What if You Didn’t Know You Were Alive? | March 8, 2026

What if the real plot twist isn’t learning you’re dead—it’s discovering you’re already alive? In this episode, I start with the movies we all know, from Ghost and The Sixth Sense to Shaun of the Dead, and then flip the lens to reveal a deeper current running through ancient myths, modern history, and the Gospels. Instead of a world where choice manufactures meaning, we enter a world where meaning arrives first, solid and surprising, and our choices learn to catch up.

I also share about a vivid near-death account that captures the shock of recognition—seeing your own body from above—and use it to ask why so many stories hinge on slow awakening. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead to C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, humanity keeps circling the same threshold: what does it take to notice the rules have changed? That question points straight to the New Testament, where Jesus doesn’t negotiate a future possibility but announces a present reality. The time is fulfilled. The page has turned. Whether or not we voted for it, the kingdom is at hand.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

A Writer’s First Bad Ghost Story

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother in Oklahoma City. When I was a senior in high school, as part of our English class homework, we had to write a short story. I wrote a mishmash of a story about a man who had been killed but didn't know he was, in fact, dead. I'd seen a drama on Saturday night at the movies with the same theme, and it intrigued me, so I tried my hand at it. It was a pretty terrible attempt. Fortunately for me, the teacher was generally forgiving of shallow, imitative tries at storytelling, and she gave me a good grade. But it was genuinely bad. If there was any lesson for me, it was that writing a short story is hard. I learned that lesson in spades. But the theme is one that's been around a long time. I just watched one of the interminable reruns of Ghost on TV the other day. This theme plays a major part in the plot of the movie. Sam doesn't realize he's been killed and he has to adjust himself to his new circumstances, which takes him a long time. It's not only it's not the only movie, and certainly not the most compelling example of the type, but it's probably the most well-known. The other most notable example I can think of is The Sixth Sense. It's now more than a quarter of a century old, and its secret plot twist is known by everyone, and yet it remains compelling, and the great reveal at the end is still worth watching, even when you've seen it before. It grips the imagination, and it remains a signal opportunity to wonder if, in fact, there are those who do encounter the dead, or at least have some sense of them, as the young character in the movie does. Having the newly deceased getting used to the circumstances of their newly altered state, passing from the living to the dead, is a dramatic theme capturing the imagination of generations. There are plenty more examples. This kind of storytelling allows the author to explore all measure of questions and place no end of challenges upon his characters, not to mention becoming a means to pry open the imagination of his readers or watchers. What kind of transition is there between the experience of the living and the dead? And what do we measure when we're free from the constraints of the body? What's it like when we no longer are no longer interacting with the familiar and the certain, even if we are in the midst of the same environment and surrounded by those who have always constituted our lives? What's the normal, what's the journey from the normal lives we lead, filled with the worries and constraints of our everyday schedule, into the metaphysical truth of a journey beyond life? And what's it like to arrive at the end of our journeying? All of these questions buzz through these stories. The only limits are in the imagination of the storyteller. The plot line opens itself up to exploring every aspect of life and death. The path may be well trod, but that only makes it a notable highway. This theme is, in fact, a lot older than we might imagine. Certainly, it predates the struggling Hollywood attempts to capture our imagination on the silver screen. In fact, something like the Egyptian Book of the Dead from roughly 2000 BC treats passing from this world to the next as a journey in which the soul seeks to complete the pilgrimage from this life to the next. The soul, liberated from the body in death, looks to find where it must go and how it must find itself among all those others who have preceded it. And this forlorn soul has to find himself amid the moment of the great judgment of his life. It's intriguing to know the question about passing from one state to another has been imaged as a continuing journey through stages and level and has been addressed for four millennia before it got to the movies. I suppose that's why there are ghost stories in every culture. The journey from the moment of death to the final embrace of the endless truth of mortality apparently isn't easy. According to the traditions of human culture, at least in the human tradition of storytelling, not everyone walks this road successfully. And thus there are those confused souls who haunt their previous life and the people in it. Of course, we don't know if there are ghosts who fill the experience of every people in every part of the world for all time, and thus we have stories about them, or if it's simply the case that the stories of such things are so powerful and so compelling that no one can keep away from telling them to hungry audiences all over the world. Whatever the truth of the matter is, this storyline doesn't grow old. Encountering death, coming to know its truth, and then journeying to the fullest acceptance of it, these are all tropes we recognize in the films we watch and the stories we listen to. It would be something like the opening part of the movie Shawn of the Dead, in which the main character walks through the streets of London on a Sunday morning, passing the characters on the sidewalks, weird, strange, and wild. It's only slowly he understands that these are the undead. He's in the midst of the zombie apocalypse and has to begin to protect himself. He doesn't know anything special has happened, at least he doesn't notice at first. Not only that, he can't imagine there would be such a gigantic change in life, because he's just a normal guy. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that what was regular is now different. Everything had been defined by living, now it's defined by dying. In the course of this dramatic storyline, the main character begins to be discomforted because he isn't able to accommodate all that he experiences. The normal day he's used to begins not to add up. He's incapable of explaining how things are different. He only knows that they are. Finally, after being unable to fit what he's finding into the model of life he's used to, he begins to entertain the notion that something has happened to him, that there's something else going on. That's when the awareness dawns. His life is finished, and death has overtaken him. I heard a story once from a person talking about her near-death experience. She'd been on a ladder, changing a light bulb in the overhead ceiling fan. She reached up to the light fixture and touched what was an exposed live wire and was electrocuted. Falling down from the ladder onto the floor, she experienced looking down on her own crumpled body on the floor as if she were floating up from the scene. And just in case you think this is some sort of fanciful setup, a sort of teaser to make a point, just remember, C.S. Lewis described this exact experience in his autobiography when he was shelled by German artillery when he was a British officer in the trenches on the Western Front in World War I. The woman described her experience as she looked down and saw what looked like a dead body on the floor. In surprise and horror, she then moved away from it because she was afraid of dead bodies. It took her a moment to realize that it was her body she was looking at. It took her a measurable time to figure out what exactly had happened and what was going on before she could grasp what she was seeing and coming to know. Her story was an astounding confession. She had to look, size up what she saw, consider all of the information, come to realize her thinking did not include all she had seen, and then expand her understanding. It took her, she said, a long time to realize that's me there on the floor. That body is mine. And so it goes. The drama is predictable, even if the narrative might be innovative and surprising. Coming to know and then weighing up what to do, that's the story. The hinge point comes when it dawns on the character that things have changed, and he has to begin walking a different path. It's not even a matter of choice, as if there were an alternative available. The drama is that either the character knows or doesn't know. Once the truth of things has become known, they can't be unknown. Perhaps it can be ignored, or perhaps not accepted, but it can't be changed. What's happened has happened. That's the story from beginning to end. We know the story. Every version of it almost writes itself because the narrative is so familiar. And not familiar boring either, but familiar intriguing. We can't seem to get enough of it if the popularity of the movies, for example, is any measure. We like it. Now, here's another story, a kind of comment on this familiar one. What if we told a story about someone who didn't know he was alive? It's an inversion of the familiar trope, yes, but not unthinkable. What if the main character walks through his days convinced his life is over, his days numbered and complete, his options forestalled, and his passions evacuated, reaching the conclusion that he's really dead. Life has ended, and he's occupying the shadow world beyond the boundaries of sunlight. In this version, the main character floats through his days with every aspect being insubstantial and vaporous. What seems actual and substantial disappears as soon as it's approached, like the morning mists or the end of the rainbow, as if it were nothing. As soon as he reaches for what he sees, even if he's pursued it, it is as nothing. But this is the state of things. The surprise comes only when things are substantial and solid, graspable and explorable. He's amazed only when he can touch and hold an encounter. In fact, to find something that's solid enough to stay in place, immovable enough to hurt the hand that reaches too quickly or grasps too firmly, that results in amazement. And then to go from one thing to another in a progression of understanding and revelation, seeing that one thing is connected to another, that becomes the drama of it all. The character passes from death to life. In this alternative version of our story, the drama would be the character finding there is a promise of life that has descended upon him even beyond his knowing. He suddenly found himself surrounded by life. He's filled with opportunity and alternatives. His days can lead to the hope and promise that he's given up on, or at least figured would be beyond him. Moment by moment, the encumbering weight of death gives way to the lightness of life. For him, it's not really a moment of choosing as much as it is a matter of knowing and then acting. He thought he was dead, turned out he's really alive. What a compelling story, and one we're not programmed to understand or to respond to, from death to life in the most engaging and positive way possible. That's the story. C.S. Lewis described this most compellingly in his little novelette, The Great Divorce. There have been other attempts, but they've been more indirect and less fun to read. Perhaps we're still waiting for the best moment to capture this kind of story. And in case you didn't know, this is the theme of the New Testament. Those who have been somnambulating through their lives, condemned to limitation, disappointment, condemnation, and exclusion suddenly find themselves offered a new chapter, beginning at that moment. It's the drama that brings the gospels to life from the first page. Not only that, it helps to explain what's going on in the lives of those who pour out to listen to Jesus and experience the miracles of his healing and his preaching. When they find Jesus, they find their lives transformed. Whether they anticipated it or not, whether they longed for it or not, whether they wanted it or not, when they meet Jesus, everything in the sum of their being changes. They go from death to life. To be fair, most of the time we don't read the Gospels this way. The focus is on volition, on the option to make a choice, to exercise the power to opt for one thing or another. In the snippets we hear, we almost always find an alternative presented to those who are listening to Jesus. A choice is presented as the option, either for God's will or against it. Those who do choose are the ones who follow Jesus. The ones who don't choose, they remain behind. And certainly, that is one aspect of our lives. It's not an accident that it is one of our responses. But, you know, that's not the whole story. If we read attentively and enter into the drama of the moment, we can find that choice isn't exactly at the heart of it all. When we encounter the starkness of the life-to-death drama, the one who discerns he's died and has no choice over the fact of his dying, he has to wake up to the truth that he is no longer in the world of the living, and then adjust his understanding of himself and his options. His choice is not about his state, but about what's going to happen next, given the state he's in. The inverse drama, from death to life, is the same way. It's part of the story in Mark's gospel, for example, when Jesus walks out of the wilderness to announce that the time is now, turn in the right direction, and believe in the good news of battle already won. Jesus is letting all those who've been gliding through life, bowed down with the disappointment of a world gone off-tilt, that there is a new page that has been turned and a new chapter that's been started. Whether they acknowledge it or not, and whether they're ready or not, the beginning has happened, and they're part of what's new. Another mode of expression would be to say, look around and see that everything has changed. Your life is now part of what God has in mind. Get ready for what's different. The people thought they were dead. They woke up one day to find out they were alive. And just as in any responsible drama, they began to respond what they had found. Talking about points of view and dramatic storylines can sound esoteric whenever we talk about how to think about the meanings of the scriptures and the kinds of things Jesus said. It sounds like we're arguing about minutiae that have nothing to do with the rough and tumble of what we decide and what we do in our lives. So let me give you a kind of sideways example of what Jesus is saying. In a book published about Russia, just after the great changes following perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the author David Rimnik tries to capture the sense of new life that filled the Russian spirit after the communist state fell apart. In this book, entitled Lenin's Tomb, he describes how the people of Russia suddenly woke up to find out that they had civil liberties, a choice of government, and a world not controlled by the Politburo. It was an amazing time for everyone, even for those who were disappointed and knocked off tilt by what they had not chosen and may not have wanted. He recounts one Sunday morning when he was in one of the great Moscow parks. He was sitting by himself enjoying the early sunshine when a young man skated up to him on his rollerblades, holding a very large can of beer. They began talking mostly about the changes that had happened and what they meant for the people of the country. The young man didn't seem all that moved by the fact that the politics of the time had shifted and what used to be no longer was, and what had been unthinkable previously was then the norm. At the end of their brief conversation, the young man made to move away and to continue his glide through the park. As a parting word, Rimnik told the young man that in most parts of the U.S., going through the park with an open can of beer would be prohibited. In most cases, he'd have to at least keep it in a paper bag. The young man looked at him as he stood up and wheeled away, and he said, Oh, not in Russia. We're free in Russia. When the dust had settled and the government had changed, everybody woke up one day to find themselves in a different world there in Russia. Beyond their choice and much beyond their own hopes, the arching tyranny of repression was gone and was replaced by an age of hope and a new era of freedom. Suddenly, everybody had to navigate a world they had not known before. Everyone had invested in a world that was diminished and small. Before they knew it, they had a world open and possible. They went from death to life. And as part of this drama, no one knew what to do. Rimnik wrote his book in the mid-90s, and we can see that not knowing exacted a price. But at the moment, everyone woke up to find themselves in a different world and all beyond their choosing. The kingdom of God is not of this world, but the offering of a new moment is at the heart of the kingdom. Jesus wants the world to assess the fact, see what has changed, look at what doesn't work any longer, and then see that those changes have seeped into everything. God's initiative has placed everyone in a new kind of place. Just look around and see it and adjust to it. That's the gospel. In fact, many of the parables were attempt to get people to wake up to this new reality that has now come among them. Take the parable of the good Samaritan, for example. We normally read it as a mortality, as a morality tale about how to treat the helpless and consider the hopeless. But the focus is also on the victim, not just a hero. The man who's beaten by robbers is rescued by his hated opponent, a Samaritan. This enemy picks him up, doctors his wounds, and invests in caring for him, all without asking the wounded man what he thought or what he wanted. The man in the ditch, robbed and left for dead, was given life, and there was nothing he could do about it. At the end of the day, looking around and seeing a world he had never imagined and a set of behaviors he had never anticipated, the man in the ditch can begin to conclude the world is different now, since I've come from death to life. It looks like life is different in every way. That's the parable. The same theme occurs specifically in the parable of the prodigal son. We read the story and see the themes of contrition and forgiveness. And certainly they're there. But we can miss the great theme the father of the two sons continues to repeat to them. The sons want to talk about personal choices and virtuous initiatives. The father wants to talk about the gift of life. Feeling hunger and shame, the younger son wants to return and take his punishment. But his father wants to celebrate that his son has been dead and has come back to life. The older son wants to have the choice of enjoying his inheritance, choosing his friends and shaming his brother. While the father wants to feast, dance, and drink because the midnight of death has turned to the noontime of life. Both sons wander through the familiar landscape, imagining everything is as it was before. Except in the story, they keep crashing into the new solidity of life. Imagine it. The drama of the story is that they expected death and limitation and punishment. It's what they could handle and accommodate themselves to. After all, it's what they'd always known. The younger son even rehearsed the litany of death as he considered the vaporous world he'd always known. I took what I should not have taken, I wasted all that was substantial, I longed for what could not satisfy, and I suffered the inevitable. I could not earn what was given, and now I condemn to be a slave by my own choices, and so make me your slave. That was his litany. Every step is entered into chasing vapor and fog. Each stopping point disappears as soon as it's approached. And the sum of the journey leads to rags, hunger, shame, and condemnation. And yet, every time he invokes death, his father showers him with life. The prodigal son is invited to wake up and see that he's alive, not dead, and it's all beyond his choosing. It's not a bad story to become fascinated by. The truth is, we're surrounded by this story every day. We expect the promise of Forgiveness and we find it. Miracles of healing and wholeness are visited upon us over and over until we yawn when we hear about them. From the bleakest moments of despair and destruction, we expect to hear about redemption and respiration and restoration. These are woven into our lives. From the cold wisps of death, we expect to find the pulsing embrace of life, but we hardly even notice. We've been entranced by the offer of choices, and we've been enthralled by the options we're offered. All the while, the gift of life is poured over us from every direction. Someday, I suppose, we'll wake up and discover it's right here, right now. We pass from death to life. Until we do, I guess we'll just keep wandering. Someday, maybe on Easter morning, we'll wake up and see it's right here. Back in just a moment. Planes, when flying, disappear into clouds, and their white embrace encloses the rushing machine. From the windows the pilot's view freezes a gauzey blindness to everything around, and all becomes plain. On the ground, the wings and tails, tinged in invisibility, peak moment by moment from the wisps and cusps of whiteness, and we wonder, standing and watching, what do they there see inside the lifting clouds? But we know from our own days here, when the fog settles in and the vaporous maze descends, even when we know the outlines of trees and stone and can move along in a city filled with life and look out on our walk and sea, as if we were lifted on wings and steered by tails to slip through the mist, traveling our way through the fog of today until the sun beyond the clouds comes. That's clouds.org.