When Emily finally dies, the story takes a new twist: Nurse Thorpe sees Emily’s spirit actually leave her body in a burst of white light: “She was her old beautiful self: her long golden, curly hair restored….Finally I saw her spirit move into the light.” What is the meaning of this serial chain of stories about patients, stories that seem drawn from real life—yet peppered with such visions? Anyone who has worked in a hospital knows that in a life time of nursing, there are moments where strange and inexplicable things happen. But are these events arbitrary borrowings from real experience (author Wanda Krantz is a registered nurse!), or do they serve a higher literary purpose? There is a not always successful effort here to weave these stories into a larger tapestry that depicts the challenges we all face as we confront the terminal certainty of death and come to terms with our own mortality. In the early portions of CROSSING OVER it is clear that the author believes that there is some sort of existence after death; an inference that is reinforced for the reader with references to ghosts in the hospital, and a few moments when Nurse Thorpe experiences visions of spirits when a patient dies or nearly dies.

As we follow this working nurse through her many experiences at Holy Blessings, we also get glimpses into her own past, learning, for example, that like her young patient Lee Vandercord, she has also had an abortion. We also learn that, as a young woman, Hope had her own near death experience; nearly drowning in an offshore undertow before her friend Suzanne Henderson swam out to rescue her. What is the meaning of all these dances near the door of death?

Just as one near-death patient, Mrs. Goldstein, is resuscitated, startling news arrives at the hospital. It is the most horrible September 11th in American history, the day that jets flown by terrorists crash into the twin towers. Death waits for us all, the author s seems to be reminding us—but she also seems to be hinting there is something on the other side—and that the transition to it may be something of a shock.

The final chapter, Chapter 7, entitled: THE DEMON, THE PSYCHIC, AND THE SOCRATIC METHOD, certainly is a bit of a shock to the reader. Suddenly we move from what is mostly gritty hospital realism to something out of a Stephen King novel, or an episode from a film like THE EXORCIST. We are reminded of the four hundred year old history of this religious hospital with its long acquaintance with death and dying, and told of a particularly evil spiritual presence that has haunted the hospital for many years. As the Halloween following 9-11 approaches, we are introduced to Hope’s newest frail patient, a police psychic by the name of Mary Kempe. Kempe tells hope that there are 63 ghosts trapped in the hospital, and that their passage to the next world is being held up by a resident demon by the name of Belhor. Kempe asks Hope to join her in her struggle to defeat Belhor and release the spirits of the 63 dead spirits so that they can move on to their final judgment. What follows carries the book fully into dramatic fantasy fiction, which, like the transition for one world to another, is both startling and unsettling. Does the author also find the literary transition jarring? Perhaps the real answer lies in the mind of the reader. It’s like the old writer’s puzzle: If I see a flying saucer hovering over my backyard and write about it—is the result fiction or nonfiction? Clearly real experience is blended with fantasy in an unusual way here—but the reader gets the feeling that the author might feel that the terminal events of this book are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. Certainly CROSSING OVER is an interesting experiment, and one that readers interested in the life/death transition are sure to enjoy.