The Body Knows: What a Diviner in the Congo Taught Me About Dying
An
#excerpt inspired reflection from The Moment After Death ๐๐
Most of us picture death as an ambush. A crash on a rain-slicked road. A phone call at 3 a.m. A door that slams without warning.
But what if the ambush is only what it looks like from the outside?
In Chapter 3 of The Moment After Death, the story leaves Mayla and takes you deep into the Congo Basin. There lives a man named Baba Nkandu. The villagers know him by that name, but in the language of the unseen he is Alrac, the diviner, keeper of sacred medicines, listener to the ancestors through dreams.
His family's gift was never power over death. It was knowing it.
Their stories were never told around the fire in ordinary words. They came as dreams, passed from grandfather to grandson, grandmother to granddaughter, across centuries. In those dreams, the ancestors showed the exact moment the body receives its final instruction from the higher self.
One ancestor saw his own end days before the leopard found him. He didn't run. He gathered his kin, said what needed saying, and walked into the trees at peace. A grandmother moved through the village with unhurried grace, knowing the night the ancestors would call her across the river of stars. She sang to the children, prepared her herbs, and lay down with a smile that belonged more to the other side than this one.
Alrac taught that the body does not die in ignorance. The spirit alerts its temporary home. It isn't cruelty or punishment. It's understanding.
Here's the part that stayed with me while writing it. The chapter also explains why so many of us never hear this story. When someone is pulled back from the threshold, by love or by unfinished song, the vivid details fade like morning mist. The mind rationalizes: It was a dream. A fever. A coincidence. But the essence stays, as a quiet certainty and a changed way of seeing.
Think about the people you've lost. The ones who seemed to say goodbye in ways you only understood afterward. The grandmother who suddenly wanted the whole family together. The friend who got strangely, beautifully calm.
What if that wasn't coincidence? What if they were listening to the song, and the rest of us just hadn't learned how yet?
Chapter 3 is only a few pages. It ties together everything around it: Mayla's death on the highway called Journeys End, the family arguing over hellfire in a hospital waiting room, and the guides, soul groups and councils waiting on the other side. It also raised a question I couldn't put down while writing it:
If dying is something the soul prepares for, what else has it been preparing us for all along?
If you've ever feared the dark, loved someone you lost, or secretly hoped there was more than the final curtain, this book was written for you.
The Moment After Death is available now. Come find out what happens after the flatline.
With love and light,
โจCarli B. FruehโจWanderer & Crafter of Worlds
โจ
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