My mom died on a mid-April new moon, a moon whose whole business is new beginnings, and somehow that felt exactly right. It was two days after my daughter Karis’ 5th birthday.

I was four months pregnant with my son, Dylan. I was in my forties and terrified. My brother Tony had just died, and on the night of his funeral, our dog Carlos lay down and died too, as if he had decided to walk Tony home. Adding Mom’s crossing felt like more weight than a pregnancy could carry.

But in those last weeks, Mom’s channeling ran with a single bright thread: the baby would be fine. He’d be a boy. Strong, wild, free, full of light and laughter. And, she said, she would work with him between worlds, teaching him a thing or two.

Dylan is almost eleven now. He is all of those things. He also has an old-soul fascination with angels and the invisible world that feels older than he is, and it makes me smile every time.

The room at dusk

When Mom left her body, seven or eight of us were in the room, each handling it in our own private country of grief. My brother Matt was folded into a corner. Jeff, my other brother, pressed his face to her hands, curled into her like a little boy. Her husband Ken kept shaking his head and murmuring, “Cheryl, I love you, baby.”

Late that afternoon, the doctor began the morphine. It moved fast. We watched her pain leave, and then her spirit started to leave with it.

In true Mom fashion, she giggled. “Wow, this stuff is good. Let’s have a party.”

Then she was gone. Or so we thought. A beat later, she came back for one last “Woo hoooo!”

Then she locked eyes with me, and I watched her leave. A spark of light I still cannot explain. I felt her say, I love you. A wave moved through the room, a whoosh with weight in it. The last thing my mind said to hers was a vow: I will stay connected to you. When she went, a piece of me went with her.

We sat without speaking as the family trickled out, until it was just me and her vacant body in a room going violet with dusk. Everything mystical, everything palpable, the veil so thin you could have breathed through it.

I was numb. Tearless. Her spirit was no longer there, but something was bubbling inside me, like the fizz in a Coke bottle that had been shaken with nowhere to go.

That feeling stayed all evening. The family went to Black Angus, and I was there and I wasn’t. One minute we talked about something small; the next, part of me hovered above Mt. Shasta in a bowl of purple sky. Something was happening to me as my mother was becoming something else.

The dream

I woke in the witching hours, damp and startled by the kind of dream where spirit shakes you awake so you cannot forget. Mom was showing me the dimensions of death. Most of it I could not translate, but one instruction came through clean as a bell:

Get a book called The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley.

I barely knew it. I vaguely remembered skimming the CliffsNotes to Brave New World in college but never Doors of Perception.

Kenny woke me for the airport. I threw everything into an oversized purse, including keepsakes from Mom, and we drove in chilly, wordless grief. The lines in his face couldn’t hide how gutted he was. I wondered how he would survive that house without her.

At the gate, I searched The Doors of Perception. It was Huxley’s account of taking mescaline with his wife and a friend, his trip into the void and the experience of being not separate from anything, but connected to all that exists.

I had to look up mescaline. Derived from peyote, a small desert cactus. What was she trying to tell me? Perhaps it had something to do with staying connected.

I ordered the book in the terminal. Mom had said she would speak to me creatively, so I followed the crumbs.

I had never really touched hallucinogens before. That was about to change.

Mother’s Beach

Karis’ birthday party was the next morning. We had planned it four weeks earlier: brunch at Mother’s Beach in the Marina with forty friends and family. Somehow, it felt as though a heavenly energy had woven everything together with a precision that was anything but coincidental, landing on Sunday morning right after Mother’s crossing.

Friends went pale when I told them Mom had transitioned sixteen hours earlier. But we stayed all day. We played, opened presents, and I felt her everywhere: in the wind, in my friends’ faces, in the great whoosh of love around us.

I gathered Karis into my arms, at the end of the day when everyone left. I told her the news - Grandma was turning into her angel.

That began a new conversation between me and my daughter, one that has only deepened.

Mom had prepared her months before in her plainspoken way:

“Gramma’s going to turn into an angel soon. I’ll be there for you in a much bigger way than I can be now, because where I’m going, there’s no time and no space. All you have to do is call.”

Karis took it like a champion.

The gates and the teachers

That night, another dream. This time Mom and Tony came together.

They told me I would walk through gates that would deepen my connection to them. I would recognize a gate when I found one, though maybe not until later, in stillness.

Then they showed me a stillness that could be found in the middle of a supermarket full of impossible things. Stillness wasn’t a place. It was a frequency. That word again.

Mom was there without a body, just a knowing of her. She told me to look out for teachers, who would come in many forms. Be open to everything, she said. Teachers can be systems, medicines, media, and humans you would never expect.

Then came a great communion of love between the three of us, a cosmic smile beaming into my chest. They were telling me they were my teachers too. I made the vow again: find the gates. Stay open. Trust what comes.

Ten years of evidence

More than a decade has passed since Mom left. Long enough to gather evidence. Just as she promised, where she exists, there is no time and no space.

She can visit any hour, but it is rarely obvious. She comes through the back door: a lucid dream I was meant to remember; an ayahuasca ceremony in which she appeared as golden light, so bright and tender I have no words for it; the night she breathed a cosmic heartbeat into my left ear and said she was installing it there, so when I was afraid or needed to listen, I would feel her. That heartbeat in my left ear has acted up when I needed it most.

When I speak to her, insights arrive from nowhere. My children mention her the moment I am tuned to her. The other day, as I wondered what to write next, Sweet Caroline, her song, her trademark, came on the radio.

Stay connected.

That is the whole thing. That is the practice.

The energy right now

I want to leave you with tools from my friend Marlo, a gifted psychic, because the waves of energy moving across the planet are a lot.

Solar activity is tracked by NOAA, which measures geomagnetic disturbance caused by solar particle radiation. When the sun releases a flare, readings spike, and researchers have linked those spikes to shifts in heart rate variability and nervous system dysregulation. Full moons carry their own signature: a University of Basel study found that around the full moon, deep sleep drops about 30%, even when participants did not know the moon was full. We have just moved through two eclipses and a significant planetary shift on top of that.

You can feel it. Dramatic weather. Erratic behavior. That wrung-out, depleted feeling. Small miracles arriving in tight succession. It is a lot.

Here is what Marlo told me:

Be the queen of water. We are mostly water. Let things bounce off you or flow through. When pebbles land in your pond, do not brace against the ripples; breathe with them. It is not the chaos itself, but how your antenna responds to it. The question is: How are you going to hold yourself deep within?

Find the pockets of quiet. Connect deeply inside them and see what rises.

The paradox

For eleven years, stay connected have been the two words that, ironically, left me more disconnected than ever. I have shed relationships. Friends. Family.

When I finally got quiet, peace was not waiting. Not at first. What waited was rage. Shame. Self-loathing. Monkey mind. Some days I felt I was stewing in the dregs of my ego and couldn’t find my way out.

In order to connect with that deeper force, we have to clear away the debris.

Marlo’s counsel was this:

Make stillness non-negotiable. Find the time. Find the place. Make a date with spirit. Then, as you would with any beloved, do not break it. Take the relationship as seriously as the most sacred one in your life. Show up. This is my devotion. This is how I connect with something larger than my comprehension, something that floods me with love, trust, and peace.

Here is a practice she gave me, mixed with some ingredients of my own:

Sit. Drop in. Take your awareness past the emotional body. Follow the breath and expand.

Picture your energy as a reverse dandelion made of golden light, wisps of you drifting back, packets of energy returning home from the day and restoring you. Blossom in the sun with zero expectation.

Watch the monkey mind as you would watch a dryer tumbling across the room: thoughts turning and turning, and you not climbing in.

Once past the noise, place your hand over your heart. Ask for love from a higher place. Let it flood your body.

Then set your intentions:

• Gratitude: First. Always.

• Connect: To divine source, God, angels, archangels, spirit guides. Whatever your word is, use it.

• Invoke: Be open to insights, creative sparks, and downloads. They may arrive later, in the shower, at a red light, or in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

• Ask: For what you actually want, from the heart.

• Send: Prayers, service, and warmth to the people you love and to the world.

• Review: Where did I grow today / this week? How are my ego, body, mind, and spirit?

• Flush: Send anything you want to release down the drain.

• Forgive: Forgive yourself for the day’s misalignments. Forgive anyone you are ready to forgive, or take one step toward it. Forgive yourself for being human and not always getting it right.

Thank source again. Surround yourself in light.

What I know now to be true

Even when we feel alone, especially when we feel alone, we are wildly, cosmically, measurably connected. To source. To God. To the higher forces we were carved from. When we make that connection non-negotiable, we build the channel our spirit guides and loved ones on the other side use to reach us.

They are always there.

We only have to make the date. And keep it.

Stay connected.

Subscribe now

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the invisible world is a mirror of the frequency we carry into the visible one. What we send out doesn’t disappear into the air; it circles back to us, amplified, as if the universe is nodding, yes, more of this, please. If we move through our days carrying darkness, resentment, fear, the low hum of not-enough, we become a tuning fork for more darkness, and it will find us, right on schedule. But if we move through our days radiating peace, love, even a small, quiet wonder, that same frequency echoes back, magnified into signs and synchronicities we might have walked right past on another day.

Self-awareness is the bridge between the world we can see and the one we can’t. Our subconscious is running the show whether we’re paying attention or not, so if we never turn around and look at who’s actually steering, the ride gets wild, unpredictable, and lonelier than it ever needed to be. But the moment we learn to listen inward, we discover something that changes everything: frequency is the language the invisible world uses to answer us back.

I didn’t learn that in a book. I learned it from my mother, on the last night I ever spoke to her in a body.

Frequency Connects Us to the Invisible World

She gave me a set of touchstones on the eve of her death, ones I have worked hard to practice ever since, because I wanted a bigger relationship with her.

She used the word frequency. This was not a word I had ever heard her say. It landed strangely, like it had been borrowed from somewhere bigger. In her own urgent way, she tried to explain that everything and everyone carries a frequency, even the objects we like to believe are lifeless. Everything hums with energy. And that energy vibrates at its own particular pitch, whether we can hear it or not.

When our soul leaves the body, she told me, it doesn’t fall silent. It rises, into a higher frequency, the frequency of the truth of who we really are, finally unfiltered by the weight of a human life.

If I wanted to reach her once she crossed, my own frequency would have to rise to meet hers. That didn’t mean grief was off the table. I should grieve. But I would have to learn to grieve with love, not love braided together with anger, shame, desperation, or any other self-loathing feelings that quietly corrode a heart from the inside out. If I let those in, she warned me, connecting with her: seeing her signs, her magic, her blessings would become improbable. I would be the one closing the door. Not her.

Here is the exchange I recorded that evening, as close to word, memory and the recording will allow:

“You have to give me permission to guide your path,” she said. “Because you have free will, I can only be there for you if you’re open to it. And the only way this is going to work is through your heart. You can’t walk around with a chip on your shoulder because you’re carrying this misconception that your mother is dead.”

“What are you talking about? There’s no misconception here. My mother will soon be dead.” I felt the agitation rise and press against my chest like a stone.

She fired back without missing a beat. “That’s a worldly truth. And a worldly truth is as changeable as the filter you’re perceiving it through. Spiritual truths don’t change. I am going to be resonating at the frequency of love. There are no lower vibrations where I’m going. We are electromagnetic beings, you and I, and if you want to attune to my guidance, your magnetism has to be somewhere in the same range as mine. That doesn’t mean you can’t grieve, or feel every normal human feeling that comes with losing your mother. But if you close your heart, if you let yourself turn bitter, spiteful, cruel, or selfish, it shuts off the channel completely.”

“Doesn’t grief close my heart on its own?”

“There are different kinds of grief. There’s a hopeless grief that believes I’m dying, and maybe that’s the end of the story. We won’t build much of a connection through that kind of mental clutter. And if doubt weighs heavier than faith as you move through the grieving, it’s going to be very hard for us to draw out the full, superpower potential of this connection.”

“I don’t imagine a lot of women have mothers orchestrating a superpower soul connection from the afterlife to help usher in some destiny they haven’t even stepped into yet.”

“Yes. That’s exactly right. Not every soul who crosses chooses to become a guide for the people they loved on earth. There are different dimensions a soul can move through after crossing, different work to be done. It’s an unlimited, unfathomable, unimaginable, placeless place. And even when a soul doesn’t choose to actively guide, the connection doesn’t dissolve. Take Tony, for example (my quadriplegic brother who had crossed over just a few months prior). Our bond with him is still intact, because a strong bond of love survives the crossing. That Love Line stays open, and it gives a soul a new way to communicate. Souls can design their own channel with the people they loved, if the person still living is open to it and gives permission. There are different levels of guidance, different depths of engagement, depending on how open the channel is and how open the heart is on the human side. I’m choosing to be a guide for you right now because there’s another chapter coming in your life, one you haven’t even visioned into yet. I want to help you build it from the other side”

“I can’t wrap my head around any of this right now, Mom. Part of me feels like it’s your rose-colored glasses talking. Like you’re trying to paint a Mona Lisa out of your death, when maybe I just need to let myself accept that you’re dying. Because if I let myself hope for all of this, and nothing happens then that’s going to make everything so much harder.”

Her hand drifted toward her pack of cigarettes, out of habit more than desire. She caught herself. Paused. Let the silence hold the room before she spoke again. “Then let’s start smaller. Let’s start with clearing some of the gunk around your heart. When we close off our human hearts, it blocks the channel. It’s really that plain, and that simple.”

“Yes, Mom. If it’s possible for us to have a connection, I want that, no matter what. But I have to get used to a world with no more hugging you, no more laughing together, no more late-night talking. I’m scared of the dark and the silence that’s coming.”

“You’re right to be scared. It’s going to be a learning curve, especially at first. But the dark silence is exactly where I’m going to be the loudest. You just have to learn how to listen in a new way. We have to build a new language together, a creative language, and that takes time. Every soul goes through its own recalibration, moving from life into the afterlife. Think of a scuba diver rising slowly from the abyss toward the surface, giving the body time to adjust so it doesn’t break. My soul is going through that adjustment right now. It’s like I already have one foot on the other side. That’s how I’m able to access all of this information I’m giving you tonight. And your whole self is there too, waiting for you. You’re just so deeply grounded in your human reality, in ordinary consciousness, that the signal is harder for you to feel. But I’m taking a part of you home with me. Watch and see. You’re going to have a pipeline open straight into infinite beauty, love, creativity, light, and so much more than you can picture from where you’re standing.”

Something in me started, quietly, to loosen. “Does everyone go through this process?”

“Every human goes through some version of it when they cross. But how deep it goes depends on how willing they are to let go of the human world. Not every soul wants to merge back into wholeness right away. Some hold on.”

“Is that what ghosts are?”

“There are different realms. A ghostly realm is one of them. It depends on how distorted a person’s thought patterns were, and how tightly they’re still gripping onto what they believed was real.”

My mind was overflowing. I didn’t know which question to reach for next. I was also quietly trying to make sense of the lucid, almost trancelike state my mother seemed to be moving through. Even the tone of her voice sounded like it was arriving from somewhere else, somewhere I didn’t have a map for yet.

She kept channeling, unbothered by my silence. “It’s impossible for the human mind to fully grasp, but picture a kaleidoscope. I can be every facet of it at once. I can exist in the place of wholeness and be right here guiding you on earth, at the same time. The choice for us to walk through this together was made in a place where time doesn’t exist. There are soul families, imagine them as enormous trees, full of every person we’ve ever met who felt instantly familiar, or who taught us the lessons that weren’t easy to learn. And then there’s our soul branch, the ones closest to us on that tree. That’s you and me. I’ve always taught you that we make agreements with our soul family before we’re even born, agreements about the lessons we came here to learn. Those agreements get encoded into our DNA, and they become the compass that leads us toward our soul families and the navigator that steers us toward our destiny. Some of those lessons are brutal. And not everyone in our soul family arrives as someone we’d call a loved one. What I’ve come to understand, just this past week, is that these journeys through the earth school were never only for our own individual souls. They exist to feed more divine intelligence back into the place of wholeness: to help it expand, and to help it evolve.”

I had to get up. I moved to the window because the information felt like too much to hold in one body. She sensed it, and let herself sink back into her pillow for a long, unhurried pause.

She shifted her weight in the bed. “Maybe this new understanding will help you see the past a little differently. We can start letting some of those old demons go. If we clear enough of that out, we get to stay close. We might not get through all of it tonight...”

“Mom. Enough.”

A darker voice inside me started to whisper its own theory. Maybe she was making all this up, one last effort to coax me into forgiving the circumstances that still haunted me, before it was too late to ask.

I handed her the blanket, the lantern, the angel statue, the angel cards. I felt guilty for letting my own angst take up space in the room, during what might be her last hours on earth.

“I need to take a walk. I’ll be back soon.”

I threw myself into the stairwell and shoved the exit door open. A primal scream sat coiled at the top of my diaphragm. I swallowed it back down. I found a bench and sat as overcast skies rolled in, and rain came down soft enough to mix with my tears without me ever noticing where one ended and the other began.

I thought back as far as memory would take me, back to when innocence was still pure like honey, back to the grand opening of the memory banks themselves, searching, I think, for the version of me who hadn’t yet learned that love and loss can arrive in the very same breath.

What I Know Now

Looking back, I understand what she was really handing me that night wasn’t a theory about the afterlife. It was a mirror.

She was showing me, in real time, that the frequency I chose to carry through my grief would determine everything I was able to receive on the other side of it. The signs. The whispers. The strange, impossible-to-explain timing that still visits me to this day, years later, when I least expect it and need it most.

She wasn’t asking me to stop grieving. Grief is love with nowhere left to go, and she knew that better than anyone. She was asking me to grieve with the door open, because love, real love, doesn’t end at the edge of a body. It just changes frequency.

And maybe that’s the whole lesson, wrapped up in one long night on the edge of a hospital bed: we don’t lose the people we love. We lose the signal, only for as long as we insist on holding the wrong frequency to receive it.

Tune the heart and the rest finds its way home.

Subscribe now

I found Mom’s room. She looked sturdier than the night before — a quick hit of hope. “Hi Baaaby,” she sang out, and I dropped everything to hug her, crying into hair she was still stroking like I was a little girl.

“Did you bring your computer?” she asked.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

“I’ve been fortunate — I’ve gotten to hang around and wait for my family. Death’s door usually opens and the soul just gets whisked away. I’ve gotten the revolving door. I know all about my new home now. It’s the home. Your home. My home. All of our home.”

“What does it look like?”

“There’s no words that would do it justice. Take every beautiful piece of art ever made, multiply that beauty a hundredfold — still unfathomable. Colors so vivid they’d explode a human heart. A few minutes ago I was floating in a lazy river of liquid gold light, and angels were humming healing chants over my soul, closing wounds from this life.”

“Can you see what your soul looks like?”

“It’s a field of light. It shapeshifts depending on who I’m in relation to. I can be my youngest, most beautiful self.”

“So you could shapeshift into Farrah Fawcett?”

“I could. But there, everyone still sees the soul underneath.”

“Do souls have names?”

“Souls have resonance and frequency. That’s the name.”

“So you’re still you on the other side?”

“Our human self is a limb of something bigger — a united, infinite field of cosmic intelligence. When we leave the body, we start out feeling separate, then merge back. The more we cross, the less attached we are to our name, and the more interested we become in what we learned, and how it helps the whole.”

Then she sat up straighter. “Now let’s get into it. Take notes. I’ve been given instructions to share with you about the death process — impossible to fully put into words, but I’ve been directed to try, because understanding makes our connection stronger. Once I finish crossing, I have an agreement to become a guide for you.”

“Like a guardian angel?”

“With complexities. Agreements. Some debris to clear. A commitment from you. Then a proclamation.”

“I’m hungry. Can we have Egg McMuffins while we do this?”

I ordered the food, dimmed the lights, lit her candle.

She drifted, then came back. “We humans have it all wrong. We think a loved one leaves and they’re just gone. We say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ — like hanging up on a direct line to divine source energy. But nothing is lost. So much more is to be gained. I can send you blessings, insights, intelligence, from a place of wholeness. But your free will has to stay open to receive it.”

“How will I hear you?”

“We’re going to have to learn a new language.”

“Language of ghosts?”

“The language of creation.”

Her face softened, almost translucent. “Nothing dies. We’re all made of energy. Energy is indestructible — E = mc². Energy transforms. My body is turning into liquid light. If you go through this with me, I’ll help you from the other side more than you know.”

The Science Behind It

No lab has proven consciousness survives death. But research has proven this: what happened in that room is common, seriously studied, and reliably healing.

Terminal lucidity — Mom’s sudden, vivid clarity right before death — is a documented phenomenon: an unexpected return of memory and connection in the dying, even after long decline. Researchers Michael Nahm and Dr. Bruce Greyson (University of Virginia) catalogued dozens of cases in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics (ScienceDirect); it remains mechanistically mysterious but clinically real (Bonoi Scientific Communications).

Near-death experiences — Mom’s liquid light, the collapse of space and time — mirror what UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies has documented for nearly 60 years: vivid, structured experiences occurring when mainstream neuroscience says no awareness should be possible (UVA DOPS). Attempts to explain it away as ordinary brain malfunction keep falling short (Newswise).

After-death communication — a felt contact with the deceased — happens to an estimated 30–82% of people in their lifetime (UVA; Psychology Today). A 2026 review of nearly 2,000 bereaved people found these moments are overwhelmingly described as turning points in grief (Death Studies). In one UVA study, 40% of people who sensed a deceased partner reported accelerated emotional recovery (UVA DOPS).

The sensed presence — what Mom meant by “representing for me” — was documented as early as the 1970s, when physician W.D. Rees found roughly half of widows and widowers sensed their spouse’s ongoing presence, often for years, and were better adjusted for it, not worse (Cambridge/BJPsych Open).

Continuing bonds theory overturned the old idea that healthy grief means “letting go.” Researchers Klass, Silverman, and Nickman showed that an ongoing inner relationship with the dead — through memory, ritual, or felt guidance — is normal, adaptive, and healthy (Continuing bonds).

And the physics is real, as far as it goes: energy truly cannot be created or destroyed — that’s settled law. Whether consciousness itself persists is the open frontier, explored seriously (not proven) by Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch OR theory of quantum consciousness (Discover Magazine).

Science can’t confirm Mom is still out there. But it confirms this: what we shared, and what I’ve felt since, sits inside a real, well-studied, healing category of human experience.

7 Ways to Stay Connected

1. Open the channel. Same time, same spot, same candle. Just check in — treat it like a phone call to the other side.

2. Journal every sign, instantly. A song, a number, an unexplained warmth — write it before your logical brain edits it away. Meaning often arrives later.

3. Incubate your dreams. Before sleep: “I’m open to hearing from you tonight.” Many ADCs happen in that hazy space between waking and sleep.

4. Get quiet. Five minutes of stillness a day lowers the noise that drowns out subtler signals.

5. Keep the bond alive. Talk to a photo. Mark the anniversary. Research confirms this heals — it doesn’t trap you in grief.

6. Ask, then release. Instead of “give me a sign,” ask something specific — then let go of when or how it arrives.

7. Stay human, too. This practice complements therapy and real support — it isn’t a replacement for it.

The bond doesn’t have to end where the body does. Staying open, staying curious, staying connected… that’s the one path back to peace that grief science and grief itself keep agreeing on.

Subscribe

“People give up a lot when they say goodbye,” my mother said into my voicemail; it would be one of her last rants. “The eternal part of me is returning to wholeness. I can help you and the kids immensely from that place, but not if you disconnect by saying goodbye.”

Mom was winding down; her decline had accelerated ever since my brother Tony died a few months earlier.

Her voice lifted. “You’re going to get a big upgrade! My long, wordy voicemails will turn into mental epiphanies that land right when you need them. Wait until you experience the dreams and all the creative ideas I can send you. Imagine me as a new stream of energy opening in your consciousness—infinitely more powerful because I’ll be merged with source. But you have to do your part… If you’re closed off or you say goodbye, you won’t see the yellow butterfly. Did you hear that? Yellow butterfly!!”

I wondered if she was messing with her meds. She’d been taking edibles for back pain too.

The next large section of her voicemail explained that nineteen spirit guides had visited her room in the past couple of days to prepare her for transitioning. Louis, her main spirit guide, was at her side the whole time. He appeared to her as a life they’d shared in the 1500s when he was her brother, Louis.

She rattled off other angels and guides—some basic names like Michael and Gabriel, others with words that sounded like backwards Russian—and I wondered how she knew how to pronounce them on the spot.

There was a transmission taking place; I expected nothing less from my mother as she neared her finish line.

She wrapped up the voice message: “When you’re trying to figure out where I am, imagine a sphere of brilliant gold light. You can contact me whenever you need me through that sphere. I will hear you and respond. However, it will be creative, because the universal language IS creation plus working with the laws of human nature. So you will get your response when your free will is receptive and your heart is in flow state or above—gratitude, love, joy, etc. In the meantime, I will have a frequency tracker on you. When it dips, I’ll send you warning signs, like stubbing your toe. If you don’t listen, the frequency tracker has a shock component that can turn up in intensity.”

Double yikes. The message cut off shortly after. I wondered how shocking me with some tracker, from the afterlife, would go down and if she was even allowed to do that in her next realm.

On the airplane I sifted through her voicemail again to prepare myself. I did not anticipate being summoned to the edge of two worlds, or that this night would cleave my life into before and after.

What I didn’t know yet was that my mom had been dying and returning to life over and over, reporting spirits in the room. She insisted no one ever really dies. They just end a chapter, and a new one begins. We have more support than we could ever imagine.

Before Mom’s crossing, I’d been hot and cold about angels, despite them being a constant topic of my childhood and adulthood. Mom had her main guardian angel: Louis.

She became aware of Louis when she hit rock bottom after divorcing my dad, trying anything to get back on her feet. She was a single mom with three teenage sons (adopted from my dad’s first marriage), plus five-year-old me, getting very little support and learning few skills.

She signed up for a free class that offered tools for psychic work, thinking maybe she could give readings. What she didn’t expect was Louis arriving through a channeled writing exercise. As she describes it, he felt like a separate stream of energy in her mind—a warm, loving friend entering the room. He was connected to her but not her. Her fingers transcribed his messages faster than her conscious mind could understand them.

Louis taught Mom that everyone has at least one personal guardian angel and that, throughout life—depending on circumstance, purpose, intention, choices—a legion of deities, masters, angels, specialists, and/or ancestors are magnetically drawn to us at various points (though not necessarily utilized, depending on the openness of human free will).

After weeks of writing with Louis, Mom developed a ritual practice—wine, visualization, timed writing, and chain-smoking True Blue 100s. Over many sittings she learned about past lives, ancient civilizations, twin souls, aliens, and every other force available in what she called the Invisible World.

When we were at our lowest after my parents’ divorce, Louis kept telling her not to worry because we’d won a trip around the world. All she had to do was start planning and look at places she wanted to go. That imagined world tour buoyed us through freezing Northern California months when we slept on a blow-up raft bed and cut photos from travel magazines to dream of Irish landscapes, Tasmanian caves, and warm turquoise Indian Ocean baths. I didn’t know what a vision board was then, but our studio became a giant vision-board world tour.

In classic Mom fashion, she landed the dream job soon after: a continuing-education company that produced events for doctors and nurses in exotic places—elite vacations with a few hours of study each morning, magical adventures by day, and gorgeous restaurant tours by night. The company booked the whole package; airlines, hotels, and tour companies treated us like royalty for bringing so many guests.

This wasn’t an easy dream job for her to manage. With Louis’s help, she walked through the fires and, after about eight hard years, got the company to a place where it made money and she became the chairman.

Because of all Louis guided her through, she preached about angels to anyone she knew. She was angry that schools didn’t teach about guardian angels and that society labeled it woo-woo. She believed we all have our own spiritual concierge and modern culture wasn’t using what we’re each born with.

Mom, of course, encouraged me to talk to my own guardian angel. I started communing with something different around seven or eight. Mom caught me playing card games with “imaginary friends” who advised me to steal cakes from the local bakery while wearing my mom’s high heels. Everything unraveled when she saw me on the corner in her red heels holding a strange cake. That’s when I got a long lecture about the differences between ghosts, spirit guides, ascended masters, angels, archangels, Elohim, and so on.

She pressed the angels on me when I had to stay with my grandparents in a brittle house where everything felt breakable and my grandma’s cancer haunted the rooms. She pushed it on me like a bandaid for something we both knew wasn’t ready to heal. The scabs of grief about our broken family were fresh. I missed my three big brothers who had been my daily world.

One terrified night alone, I felt a light bigger than me enter my heart. It seemed to ask my permission. I knew it was my guardian angel and affirmed it without doubt. A warm, honeyed wave lifted a knot from my chest. I asked its name and heard a whisper from inside me: “Henry.”

I couldn’t wait to tell Mom. This changed our relationship; it almost put us in a new mother–daughter club. I called on Henry in moments of despair, loneliness, and fear, and it worked. Light seeped through the holes and I felt safe and held. Henry carried me through childhood—eight schools by fifth grade, grimy rainbow shirts, Wiggles jeans. When girls threw rocks and called me a freak, summoning Henry helped me see their own projected insecurities.

Most of Mom and my adventures felt inspired by these angelic forces: when we were invited to baptize a cenote in a Mayan cavern that had water older than time, trespassing into an English castle because Mom insisted we’d lived there in another life, or standing in an ancient church as solstice light poured across a painted third eye of Jesus on the wall. Her faith made the invisible world lean into us.

Mom taught me to co-create with the angels. To respond to the signs they send by taking action—since we are the ones in a physical body. She gravitated to pyramids, portals, castles, hieroglyphs, gemstones. At twelve she took me to Egypt, held up a walnut-sized emerald, and tried to hypnotize me into remembering a past life. Maybe something felt familiar. She dragged me into pawnshops and bought caches of pale blue Larimar because Louis told her it came from Atlantis.

She taught me that spirit is bold. Like when a Cabo hotel evacuated for a hurricane and she told us we were staying put, booking spa treatments and fine dining because Louis said the storm would divert. It did.

Because of this grand connection with Louis, Mom had no fear of death. She believed we are spiritual, electrical beings who funnel consciousness through a body that forgets who we truly are, in order to remember again and learn what we are not. Death was exciting to her because she would finally be her full potential again. She just felt badly for the people left behind.

Her only other regret about leaving this life was that she hadn’t finished some things. So on the eve of her crossing she tried to cram as much in as she could and suggested I record everything. She wanted to share messages, directives, and the insights she was receiving from the other place.

She said Louis was beautiful and filling the room, and Tony was there too—Tony, my big brother who had died months earlier after being a quadriplegic for twenty-three years from a motorcycle accident—now apparently streaking through the room like a comet, free and light.

Then she told me I was having a son. I was four months pregnant, terrified and in my forties, still raw from Tony’s death and now my mother’s. I didn’t know the baby’s sex. She insisted it was a boy and that he was racing Tony around the room, which was giving her a headache.

I tried to explain it away. Dying people hallucinate, I told myself. But the night kept unfolding into something harder to dismiss. Her departures grew longer; her returns were sudden, eyes wide and smiling. “Surprise!” she’d say. I laughed, then cried, then reached for Kleenex and my notebook. Part of me knew I was witnessing something I’d spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

Over the night she described the Invisible World—not a distant heaven but a reality just beyond ordinary perception where wholeness is restored and only love, truth, peace, and light remain. Her repeated message was simple and radical:

Humans live in the material world—0.00001% of reality. The rest is the Invisible World, which we mostly ignore even though so much is happening there: eternity, quantum physics, spirit realms—existence, the truth of who we are.

Culture teaches people to end their relationship with a loved one who crosses. That doesn’t have to happen. We often assume a bond ends when a body dies, but science has shown we are made of energy—the essence of the invisible world—and it’s indestructible and goes onward.

“Invoke me!” she said often. Invoke became a refrain. She said she could only get through if I invoked her and aligned with her frequency—through gratitude or finding a place of nothingness.

Practices that helped me find steadiness and open a sustaining channel:

Practice 1 — Keep a Door-to-the-Subconscious Journal
Ask one clear question each morning or before sleep. Write whatever spills out—phrases, images, song lines. Don’t edit. Over time patterns emerge: repeated images, numbers, or coincidences that feel like answers.

Practice 2 — Communicate Creatively
The Invisible World speaks through creativity symbols creation : dreams, symbols, songs, colors, animals. Choose tokens as signs. pick a few and let it go to see what shows up. yellow butterflies, a Beatles song, a red sticky note—and log each recurrence. Treat tokens as breadcrumbs. Do not text spirit. Invite.

Practice 3 — Build a Routine with Small Rituals
Rituals prime the field. Light a candle at the same time each evening. Speak an intention aloud. Leave a small offering—a flower, a note—and let go. Add micro-practices: a gratitude pause on waking, a breath before meals, an intention at bedtime. These keep the channel warm; they are invitations, not tests.

Practice 4 — Ask, Listen, Follow
Ask one focused question before sleep or meditation. The next day, notice textures rather than fanfare: a dream fragment, a line in a song, a sudden idea, or an overheard phrase. Follow what lights you up; small actions often redirect life more than dramatic messages.

Practice 5 — Do the Hard Work: Forgiveness and Clearing
Mom insisted the channel needed clearing. Forgiveness doesn’t erase pain; it unclogs channels clogged by resentment. This work is gritty—therapy, ritual release, accountability—but when a fracture clears, guidance often arrives with sharper clarity. Grief isn’t denied; it becomes porous, able to hold connection as well as loss.

Grief can become more than loss—a doorway to connection that outlives the body.

A few practical suggestions:
Start small. Consistency matters more than intensity. Maintain discernment—experiences that instill fear or confusion deserve grounded support (therapy, trusted friends, spiritual counselors). Record both meaning and mundane possibilities.

Why this matters:
We assume death severs bonds. My mother insisted otherwise: most of reality is invisible and often ignored, and choice—what we perceive—shapes whether channels remain open. When we cultivate simple practices, the impossible feels ordinary. The yellow butterfly are metaphors for attention: be reachable, and be willing to notice.

If this landed for you, start tonight: get a small notebook, ask one question before sleep, light a candle for a minute and state a single intention. Note any dream fragments or odd coincidences in the morning. Keep it small. Keep it consistent.

If you want to travel this map with others, I’ll share more stories, exercises, and a 7-day starter worksheet next week.