“A Six-Year Journey to Belief in the Afterlife”: A Review of Love, Dad: How My Father Died… Then Told Me He Didn’t by Mike Anthony

 

(Cardiff, CA: Waterside Productions, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-951805-66-1.

Let’s begin with a buyer beware, spoiler alert, and disclaimer. First, this isn’t a book written from the onset by a true believer, filled with anecdotes involving inspiring messages from the deceased. If you are looking for that type of book on the afterlife, they are abundant. So abundant, that is what I thought I was reviewing when I picked this one up.

Instead, it details the author’s six-year journey from near cynicism to a scientific skepticism where he spent a good deal of time and money, created or adapted protocols, and did all he could to debunk psychic mediumship, all while receiving what seemed to be messages from his recently deceased father.

Now, the spoiler alert: At the end of the six-year journey (on p. 286 of 305), the author writes: “[O]nce you have come to see this truth for yourself, and your personal universe expands, it is no longer so important to you that everyone else sees it.”

Which brings me to the disclaimer. I have taken the same journey as the author in terms of seeing the truth and now not being concerned if everyone else sees it. I arrived here on a different path, having married a psychic medium and certified hypnotist with a specialization in past life regression and soul contact and having had an experience with parallel dimensions, interdimensional beings, and possible alien contact/abduction in 2009 so profound that I have given increasingly greater time and devotion in my career over the past eleven years to being a rigorous paranormal investigator, researcher, author, lecturer, and weekly podcast host (the author will be on our show May 6). My wife and I have spoken in person and reached through the airwaves hundreds of thousands of people about consciousness surviving death. We have collected and analyzed dozens of cases, and are members of a respected research group doing the same.

Mike Anthony’s journey is to be admired. He met with and tested numerous psychics, spoke with leaders in the field of consciousness and reincarnation, read book after book, studied case after case, and even spoke to the confirmed cynics, such as magician Penn Jillette and Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society. He also talks at length about professional cynic James Randi, who was—up until his death—to afterlife research what Philip Klass was to UFO research.

Then there are the post-death messages from Anthony’s father, with whom he was very close. A man with a huge heart that did everything for his son and daughter. The messages come in the form of songs, revealing of secret code words during readings, synchronicities, monarch butterflies, and even the transmogrification of his father’s bearded face onto the face of physical medium Stewart Alexander.

Anthony connected with respected New York Times journalist Leslie Kean, who wrote a book on this subject and was behind the January 2021 Netflix series Surviving Death.

Anthony is a go-getter. I recently reviewed his first book, Life at Hamilton, which has a very different tone. Where Anthony is gregarious and hilarious in the first book, he is (understandably) somber and stoic in Love, Dad. Even as the evidence continues to mount in favor of the messages from his father being legitimate, he digs deeper, not wanting to be responsible for misleading anyone.

I agree with this approach, as I apply it every day. When people are taking your word on a given subject (life after death, the paranormal, parallel dimensions, alien contact) seriously, and come to you at times in crisis or dealing with profound loss, you better be sure what you are saying is backed up by something more than good intentions, otherwise the potential damage can begreat.

Over the course of the book, Anthony becomes a historian of the spiritualism and psychic mediumship movements, sharing information on the famous “21 grams” experiment attempting to prove that the soul leaves the body upon death; sacred texts on the subject, such as the Bhagavad Gita; the roots and limitations of materialism; séances, with their ectoplasm, disembodied voices, and flying objects that Houdini tried so hard to debunk [leading to a feud with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, arguably one of the grandfathers of paranormal research]; tricks that psychic mediums can use, such as “cold” and “hot” readings, the Forer Effect, and the controversy surrounding TV psychic medium John Edwards, who has been accused for years of employing these tricks; and the pioneers of reincarnation research, Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker.

At the end of the day, it could be reincarnation research—which I have also undertaken—that may provide the best proof of consciousness surviving death, as it involves the detailed, often verifiable, memories of children that are two to three years old.

There are two appendices for those who wish to see hit and miss statistics from a psychic Anthony tested and the protocols from another study.

Throughout the history of research in these fields, the best evidence has ultimately come from those who came from the position of cynic or far-from-believer on the skepticism scale. I think of John Keel, Colin Wilson, and others. Although I have always believed that there is more to Heaven and Earth than is accounted for in most philosophies, to paraphrase Hamlet, I have used a very diverse toolbox to explore these phenomena—and my own experiences—and admire anyone, including Anthony, who has done the same.

Because of his having taken this journey, Anthony’s book is all the more beautiful, inspiring, and inspiriting.

Ultimately, you will make up your own mind about Love, Dad. For the true believers and confirmed cynics, they will each emerge from the book stronger in their belief. For those who are unsure and open-minded, this book is perfect for you, and highly recommended.

I want to end with two synchronicities, as I include this phenomena in my toolbox and Anthony’s text contains them. There is much made in the book about monarch butterflies (also related, to a lesser extent, in Life at Hamilton). The night I read about hundreds of them appearing in a field in New England after contact with Anthony’s dad, I watched (for the first time) the two-part Season 5 finale of Modern Family, wherein a group of monarch butterflies get loose in a Prius.

The second happened within a few hours of the completion of the initial draft of this review. A very close friend had just buried his granddaughter, who was born three and a half months premature and died two weeks later.

I sent him the following message: “I have been thinking so much about [name] and her soul journey here for such a brief, painful time. More questions than answers and I have never been much for Faith on its own...”

He replied, “Indeed. The answers, if any, come in time.”

At that very moment, I realized Bradley Cooper’s “Maybe It’s Time” was playing in my iTunes, and he was singing, “Nobody knows what waits for the dead. Nobody knows what waits for the dead. Some folks just believe in the things they’ve heard and the things they’ve read. Nobody knows what waits for the dead.”

It was a country song that started it all for Mike Anthony, and a country song is where I’ll end this review.