Most people who knew Bill Martin, a high school student in Bowie, Maryland, knew he was a Civil War buff. His interest started because of his father, Bill, Sr., who read all sorts of books on American history. Bill and his family visited battlefields across the country, including Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee. There he learned about the geography of the area, the events leading up to the battle and the staggering death toll suffered on both sides.

After returning from their trip, Bill and his mother, Phyllis, discussed the battle over dinner. “A colleague of mine told me something we didn’t hear about on our tour,” Phyllis said. Bill was all ears.

Some of the fallen soldiers’ wounds were said to have emitted a mysterious glow, and those soldiers were more likely to survive. Shiloh National Military Park was never able to confirm that anything of the sort took place, but the story spread so rapidly, it became something of a Civil War legend. What was this phenomenon that history had dubbed the Angel’s Glow?

Phyllis was a microbiologist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland. Her research focused on bioluminescent bacteria—microorganisms that produce light—particularly the kinds that live in soil. One variation she studied, called Photorhabdus luminescens, emitted a blue glow. “My colleague wondered if bacteria had anything to do with the soldiers’ glowing wounds,” Phyllis said. “We may never know. It’s not something that scientists are clamoring to research.”

But Bill recognized an opportunity. “Do you think it’s possible it was bacteria?” he asked his mom. Being the family scientist, Phyllis replied, “Well, you can do an experiment and find out.”

In early April 1862, Union soldiers under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant were camped along the west bank of the Tennessee River in Hardin County. Their objective was to take over a nearby rail center that would give the Union control of the region. Before the reinforcements arrived, the Union soldiers were attacked by Confederate troops led by General Albert Sidney Johnston. What followed were two days of intense combat. On April 6, furious fighting took place in a local peach orchard.

But by April 7, with reinforcements, the Union secured a victory. The battle was over, but not without heavy human cost. The number of casualties was staggering: more than 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers combined.

Combat doctors were unprepared—more than 16,000 wounded men needed care. Many of them lay sick and dying in the muddy fields, waiting for a medic or a bed. One evening, as dusk fell on the field of Shiloh, some of the soldiers noticed that their wounds were glowing a light blue.

It is believed that these wounds were cleaner and less prone to infection. Almost as if an unearthly power was protecting the soldiers. None of this was documented at the time, but it eventually became part of Civil War lore.

All these years later, the Angel’s Glow was still a mystery. Were there really angels in the battlefield at Shiloh? Or was it the work of a helpful bacteria? Bill resolved to find out.

Enlisting the help of his friend, Jonathan Curtis, Bill set out to find an answer. He handled the historical aspects of their project, and Jonathan focused on the science, with Phyllis advising. The boys’ research showed that the soil at Shiloh was a perfect breeding ground for P. luminescens bacteria. They put this bacteria in a petri dish with other infectious bacteria and found that it killed off dangerous pathogens. P. luminescens, while infectious, is not very dangerous to humans. It actually cleaned the soldiers’ wounds of the more harmful germs and stopped infection from spreading. Mystery solved?

Not so fast. The boys’ lab experiments showed that human body temperature was way too warm for P. luminescens to flourish. The bacteria needed colder temperatures to survive. Then how did these glowing bacteria thrive? Bill and Jonathan turned to the battle’s weather reports. Nighttime temperatures in Tennessee during early spring created some chilly conditions. The body temperature of a soldier exposed to the elements all night would have dipped dramatically.

To test their theory, Bill and Jonathan went outside on a cool spring day and sat in the rain. Using an infrared thermometer, the boys checked the surface temperatures of their legs. The temperature was low enough for P. luminescens to thrive! The wounded soldiers at Shiloh would have been even colder. Hypothermia created the very conditions the bacteria needed to survive. It seemed that the soldiers in the most danger were the ones who received a saving grace.

Even after the experiment was completed, Phyllis’s colleagues continued to approach her with their own theories about the Angel’s Glow. One friend who studies nematodes, a microscopic organism that creates P. luminescens, told her they often contaminate peaches. He wondered if Shiloh’s peach orchard, where part of the battle took place, had anything to do with the presence of the lifesaving bacteria. Even now, there’s so much left to discover.

Bill and Jonathan presented their research at the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. They won first place in team competition for tracing the nearly 140-year-old mystery to bacteria.

For the wounded soldiers, survival was nothing short of miraculous. Writer Ambrose Bierce, who fought in many Civil War battles, including Shiloh, wrote that “God’s great angels stood invisible” among the soldiers. Invisible, yes, but still doing their divine work.

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It was may 8, 1994, Mother’s Day, and I was at a public telephone in a shopping mall in Las Vegas.

I was attending a conference at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on shared death experiences. After years of collecting the case studies of shared death experiences and considering their implications, I was about to launch a study that would examine the phenomenon, breaking them down into their component parts to try to figure out why and how they took place.

The implications were clear: that death opens a portal to the “other side.” By now I had faith that such a portal does exist. But obviously this supposition needed further evaluation. Faith alone gets you very little in the world of research.

At any rate, because it was Mother’s Day, I temporarily left the conference and went to the mall with my family. While there, I stopped at a pay phone to call my mother. She was seventy-four years old and still lived in the first house that she and my father owned, in Macon, Georgia.

As I dialed her telephone number, I had no problem imagining her sitting in the living room, reading the most recent issue of Guideposts magazine and waiting for her children to call.

“Well, hello, Raymond,” she said. “I knew you would call me today.”

Conversation with my mother had always been a great comfort to me. In fact, I have always been a devout mama’s boy, and truth be told, a man who enjoys the company of women more than men.

That attitude toward women has a lot to do with my upbringing. I was born on June 30, 1944, the very day that my father shipped out for WorldWar II. I don’t know what my mother was thinking as she labored to give birth to me that summer day. Given the way her life had gone up to that point, she probably thought that her husband would be killed in the war and never see his newborn son.

Eight of her fifteen brothers and sisters had died in childhood, and one more would be lost in the war. Death had been a constant companion for Mom, and it would be safe to say
that she didn’t expect the future to be any different.

I know mine was a difficult birth. Mom was young, I was large, and negative thoughts about her husband’s likelihood of returning from a very violent war were on her mind as she struggled with childbirth. The pains of labor, the dark memories, and the fear of the future all added up to a tremendous case of depression, which my young mother would only talk
about with her parents.

In those days, people didn’t speak freely about their emotions as they do now. Americans were almost devoutly stoic, expected to show quiet endurance in the face of adversity rather than let anyone know how they truly felt. The result for my mother was a worsening case of depression, one that she had to hold inside rather than express.

I think the town of Porterdale, Georgia, was filled with women coping with anxiety and sadness similar to my mother’s. World War II had emptied the town of all its young men, and the women of Porterdale lived with daily doubts that their sons, husbands and lovers would come home alive.

The war also left many of them childless. Few children had been born since the United States entered the war in 1941. And now, with my birth in 1944, an event of some importance had occurred in the town of Porterdale. There was a new baby. That was good for my mother. When she needed a rest or just some time alone, her parents would take over the role of parenting. They doted on me as if I were the only child they had ever seen, passing me constantly from one to the other in an effort to give my mother breathing space.

It was through them that I was “shared out” to the rest of the community, an arrangement that gave me a large and caring family of very loving women. All of the women in the neighborhood who were about the age of my grandmother unofficially adopted me as a grandchild of their own.

Two doors down was Mrs. Crowell. She became one of the most important figures in my life. I remember her as being a sweet but very strong woman, the kind I would eventually be most happy with in marriage. I would go see her all the time—as a child and later as a teen. She allowed me to enter her home without even knocking, which I did frequently. Once inside, I would curl up on her sofa and dream. She was among the most encouraging people in my life.

Her son told me at her funeral years later that when I was an infant she would hold me on her lap and repeat over and over to me, “Raymond, you are going to be a very special person someday.”

All of the women in town were encouraging and loving. It was through them—but especially through my mother—that I developed empathy, my most valuable personal and professional trait. After all, a psychiatrist without empathy is of little use to his patients.

Anyway, on this Mother’s Day in 1994, I stood in the mall talking to my mom and remembering a lifetime of great times together. She told me what my brothers and sisters were doing and recounted events in the neighborhood. Before long I realized that I had been on the phone for almost an hour.

“Mom, I have to go now. I was supposed to meet Cheryl (my wife) twenty minutes ago and I don’t want her to wait too long,” I said. “One more thing: How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said very cheerfully. “Yesterday I got a rash on my arms but Kay (my sister) took me to the emergency room and the doctor there said it was nothing. So I’m about as good as I can be.”

I questioned her more about the rash but there wasn’t much else to say. “The ER doctor got me an appointment with a dermatologist tomorrow and we’ll see what he says,” she told me. “I don’t expect that it amounts to much.”

I wish she had been right.

A Deadly Prognosis and Strange Events
The next day I received a tearful phone call from my sister. She had gone to the dermatologist with Mom and watched as his pleasant demeanor turned to one of great concern. She knew there were problems when he ordered some tests and demanded immediate results back from the lab.

That afternoon, looking drained, the dermatologist rendered his diagnosis with no embellishments.

“Mrs. Moody, you have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” he said. “You have two days to two weeks to live.”

This cancer of the white blood cells can be very fast growing, and according to the oncologist, hers was the fastest-growing possible—“fulminate,” as the doctor declared.

“I’m terribly sorry.”

I knew what this meant. The cancer was spreading so fast that chemotherapy would have little effect on its progression. We flew immediately to Macon, Georgia, and for the next two weeks we joined the rest of the Moody family in making her final days as comfortable as possible.

We stayed at her side for the last few days she was at home and then we all moved into the hospital and stayed with her until she died, which was two weeks to the day from when she was given her fatal diagnosis.

The day she died, we all gathered around the bed. She had been comatose for the last two days, but shortly before she passed she awoke and with great coherency told us that she loved us all very much.

“Please say that again, Momma?” asked my sister Kay.

With great effort Mom batted her oxygen mask away and said it again: “I love you all very much.”

It was a touching moment for us all, one that built false hope that she was perhaps recovering but also emphasized the powerful need she had to express love just one more time.

We all held hands around the bed—my two sisters, their husbands, and Cheryl and I—and waited for the inevitable moment of death. And as we waited, it happened to us: a shared death experience. As we held hands around the bed, the room seemed to change shape and four of the six of us felt as though we were being lifted off the ground. I had the feeling that the room had turned into the shape of an hourglass.

I felt a strong pull, like a riptide that was pulling me out to sea, only the pull was upward.

“Look,” said my sister, pointing to a spot at the end of the bed. “Dad’s here! He’s come back to get her!”

Everyone there reported later that the light in the room changed to a soft and fuzzy texture. It was like looking at light in a swimming pool at night. As all of this took place, there was great joy in the room. We all knew something truly incredible had happened to all of us as our mother died. It was as though the fabric of the universe had torn and for just a moment
we felt the energy of that place called heaven.

After the funeral we spent a few more days in Macon with my family, taking care of the loose ends that are always left after a death. It was during this period of time that we all began to compare our experiences at Mom’s bedside and realized how extraordinary they had been. We were all convinced by our individual experiences that we had each shared Mom’s death in a unique, spiritual way.

My brother-in-law, the Reverend Rick Lanford, a Methodist minister, summed it up best when he said, “I felt like I left my physical body and went into another plane with her. It was like nothing that had ever happened to me.”

I agreed completely with Rick.We all did. What should have been one of life’s least happy momentswas suddenly cause for elation.We had gone partway to heaven with our
mother.We had personally seen her off to heaven!

Zippy stuck his head out the car window, grinning into the wind that ruffled his fur. We were having a fine time vacationing in a cabin in northern Minnesota for the month of August.

My husband, Bill, hiked; Zippy, our Shetland sheepdog, ran in the open space; and I painted. We left our hideaway to replace the creaky old bed frame in the cabin.

“Look over there!” I said, pointing up the road at a country store with a big sign hanging out front: Consignment Shop.

Bill pulled up and parked. Zippy jumped around in back, eager to get out. “You stay here for a second, Zippy,” I said. I climbed out and poked my head into the store, chock-full of stuff, floor to ceiling. “Mind if we bring our dog in?” I asked the blonde woman at the counter.

“No dogs allowed,” she said. “I’m awful sorry.”

Guess she isn’t a dog person, I thought. I motioned for Bill to come in alone. We couldn’t leave Zippy in the hot car for long. I picked through the narrow aisles, but I couldn’t really concentrate. “Be back in a sec,” I said to Bill, and made my way through the maze of items to check on Zippy.

He barked joyously as I approached. “Okay, boy,” I said, letting him out of the car. He jumped around at my feet and rolled over in the grass in front of the store. I scratched his tummy.

“He sure loves you,” someone said from behind me. It was the woman from the shop. She set a bowl of water on the ground. “My name’s Lana.” Zippy lapped up her kind offering. Lana scratched him behind his pointed ears. Guess I was wrong about her, I thought.

“I hate turning dogs away,” said Lana, “but the store’s overcrowded. You know what I think the best thing about heaven will be? Every dog will be welcome there!”

I raised my eyebrows. Dogs in heaven? Much as I loved Zippy I’d never considered such a thing. Zippy chased butterflies in the grass as if he couldn’t imagine a nicer place than where he was right now. Could there be an even better place waiting for him somewhere? “Do you really think there will be animals in heaven?” I asked.

Lana pointed up the hill. A driftwood cross was barely visible, sticking out of the ground. “That’s where my dog’s buried,” she said. I felt a pang in my heart looking at the distant cross. Zippy was 10 years old, and I couldn’t bear to think of a time when he would leave us, though I knew it would happen.

“I thought I’d lost him forever,” said Lana. “I was devastated. One night I was lying on my bed crying over it, and God gave me a vision.”

“You mean a dream?” I asked.

Lana shook her head. “It wasn’t your usual dream. Not by any stretch. Jesus was sitting on his throne. My dog had his paws up on Jesus’ lap. Jesus was rubbing him under the chin, just the way he liked.” Zippy lost interest in the butterflies and came and sat obediently by my side. He perked his ears up at Lana.

“My dog turned and looked at me,” she went on. “He thumped his tail on the ground. It was as if that animal had found his voice and told me: He was happy in heaven, so I shouldn’t grieve for him any longer.”

Zippy rolled over and wiggled on his back in the grass. I tried to picture Jesus rubbing his belly, the way Zippy liked. It seemed kind of silly. Why should it, though? I asked myself. Doesn’t God love all creatures of the earth?

Bill called from the store, “Found what we’re looking for!” Lana went to take care of business, and I got Zippy back in the car. I told Bill all about Lana’s vision during the drive back to the cabin, and I thought about it in the weeks after when I stood sketching in front of my easel. “I’m going to paint it,” I told Bill one morning. “Just like Lana described.”

I sketched Jesus on a throne with a sleek greyhound resting its head on his knee. “Do you approve, Zippy?” He panted, and I took that to mean yes. Once I started painting, more dogs appeared on the canvas. A German shepherd pulled at Jesus sleeve. A spaniel nosed his arm. Other dogs gathered at his feet, proud and content. I couldn’t keep them away, and Jesus didn’t seem to mind.

Zippy sat front and center, looking at the viewer the way Lana’s dog had turned and looked directly at her in the vision.

I entered the painting in a local art show back home in Illinois. People were drawn to it. “I always say heaven must be filled with dogs,” someone remarked. “Whenever I picture Jesus,” a woman told her friend, “I’m going to picture him like that.” I was delighted. Zippy was waiting for Bill and me when we got home. “One day you’ll sit at Jesus’ feet too,” I said, “and that will make it easier for me, if you get there before I do.”

The following August Bill, Zippy and I returned to Minnesota and drove straight to the consignment shop. I couldn’t wait to tell Lana how her vision had changed me. But the store was empty. I pressed my face against the glass. “There’s no hint a business ever operated here,” Bill said. Even the big sign was no more.

Zippy sniffed out the window and jumped out to chase a butterfly. I looked up the hill for the driftwood cross, but that too was gone, as if it had never existed. But I had Lana’s vision of heaven, captured in canvas and oils. I knew that the animals we loved would be loved and welcome there.

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