Love Transcends Death

Communicating with your loved one is possible and you don't need a "psychic"

My teacher Ram Dass once said that when we lose a child (or any close loved one, but most especially a child), we must grieve first. Let it flow through us. No false strength. No pushing it under the carpet. Open to the pain and allow the heart to break. Only after the waves of anger, self-pity, shock, and longing have rolled through us repeatedly do we sometimes arrive at what he called “a little quiet space” within us. And in that quiet, he suggested, we rediscover the love itself, a love that exists independent of death.

When my son Bix died, there was no quiet. There was a rupture, and a relentless replaying of what had happened and what would never happen again. Grief was not poetic. It was physically demanding, disorienting, and loud. Anyone who has lost someone they love understands this terrain. You come up for air and think you are steady, only to be pulled under again.

What happens after death remains a mystery. Across cultures and religions, there are many explanations: heaven, rebirth, ancestral realms, and dissolution into pure consciousness. There is no universal agreement. Yet a common thread runs through many of them: consciousness does not simply vanish. Energy doesn’t die. Atheists don’t like it, and meet monthly all over the world to discuss how death means dead and gone.

My perspective is based on personal experience (which is never up for debate) and extensive research. I believe consciousness survives death because I experience an ongoing relationship with my son that is multifaceted. I’m not offering doctrine or trying to persuade anyone. No religion involved. I am describing what has unfolded for me, along with much of what I have read about consciousness and energy that backs it up.

The relationship did not end when his body did. It changed.

To be clear, I do not hear voices. I do not see apparitions, nor do I try to summon Bix through psychics or mediums, nor do I impose meaning on butterfly sightings or songs on the radio. Although sometimes those things can be signs, and we can know them when we see them, when we practice and develop discernment.

In the early months after Bix died, I would have mistrusted anything that arose in me because my longing was too desperate and my brain fog was thick, murky. Grief distorts perception before it clarifies it. That is why grieving fully matters. Until the nervous system settles, the world feels amplified and chaotic. In fact, I heard nothing from Bix in that first year. Maybe that was for a reason.

Over time, something shifted. When I became quiet enough, truly quiet, not numb or dissociated, I noticed that love did not feel past tense. It felt present. A thought would arrive whole. A phrase. A subtle but unmistakable shift in understanding. These moments were different from the thoughts I manufactured in my anxious mind. They did not spiral or flatter me. They did not soothe me with fantasy. Often, they oriented me toward how to live better, rather than toward proof of an afterlife.

People reasonably ask: how do you know it isn’t just your mind? It is a fair question. The mind is powerful. Longing is persuasive. Loss is traumatic. So, I practice discernment.

Grief-thoughts are loud. They repeat. They demand relief and convey urgency and fear. Imagination tends to tell me what I want to hear. What I trust feels different. It arrives calmly. It does not argue. It does not require me to convince anyone else. It leaves me steadier, kinder, and more responsible for how I move through the world. If I am emotionally flooded or exhausted, I assign no special meaning to anything. I wait. Discernment requires patience as much as silence.

What I know with certainty is this: my son and I loved each other. Even a single moment of real love between two beings leaves an imprint that does not fade. The trauma of death is real. The absence is real. But the essence of what was shared does not evaporate just because the body is gone. However long it takes, there comes a moment when you are quiet enough to sense that what was true between you still exists. Not as denial or fantasy, but as living love.

I believe you can hear your loved ones “speaking” as your discernment grows and your connection to your higher self develops. As I have said before, the loss of a child is a bullet train to awareness and awakening once the fog lifts. I don’t hear him “out loud” in the way Bix used to burst into a room with “Mom!” But quietly, and directly through thoughts that don’t come from my fear or worry, excitement, or imagination. This guidance is distilled through my spirit, coming most especially from Bix, my teacher Ram Dass, God, and the universe. If this makes you uneasy, I’m sorry. It’s my truth. I tell those stories in the book I am writing.

You can approach the mystery of death with fear or fascination. Fear demands rigid answers. Fascination allows openness. I recommend openness. Not blind belief. Not forced certainty. Openness to the possibility that love operates by laws beyond our current understanding.

If this is you…

If you are newly grieving, let your heart break. Do not rush toward transcendence. Quiet cannot be forced. If you are further along and beginning to sense something you cannot quite explain, you are neither irrational nor weak. You may simply be discovering that the relationship continues in a different form.

You do not have to prove it or define it. You only have to live from it. Love is not erased by death. It changes its address, and if you become quiet enough, you may find it waiting for you there.