Book Review: Soul Shift - Finding Where The Dead Go by Mark Ireland

It is widely held that there is no pain so great as losing a child. Its pain is echoed in art: from Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” to Shakespeare’s King Lear. William Shakespeare penned Hamlet, about a young prince lost in grief for his father, after the loss of his only son Hamnet. One wonders, reading between the lines of its soliloquies about life after death, and of Hamlet’s anguish, if Shakespeare was releasing some of his own grief, as well as pondering what happens next. Shakespeare has Hamlet, the protagonist struggling with his sudden plunge into matters he had perhaps heretofore thought of elliptically, confront these questions head-on, as he attempts to come to term with sudden loss:

To die, to sleep --
No more — and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep --
To sleep — perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

A 1998 film borrowed its title from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy - and long before that, in Platonic dialogues and even in cave paintings, man has addressed the soul’s fate. In our modern world this question reverberates: what happens to us when we die? Where, if anywhere, do we go?

A man has faced this question in the most personal way. A process of examining the mysteries of life, death, and life beyond death began when Mark Ireland and his family lost their teen son. Their youngest family member, son Brandon, had gone on a mountain hike with some of his friends on a Saturday morning. Air pollution was thick that day, and unexpectedly blew upward into the mountain range. Brandon, tragically, suffered an asthma attack, and could not be saved. He was gone, his hand held by a passing stranger, before medical help could arrive.

How does one cope with such sudden, irrevocable tragedy? One can either go under, or go through and perhaps even help others one day. The amazing account of the process author Ireland went through, Soul Shift: Finding Where the Dead Go recounts one man’s personal journey and that, too, of his surviving family members: wife Susie, and their firstborn son, Steven. It is at once devastating - no sensitive person can escape the loss inherent in this account. And hopeful - there is light beyond the darkness that we feel at times pervade this life.

Article Author: Brandy

Visit Brandy's author page