Skip to Main Content

Postcards from Heaven

Messages of Love from the Other Side

About The Book

"Nearly all of us either have had or have heard of an experience in which a soul already departed reaches back to us who have been left behind.... Sometimes, it's no more than a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence as vivid as when the loved one was still alive. These moments are just that...moments, a glimpse behind the veil; not a letter from heaven, but a postcard." (Dan Gordon, Postcards from Heaven)

A postcard from heaven is not a revelation from on high -- rather, it's "a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence" of someone who's passed away. It is just enough of a message to imply that what we call life is not ended by what we call death.

Dan Gordon has been receiving these postcards all his life -- from his father, his older brother, and his son Zaki, who was killed in a car accident when he was only twenty-two. Postcards from Heaven is the beautiful, inspirational memoir of four generations of a remarkable family and how they remain interconnected, a part of one another's stories, even after passing to the other side. Here is the span of his father's long life, moving and funny, from the Russian Revolution to his improbable Depression-era courtship of a woman named Goddess -- Gordon's mother -- to his spiritual later years in Israel; his incorrigible older brother's mischievous magic, able to find humor even in cancer treatment; and his brilliant son, a natural storyteller who looked destined to follow his father into the movie business. These are the stories of their lives on earth as well as after death.

Full of humor, compassion, and love, Postcards from Heaven comforts and assures us that those we loved can reach back to those of us still on earth -- and, if only we are attentive enough to listen, we can hear them say,

Got here safe.

It's really beautiful.

Much love, till we meet again.

Excerpt

Postcards from Heaven


My Sweetheart, who is as wise as she is beautiful, refers to death as taking off the spacesuit.

Imagine you were an astronaut, out for a little space walk, puttering around the station perhaps, fixing up the solar panels, when suddenly you encountered a being from another galaxy. Let us say that you and the being exchanged astronaut pleasantries and looked each other over, possibly even touched each other, and then your new E.T. friend vanished, headed back to the mother ship all atwitter with news of the strange new species he had just encountered.

That being from a galaxy far far away would probably describe you as looking like their equivalent of the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Michelin Man. You were, he would report, bulky and white, with a glassy countenance. Then he might suggest that he believed that the spacesuit was just an outer shell. Underneath it, he believed, he had glimpsed something wonderful, graceful, elastic, muscular, and so much more beautiful than its bulky carapace.

I can imagine his cynical alien boss pooh-poohing the notion. “I’ve seen them,” he might say. “And what you see is what you get. There is no inner earthling, separate and alive, which animates the outer earthling. Why,” he might add, “I have even had occasion to measure their life span. It is there in the rectangular hump on their backs. It is called oxygen and when it runs out they die. Period. End of story.”

So it is with us, says my Sweetheart. What some call Death is simply a discarding of the spacesuit. That’s what we bury, the old suit, no longer needed.

I was there when my brother got a glimpse of that place where spacesuits are no longer necessary. I was there when he took off his suit, and later…when he sent me a postcard from the other side.

About The Author

Photo Credit:

Dan Gordon was head writer of the hit TV series Highway to Heaven; his screenwriting credits include The Hurricane, Murder in the First, Wyatt Earp, and The Celestine Prophecy. He is the author of the stage adaptations of Terms of Endearment and Rain Man; cofounder of the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking in Sedona, Arizona; and has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University School of the Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, and Tel Aviv University.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Atria Books (December 1, 2010)
  • Length: 128 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781416588306

Browse Related Books

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: Dan Gordon