The IANDS may exist to give scientific legitimacy to the claims of near-death experiencers, but I suspect most of its members would believe in Heaven even if it didn’t. Their belief isn’t predicated on scientific research but on the essential strangeness of life and death; I thought again of Chris Kito in his little blue hospital socks, almost killed by a peanut and flooded with love. To my mind, NDEs aren’t proof of Heaven, but they do prove that nearness to death changes you, rearranges your sense of the possible. And so it does. I stopped believing in God in my furtive way after my dad died—some switch was flipped, and that high clear tone, a frequency I could once hear, went dead. God was there and then he wasn’t; my dad was alive and then he wasn’t. And yet the world seems vaster and stranger than I had fully accounted for. Even now, I sometimes let myself imagine running into my dad at the grocery store—I turn the corner and spot him in the dairy aisle, wearing sweatpants with suspenders and trundling along with his shopping cart. Just plainly there, unremarkably alive. To see him resurrected in an Acme would confound my sense of reality, but I’m not sure it would be any more confounding than his death. On any scale, death feels arbitrary and inexplicable. It shouldn’t happen, so when it does, you get to thinking that anything might.