, he dies from a heartattack back at home in Hawaii. Then it is another three weeks later, yet another wave. Now my lover, only 33 years old and perfectly healthy, living on another island then me, suddenly enters a coma from another heart attack, to shortly after die. When I get the news through a message on my laptop from his brother I start crying.

And this is when the most unbelievable thing happened:

Handwritten cursive letters appear on my computer screen outside any frame, or window, one inch high, asking me: “Why are you crying?”

“It is my Umberto, I am here in heaven, dancing with angels, but why are you crying?” To my amazement I am able to type back, and for half an hour we get a conversation and it went like this:

The letters appear rapidly on my screen — as if written with a feather in real time, word by word, letter by letter, one inch tall, in white. The rest of the screen seems to vibrate — as if getting ready to disappear. There is no frame besides the little frame underneath his brother’s conversation: “Umberto appears to be offline.”

I type back in the Yahoo messenger box: “Who is this?”

“It is me, Umberto. Why are you crying?”

His handwritten words appear again on the screen. “Why are you crying?” They fill the whole screen from left to right. It looks like his beautiful handwriting. I glare at the keyboard to see if the keys are being pushed. No. I take a deep breath and try to push my tears away.

Umberto sees that I am crying. His body is dead — hundreds of miles away from me. He sees me. He can see that I am crying on the Big Island.

“I think you are too young to die. That is why I cry.” My fingers tremble as I type the letters. I feel as if I am actually touching his compact body. I realize the absurdity of this statement. Who am I to say that? Too young to die? What has age to do with it anyway? I smile wryly.

A warm gush is flowing through my body. It is as if he is there with me. Over my back and down in my belly — the love for everything as I knew him for that short period of time. His dark skin is next to mine. Our connection is oozing through these strange, magical letters on my old computer screen. All of our encounters were filled with magic — despite the differences of my lightness next to his depression.

“They are calling me. My family is calling me.”

I stare at the black screen, trying to imagine, as I repeat what just appeared in front of me. Calling?

“All these people are calling me, Christel. There is such a beautiful music. I am dancing. I am so happy. But why are you crying?”

All these people? Like all the ones who lost their lives in the tsunami? I can almost feel it. It is like a wave — an energetic tsunami pulling souls to the other side. And now it is his turn! Wave after wave after wave. Three weeks after the tsunami, his mother. Three weeks later, his father. And now Umberto … another three weeks, another wave.

I bend forward and shout at my laptop in Dutch. My mouth almost touches the screen.

“Okay, Umberto. It may be that you are dancing with angels there in heaven, but I think you don’t have to go yet. It is too early. You still have a choice. A choice to be alive.”

I want to enter the world where he is right now. For a moment, I grab the screen and move it back and forth to see if his world really appears behind it. Then I slump, dropping my body back as I realize how silly it is.

“I love you so much, my lilikoi.” My lilikoi. I feel a chill down my spine. I feel so embraced by him. ‘I love you. I can almost hear the way he pronounced it with a little Hawaiian accent, the warm timbre, almost mumbling. We never went there before. We never said it to each other. Always dancing around those words, both of us were afraid of the consequence: to get too attached or make it all too real. He would just say “My lilikoi.” Lilikoi is the Hawaiian word for passion fruit.

“You can choose, Umberto! You can make a choice. You can make a statement that you want to be alive,” I type.

“But I am happy here where I am.”

“Why did I come into your life?”

Surprised I look at the last sentence I typed. What a strange question. At the same time, it was so appropriate, I had to ask it. And now that I see it appear on my screen, It is as if somehow we both touched upon a whole different level of our accidental meeting. The conversation stopped. I look at the time: 9.30. Half an hour! Half an hour after we first started talking, but it only felt like five minutes. His last letters right in the middle of my screen were big and alive, almost breathing.

“I love you.”

I imagine Umberto dancing between angels, his chubby face moving around, and his body like a puppet underneath it. He is dancing on a cloud. Anxiously I keep looking at the screen, hoping to enter this “other world” through the glass surface, but nothing happens. The last letters I typed keep on echoing in my mind. Why did I come into your life?

I intuitively grab my phone and cross the street to the only place where my cell phone has reception. With every step, another question pops into my mind. How could it be? How could Umberto be talking to me on the computer? Where did he die? How did he end up in the hospital? How did his family get to him so quickly? How come he had a heart attack?

I sit on a little lava rock bench in the empty lot between the vines. Strange. I have all these questions about the reality of his body, but it seems to not matter at all. He was chatting with me from heaven. He is still the boy who experiences life as something that just happens to him, wondering: “How did I end up here?” He is following his ancestors in that deadly wave.

And I was just typing to heaven. And then there was the fear that, my two witnesses, my two retreat ladies showed. The disbelief. And my inner voice told me so clearly: “Just talk back to him.” That moment I knew for sure: this is true.

As I take a deep breath, my phone rings and I am astounded to see Umberto’s number. Another deep breath … imagine, imagine that … no … that cannot be true. My voice trembles when I pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

His voice was faint. “It is me, Umberto. I am back! We have been talking to each other, right?”

“Umberto?”

What does he mean, talking? Typing he means. After five minutes, your brain will be permanently damaged, scientists say. Has he become crazy? No, he doesn’t sound like it. He is absolutely himself. He just sounds weak and soft.

I push my little phone against my ear. I’m irritated by the noise of the waves in front of me, and the lava rocks seem too hard.

“I could hear your voice.”

“What did you say?” I yell.

“I am back in my body.”

“You are back? You were dead for two hours — and now you are alive again? Where are you?”

“I am in the hospital. I could hear your voice. It is so beautiful there.”

“Hear my voice?” I try to scream above the waves.

Voice? My voice! He can remember everything I typed, and he heard it as my voice — even though I only used my voice when I said I wasn’t agreeing with that energetic tsunami in Dutch.

Before I can say anything else, he says: “I saw you taking a shower at seven thirty.”

And this is when I was even more amazed. He is now describing how he was watching me taking an outdoor shower at 7.30. The moment he left his body, on another Hawaiian island. His body was dead, but he could exactly describe details in my reality. Little did I know that many, many, more conversations like this would follow. This is an excerpt of my book: “Forty-Nine Days, a Sensuous Journey in the Modern Afterlife”. This experience and many more gave me a tremendous insight in the power of choice. Writing this blog, still makes me realize the absurdity of this experience and still rises the question: Who will ever believe me? Yet, I cannot do any other thing then sharing my story. Despite the disbelief, the judgement and the ridicule. In many ways I feel like a pioneer with this experience and I am convinced that many more experiences like this will emerge all around the world.

Christel is a Qigong Artist, Writer, poet and Author of ‘Forty-Nine Days, A sensuous Journey in the Modern Afterlife. She is the founder of Spontaneous Movement, and offers retreats and classes in Hawaii to allow ‘a bigger reality to speak through you’. You can find her at www.christeljanssen.com