What are the first impressions after death?

No one who has not passed through the transition can understand the feelings of surprise and delight with which persons from the earth enter into the spirit world and see themselves surrounded by old faces—

Remembered long ago—

Seemingly, in a former state of existence, for the change they have just passed through has placed a barrier between them and all their recent associations and surroundings—

Such as makes their new life almost a new birth. 

Some think they are awakening out of a long sleep of years and that they will find themselves children again—

Their intermediate life being merely a dream. 

This feeling is owing to the extreme vividness of their childish recollections, which are first to return to their remembrance. 

Thus, they imagine at first glance, that all their recent cares and troubles in life are passing away, and all remembrance thereof is being wiped out, but this is an illusion, which a very short experience in the spirit world suffices to dispel. 

Memory, they soon learn, will not be thrown off, but clings to them still, and as the earlier pages of their life's career pass before the mind's eye, they give place once more to the more recent events they would fain have erased from recollection, but which nevertheless assert their right to be again remembered.

The fact that they are in another world of being does not immediately strike the newcomers, for they see at first no difference in their surroundings. 

There is the same bed on which they had but recently lain down to die, and now that the dreaded event has actually happened, they find themselves standing by the side of a transparent duplicate of their former selves, for the material body, minus its spiritual counterpart, presents to them the appearance of a ghostly corpse, of which the spirit body now severed from it is the real material counterpart. 

The earthly friends of the dead man stand around this ghostly image of himself, lying stiff and stark on the bed before them, weeping and wringing their hands, with cries of anguish or despair. How should the newly-arisen spirit realise the immense change that has taken place in his state?

He speaks to his friends, but the latter take no notice of him, persisting in lavishing the most extravagant lamentations over the wretched object before them. 

No one who has not attended a scene of the kind can realise the intense anguish of the spirit on finding his friends so inconsolable, and knowing that he cannot render them any help, for the consolation he would now give them is impossible for him to convey, since he speaks to those who cannot hear him and appeals to those who do not see him. 

Until the state of the case is fully explained to him, it is easily conceivable that he fails to realise the change that he has undergone. Could he have foreseen it, he would probably have given thousands of pounds to have spared his friends the anguish they are suffering on his account, and which is rendered all the more acute to him because he cannot show them how mistaken they are in bemoaning his death, and how groundless their sorrow is. 

He is not dead, he lives. 

Such are the words he would impress on their sorrowful hearts if he had but the power, but his tongue is speechless to their ears and his form is no longer living in their eyes—

So what can he do but lament with them. 

This only increases their sorrow, as his mind being in sympathy with theirs renders him susceptible to the same feelings that they experience, and thus one reacts on the other, and the result is an increase of grief to all.

If the friends who are left behind could but see the joyous, gladsome spirit who first rises from the recumbent form of the dead man—

For until he realises his surroundings, his spirit is filled with joy and thankfulness to the Almighty for having, as he supposes, raised him from a bed of sickness and sorrow to a renewed lease of life—

They would not be sad, but rejoice at the change, which though depriving them of the companionship of one they loved has been for him a consummation devoutly to be wished. 

On first rising, his sensations, in fact, are somewhat similar to those of a man rising from a sweet, refreshing sleep. When however, he begins to realise the true state of the case, it is easy to imagine how bitterly he will regret the neglect of any means of information that would have removed the dreadful blank in the lives of the dear ones he has left behind—

Mourning over an absent one who is in their midst. 

Life Beyond the Grave