Ellie Braun-Haley has written a wonderful collection of stories about the visits people have received from their deceased loved ones. In many cases, her stories were collected from people who had never told anyone about their experiences for fear of being ridiculed. However, they gladly shared them with Ellie so that she could use them to comfort others who had lost loved ones. An uplifting collection worth reading and sharing many times.

Here is how Ellie described A Little Door, A Little Light and the process of writing it:

This is not my book. It is instead a collection of stories that were told to me by people who had been given wondrous gifts - visits from loved ones who had died and so left the world of the living. In other words, these are stories about contact between living and dead people, contact across the barrier that is death. They are proof that there is life after death and that death is not an absolute barrier to be crossed only once and in only one direction. Instead, it is a gateway, a door across which there is traffic in both directions.

That should not really be too surprising since humans have long attempted to determine the exact nature of death and failed miserably. We are no closer to a definition of death than we were ten thousand years ago. Even the medical community cannot provide a definition. The doctors can provide a set of conditions that they use to determine if a person is dead or not and that is sufficient for their needs but it begs the question. Death is as mysterious now as it always has been and anyone who professes to know the solution to the mystery is fooling himself. Only those who have died know what it is. In a way, this book speaks with the voices of the dead. Perhaps by listening to them, we can gain some understanding of that ultimate mystery.

Some people will approach this collection of stories with skepticism and suggest that the individuals telling the stories were being less than truthful or that they were delusional, imagining things. Perhaps some were made up or make-believe but there are far too many stories too similar to one another to be coincidental. I am convinced that the contacts were real, that they did indeed happen the way they were told to me. The stories were not told for personal gain or even for recognition. Many of the people who talked to me had never before told anyone about their experiences but agreed to talk to me only because I wanted to show those who have recently lost a loved one that the dead person was not lost to them after all.

At first I did not trust anyone with the story of that day in November when Jason (who was killed in 1989) returned to comfort me. One day I did tell it and, when I did, that person had a story for me. I cried as I heard her story and it was almost like a renewal. It had a very healing effect on me. The time came when I again trusted my story to a young girl and she, in turn, told me a story that she had never told anyone else. It was so beautiful! I cried again and experienced a feeling of healing. It was so strange but I seemed to be surrounded by people who had stories. I do not mean that literally and it wasnžt like I was hearing a story every day but there seem to have been a lot of people with stories. I was too excited at the time to wonder about it. I just knew that it was exciting. Actually it was awesome to keep running into strangers (and at that point they were all strangers) who were sharing with me some extremely precious and wondrous events.

I decided I wanted to write about these stories people were telling me. I felt that such a book would surely help others who were grieving. I began seriously collecting the stories for the new book and then I stopped. I thought: “Wait what right do I have? What if God doesnžt want me to do this?” After all these are very sensitive stories. I dropped the idea. Two years later, in the late fall of 1992, a series of events took place which led me to believe that it was all right to go ahead and write the book. That fall, I was to receive a series of messages but they all said the same thing: “Write the book.” So I did.