Rebecca Coffey

After Gerald A. Press—a noted Plato scholar and the man science journalist and illustrator Rebecca Coffey was about to marry—died unexpectedly, Coffey began having experiences she could neither explain nor ignore. Rather than accepting them as evidence of an afterlife or dismissing them as products of grief, she approached them as she had approached subjects throughout more than four decades of science journalism: gathering observations, separating evidence from interpretation, and asking what philosophy and science might contribute. Trying to understand these anomalous experiences—and whether it was possible that Press’s soul was somehow communicating with her—Coffey turned first to Plato. Press had devoted much of his scholarly life to Plato, whose dialogues repeatedly address the nature of the soul, death, and the possibility that some aspect of a person survives bodily death. Coffey explored these ideas not as answers to what she was experiencing but as part of a much older human attempt to understand consciousness and mortality. She also returned to quantum physics, a subject she had encountered during her years as a science journalist. In particular, she considered its puzzles about the nature of reality and entanglement, asking whether they might offer another way to think about connection and what we assume to be possible. Quantum physics does not provide an explanation for after-death communication, and this presentation does not claim that it does. Instead, Coffey considers what happens when phenomena that challenge ordinary assumptions are examined without prematurely deciding either that they are impossible or that they prove survival after death. In preparing to speak publicly about her experiences, Coffey also examined research on near-death experiences, the dying brain, and after-death communications (ADCs), including studies documenting sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased among bereaved people. That research has not answered what happened to her. It has, however, placed her experiences within a surprisingly common human context and raised questions about why such experiences are often kept private. Throughout this investigation, Coffey continued an unusual conversation of another kind. In the weeks before Press died, she had been drawing whimsical pelicans for him and sharing them with him. After his death, she continued drawing for him. The resulting images became both a record of grief and part of her effort to understand a relationship that felt altered by death but not simply ended. Illustrated with those drawings, When the Soul Won’t Stay Dead examines what anomalous experiences associated with bereavement and death can—and cannot—tell us about consciousness. It asks how skepticism can coexist with belief and doubt, what philosophy and science allow us to say about experiences that resist conventional explanation, and how we might remain intellectually open to questions for which neither belief nor skepticism yet provides an adequate answer.

Rebecca Coffey is a science journalist, author, illustrator, and speaker with forty-one years of experience reporting on psychology, medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, and other sciences for general audiences. She is known for making difficult scientific and scholarly ideas accessible without sacrificing nuance. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Discover, Forbes, Psychology Today, and other national outlets. She is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming grief memoir Pelicans and the Science of Souls (2027).

Coffey has presented at universities and professional conferences in the United States and abroad, including the Phobia Society of America (now the Anxiety and Depression Association of America) in 1988; the 50th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Buenos Aires in 2017; and New York University’s Graduate Program in Psychology and Psychoanalysis in 2017. She has also given classroom presentations at Washington University in St. Louis and other universities.

Author website: https://www.rebeccacoffey.com

Recent work: "Near Death Experience Meets the Twilight of Death" at https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccacoffey/2025/10/31/near-death-experience-nde-meets-the-twilight-of-death/