A Place For Us

Table of Contents

* The Math

* The God With A Marketing Problem

* What I Was Really Taught

* The Evidence I Couldn’t Unsee

* What This Means For Shayna

* So Where Am I Now?

* Where Are You?

I grew up in the church. Everybody I knew was Christian. Everybody on my street, everybody at my school, everybody in my family. There were probably some Catholics around, but nobody made much of it. They weren’t really identified. I thought they were pretty much the same as we were.

Then my cousin married a Catholic girl.

That’s when I heard it, said out loud at the dinner table. Catholics weren’t real Christians. They hadn’t been baptized properly. They hadn’t received the Holy Ghost.

I was 13 years old. One word popped into my head: “What?”

My mind went somewhere it had never gone before. If Catholics weren’t saved, who else wasn’t?

That question cracked something open. For the first time I realized that my experience of almost everybody being a Christian was not how the world was. It was how my little corner of it worked. The majority of people on this planet were something else. Less than 30% of people are Christians. This blew my mind.

A billion or so Muslims. Hindus. Buddhists. And what about the “good” atheists, the ones who loved their families, told the truth, and showed up when somebody needed help?

Where did they all end up?

I was taught there was one true religion. Now I started counting the people who weren’t in it.

The Math

Here’s what I mean by one true religion. Catholics had it wrong, so they were headed for hell. Jews? Well, Jesus was a Jew, but unless you accepted him as the Messiah, hell for you too. Muslims honor Jesus as a prophet, but he isn’t the begotten Son of God (and that word “begotten” is doing a lot of work). Hell for you too. Atheists had no shot. And on and on.

I knew I was lucky to be born into a Christian family. Practically born Christian. My grandparents and their grandparents were all part of the right faith.

Lucky.

Sit with that word for a minute, because it’s the one that broke it for me.

If I was lucky to be born into the right family, in the right country, in the right century, then what exactly was luck doing in a story about eternal salvation? What if I had been born in India? Surely I’d be a Hindu. What if no missionary had ever reached my village? What if I clung to the faith of my parents and their grandparents just as tightly as I was taught to cling to mine? I was taught not to give it up to anyone, for any reason.

I had spent my whole childhood believing the question was “Which religion is true?” I was told I had chosen wisely. At 13, at that dinner table, I realized I hadn’t chosen at all. I was chosen. I had won the spiritual lottery.

If salvation depends on believing the right thing, and belief depends almost entirely on geography and birth order, then heaven and hell aren’t really about faith at all. They’re about luck.

That’s a hard thought to hold when you’ve built your identity on being one of the right ones.

The God With A Marketing Problem

The God I was taught about apparently had a delivery problem. Great message. But lousy distribution.

Billions of people, across thousands of years, never heard the “correct” message. They didn’t refuse it. It never showed up. God chose to give his message to one guy in a small town, to a people under occupation. Sure, it had spread. But so many didn’t receive it.

Picture a woman born in rural Nepal, centuries before any missionary arrived. She never had a chance to accept Jesus as her personal savior. Picture a boy born into a devout Muslim family in Marrakech, who is taught from his first breath that the Trinity is a corruption of pure monotheism. He loves God with exactly the sincerity I was taught to love by my faith. Yet, somehow people say his God, Allah, isn’t the same as mine.

Is the Nepalese woman condemned for a mission trip that never happened? Is he condemned for not abandoning the faith of his father, and his father, and his father?

If yes, then what we’re describing is a rigged lottery with eternal stakes.

If no, then something is wrong with the framework I was handed.

I’ll also say this, because I know many of you were raised in the faith, and you love it. I’m aware that plenty of Christians hold much wider views than the ones I grew up with. In fact, I hope most. Some believe God’s mercy reaches far beyond the church walls. I’m not writing about them. I’m writing about the version I was handed at that dinner table, the one with a narrow gate and a lot of people on the wrong side of it.

What I Was Really Taught

Eventually I noticed the pattern underneath the theology.

Every version of “we’re right, they’re wrong” seemed to need the same three ingredients: certainty, exclusivity, and fear. Certainty gave you comfort. Exclusivity gave you belonging. Fear kept you from wandering too far outside the fence to check.

You find this in almost any tightly bordered belief system, religious or secular. Us and them. Saved and lost. In and out.

I was taught to read that as evidence of truth. The narrow gate. The few who find it.

I’ve come to see it differently. A framework that needs fear to hold its members manages behavior more than it describes reality. Years later, I would discover an author, Martin Zender, who wrote the book “How to Quit Church Without Quitting God”. In the back of the book was a list of traits of a cult. Twenty of them. Many churches check every box. That was an eye-opener for me.

The Evidence I Couldn’t Unsee

I didn’t walk away from faith. I walked toward something wider, and I did it the way I was trained as an engineer: by looking at the evidence.

In my mid-30s, I wandered into a bookstore and found the book, “The Afterlife Experiments” by a guy named Dr. Gary Schwartz. Little did I know that two decades later, I’d be working with Gary on The SoulPhone Project. Gary had tested mediums under controlled conditions, in a lab.

I’d move on to discover Near Death Experiences. No single account convinced me. What got me was how much they resembled each other, and one thing in particular that kept showing up: nobody was judged.

I kept waiting for the part where the person got sorted. Goats on the left, sheep on the right. Checked against a list. Asked which church they belonged to. It never came. Dr. Rajiv Parti was an atheist, raised in a Hindu home. He had a bit of a rough start to his NDE. But no eternal torment. Howard Storm was a hardcore materialist and self-described not-nice guy. He too had a rough start. But eventually, all was well. These were the worst cases I could find, and I looked hard.

Here’s what I want to be careful about. The details of these experiences do vary with culture. The figures people meet, the imagery they see, the language they use all shift afterward depending on who is telling the story. A Hindu grandmother in Delhi and a lifelong atheist in Ohio will not describe it the same way. But underneath the differences, the core keeps repeating. Overwhelming love. A sense of presence. A feeling of coming home instead of arriving somewhere foreign.

Nobody gets turned away at the door for having the wrong denomination on file.

That one pattern undid more of my inherited theology than any argument ever did. If love and presence greet a Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist, and a Christian with the same warmth, then the thing we’ve been fighting wars and burning bridges over, being correct, was never the point.

Connection was. It always was.

What This Means For Shayna

I can’t write about this without writing about my daughter.

When Shayna passed in 2015, every question I’d been asking since that dinner table at 13 stopped being theological. It became personal.

Where is she? Is she okay? Does it matter what she believed, or what I believed?

I held onto what I’d learned about the near-death experience. That love is what greets people. That nobody is sorted. That it’s bigger and kinder than the fear I was handed as a kid.

I can’t tell you that this took the pain away. It didn’t, and it doesn’t. But it chan…

A song comes on. Three minutes later, you don’t know if you just got sad or got healed. Maybe both.

That’s what a handful of songs do to me. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s The Way of the World.” Enigma’s “Return to Innocence.” Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.”

Four different decades, four different sounds. Same wound. Each deeply resonated with me at various points in my life. I never knew exactly why at the time. Now I do.

Every one of them is about a kid who shows up wide open, and what the world does to shut that down. Oh, how I can relate to that.

I’ve linked to the songs referenced in the article. You can read the article without listening. If you can find the time, go down the rabbit hole with me and give them a listen.

The World Has a System, and the System Wants You Quiet

“The Logical Song” reads almost like a case file. A kid starts out amazed by everything, magical, mystical, alive with wonder. Then he gets sent off to be educated. Somewhere along the way, the wonder gets swapped out for something more useful to everyone but him. Logic. Responsibility. Straighten up and fit in if you want to succeed.

Pink Floyd names the same thing and turns it into a chant. “We don’t need no education”. No subtlety about who’s doing the shutting-down. The institution grinds kids through a system built for control, not curiosity. In the movie, there’s even a meat grinder as the kids are turned into something pliable and void of individuality. Extended movie version linked below.

Both songs are diagnoses. They tell you where it went wrong and who did it. Neither one tells you what to do once you know.

And honestly, that’s where most of us stop. We spend years confirming the diagnosis. Yes, the world did this to me. Yes, I can point to the exact moment. We go to therapy, and they tell us why we are the way we are. I was inspired to write this after seeing someone claim our entire personalities are just trauma responses. Yeah. It can seem that way, huge parts of them anyway.

Naming the wound is real work. It’s just not the whole job. Now that we know, what do we do?

Earth, Wind & Fire Named the Machine

“That’s The Way of the World” isn’t a diagnosis so much as a lament. It describes what the world rewards and what it costs you to keep up. This is the view from inside the compromise. The song doesn’t ask how you get free of it. It just tells the truth about what playing along does to you.

Supertramp and Pink Floyd show you the wall going up. That’s The Way Of The World shows you what it’s like to live inside it, knowing the game is rigged, playing it anyway, because everyone around you is doing the same thing.

Only One of These Songs Talks About Getting Back

I went back to all four of these songs years into doing grief work, and here’s what got me: only Enigma talks about the way back.

Not backward. You’re not un-learning anything. They call it a return to innocence. The video is brilliant, showing a life going backward, Benjamin Button style, as the old man becomes a baby again.

But the truth is more subtle. It’s forward, into something that got buried but never actually left.

The song barely has lyrics. It’s more chant than statement, more feeling than explanation. No instructions. Just an insistence that what got taken from you wasn’t taken forever. It’s still under there, somewhere beneath everything the world piled on top.

I didn’t understand why that distinction mattered until I found the word for it.

There Are Two Kinds of Innocence

Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century theologian, drew a distinction that has captivated me since I first heard it a few years ago. I think it’s the missing instruction manual for all four of these songs.

He said there are two kinds of innocence.

The first is the innocence of infancy. The wonder-filled child Supertramp sings about, the beautiful creature EW&F talks about. The uncorrupted kid Pink Floyd names. They're all about the openness the world eventually shuts down. But look closely, that innocence is really ignorance. Ignorance is not used as a pejorative here. It’s literally not yet knowing. I think, in the case of our returns to Earth, it’s a matter of forgetting. Starting with a relatively blank slate. It’s not earned innocence. It’s a starting condition, handed to you before the world gets a chance to test you. You come in wide-eyed and open.

The second innocence is a different animal entirely. It only exists on the other side of experience. You can’t fake it, and you can’t stay young enough to skip needing it. It shows up after you’ve been out in the world, after you’ve lived what “That’s The Way of the World” describes, after you’ve felt the wall go up brick by brick. And you choose it anyway. Not once. Over and over. It’s what awaits at the end of The Wall album by Pink Floyd when the Wall is torn down.

The first innocence gets lost the moment life happens to you. Nobody has a say in that.

The second innocence you build. On purpose. Slowly, and it costs something.

This is what Enigma is pointing at, whether the songwriters knew it or not. Not a return to not-knowing. A return to you, carrying everything you now know.

What This Has to Do With Grief

If you’ve lost someone, you already understand the second innocence. You just might not have had a word for it.

You don’t get the first innocence back. You don’t get to unknow what loss taught you, how fragile this life is, how fast it can change, what it costs to love someone all the way through.

But something else opens up. Not the return of what was. The emergence of someone who has metabolized the damage instead of being defined by it. Someone still capable of wonder, not despite what happened, but because they walked all the way through it and came out the other side still able to feel. The world becomes magical again. You begin to trust again. Not out of ignorance. But out of experience.

I call this planted, not buried. You are not who you were before the loss. You are also not only broken. Something in you can grow into a shape that couldn’t have existed any other way.

That’s the second innocence.

You Can’t Go Back. But You Can Go Through.

Supertramp, Earth Wind & Fire, and Pink Floyd are right about what happens to us. The world closes something in us. There’s a machine. It builds a wall.

But Enigma got hold of something they never touched.

The way back isn’t back at all.

It’s through. Through the grief, through the disillusionment, through everything the world piled on top of who you actually are. Out the other side, into a self who knows what you know now and stays open anyway.

What would it take for you to return to that kind of innocence? Not the one you had before the world got to you. The one that’s only available now, on the other side of what you’ve already survived.

A Note On The Wall- P.S.

Another Brick In The Wall, the song I referenced, is just one song from an album that is a masterpiece. Released in 1979, I was a sophomore in college when I heard the album. I knew there was something special about it. I listened to it at least once a day for months.

But I don’t think I fully got the album's arc until I saw the movie. The album is about the return to innocence. Our hero, Pink, is bandied about by the vicissitudes of life- an overprotective mother, an absent father, a school system that stifles him, a wife that cheats on him, and a music career that only cares about what he can produce on stage. He spends his life building one brick at a time on a wall to keep the world out, only to find out the wall has become a prison. The last song is about life on the other side of the wall after he is forced to destroy it.

Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss.

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A few weeks ago I was talking with a client. I’ve changed some of the details, but this happened.

I’ll call her Pat. Her husband Frank passed about a month ago, after thirty-two years of marriage. She spent more than half her life with him. She can barely eat now. Sleep comes in fragments. The house they built their whole life inside feels unbearable to sit still in.

That same week, she had a job interview.

For a couple of hours she sat across from someone answering questions about her experience, her plans, her future. And something happened she couldn’t have predicted.

She forgot.

Not forgot the way you forget where you set your keys down. Forgot the way a body forgets, when it’s busy, that the world has changed underneath it.

She walked out of that building feeling good. Hopeful, even.

So she did what she had done for thirty two years every single time something good happened. She pulled out her phone and dialed Frank.

It rang.

And it rang.

And that’s when she remembered.

Your Brain Never Filed Him Away. It Built a Map.

Here’s why that happened, and I want to be careful with how I say this, because Pat wasn’t in denial. She hadn’t stopped accepting reality. Her brain was doing precisely the job it was built to do.

We tend to assume the people we love get stored as memories. Filed. Finished. Set on a shelf somewhere in the back of the mind.

That’s not how it works.

Your brain stores the people you love as a map. A running, constantly updating map of where they are, how to reach them, and what to do the second something good or something terrible happens.

The neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor calls the attachment system what it actually is. A locator.

It’s the same system that made you, at five years old, check where your mother was every few minutes in a crowded store without ever deciding to. It doesn’t run as a thought. It runs as infrastructure.

For thirty two years, Pat’s locator had one job. Something happens, find Frank, tell him.

A good interview triggered that. Not a decision. A reflex, and one of the oldest ones you own.

If I asked you right now to think about your spouse or your child, your mind would go somewhere. At work. Downstairs. On the road. Somewhere.

THE RESEARCH BEHIND THIS

Who she is: Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab. Her work looks at the physical side of emotion, including the yearning and isolation people live with during bereavement.

The core idea: O’Connor describes attachment as a set of invisible tethers. Ask someone where their daughter or their partner is right now and they’ll have a sense of where, how to get there, and how long until they see them again. Your brain holds three dimensions for every person you love. Here. Now. Close. Death removes all three at once, and the brain keeps running the old prediction anyway.

Why it takes so long: She frames grieving as a form of learning. Your old habits automatically included your person, so every day your brain has to update its predictions, one at a time. You can no longer expect them home at six, or expect them to pick up when you call with news.

Where to read more: The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (2022) covers the neuroscience. Her follow-up, The Grieving Body, takes on what loss does to the heart, the immune system, and the endocrine and nervous systems. That second one lines up with everything in the next section

The Error Message That Won’t Stop Running

The locator system has no idea how to process gone.

It was built for temporary separation, the kind our ancestors survived by finding each other again. We needed the tribe. We needed the people who’d protect us and who we’d protect back. When someone wandered off, the search ran until they came home.

So when the query comes back empty, when it returns the equivalent of a 404 error, the system doesn’t shut down.

It runs the search again.

And again.

That’s the phone call. That’s turning toward the door when you hear a car outside. That’s reaching for your phone to tell them something a hundred times, a thousand times, long after they’re gone.

Every one of those searches costs energy. This is a large part of why grief leaves you so tired that showering feels like a project.

You’re not failing to accept anything. Your locator is doing its job in a world it wasn’t designed for.

Part of Him Was Living Inside Her

Then there’s Pat’s body, which is where grief stops being only emotional.

She can manage a few bites at a time. She’s drinking protein shakes to keep her strength up. And this part you can nearly measure with a blood test.

When you live with someone for decades, your bodies stop being separate. Research on long-term couples shows that your microbiomes converge. The bacteria in your gut, on your skin, in the air you share. Part of Frank was, in a literal sense, living inside Pat.

It goes further than biology.

Your nervous system doesn’t only love a long-term partner. It borrows stability from them. Oxytocin. Cortisol regulation. Heart rate and breathing that gradually sync with the person sleeping next to you.

Psychologists call it co-regulation. You end up running a second nervous system that lives partly outside your own body.

You Didn’t Just Lose a Person. You Lost Your Regulator.

Picture someone in the middle of a panic attack. Heart slamming, breath ragged, thoughts running over each other.

Then someone they love wraps them in a hug, or just says their name in that voice. Low, steady, the one reserved for them alone.

Watch what happens. The breathing slows. The shoulders come down. The heart rate drops, often within seconds.

That’s one nervous system reaching over and physically recalibrating another. Touch and a familiar voice are two of the fastest-acting regulators we have, faster than most of what’s in the medicine cabinet.

That’s what thirty-two years builds. A person who walks into a room and, by presence alone, tells your body it can stand down.

When Frank passed, that went offline. No warning. No replacement.

The sleeplessness. The appetite gone. The house feeling wrong under her own feet. That’s withdrawal, and it shows up on brain scans looking a great deal like what researchers see in addiction studies. Her body spent three decades building its chemistry around this man’s presence, and now it’s detoxing from a relationship it never agreed to lose.

The Cruelest Design Flaw in Grief

I talked with another client once about losing his wife.

He said the person who carried him through every other loss, every other grief, the one who told him it was going to be okay, is the exact person he needs now to tell him it’s going to be okay.

Sit with that for a second.

Your body loses its regulator at the precise moment it needs regulating more than it ever has. The storm to end all storms arrives, and the shelter you’ve always run to isn’t standing.

I think about the people I know who are living inside that right now, and my heart breaks for them, because they feel so completely alone in a way that goes past emotion and into chemistry.

What the Reaching Actually Means

So here’s what I want you to take from Pat.

If your brain keeps dialing a number nobody will answer, that’s evidence of how thoroughly that person was mapped into you, and you into them.

If you can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t sit still in the space you used to share, that’s evidence of how deeply your chemistry rewired itself around another human being.

None of that makes it fair. It makes it explainable.

The volume of this grief exists because the bond was real and is real. Not as a metaphor. Biologically.

Your brain built a map for them. Your body built its rhythms around them. What you’re feeling is what happens when that gets pulled away.

The Error Message Does Stop

Here’s the part I most want you to hear.

The locator eventually catches up. It stops returning the error. And somewhere in that process, something shifts, because you start to under…

Ask me where my wife is right now. I’ll get it right, down to the couch cushion.

Ask about my daughter Kayla, and I’ll get that right too. Her drive to work. Her Tuesday. I don’t have to think about it. I just know.

But when Shayna passed, when I asked myself “Where is she?”, my brain glitched. It returned a “that does not compute.”

Researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor’s describes it this way: we build a map for the people we’re attached to. Not a metaphor. An actual neural map, running underneath everything else. It tracks the people we love along three lines: space, time, and closeness. Where they are. When we’ll see them again. The tighter the bond, the more detailed the map.

That map is active right now, in all of us, for everyone we love. It’s why you can feel your spouse in the next room without looking up. It’s why you know, without checking a clock, that your kid is at practice until 5:30. The map does this work silently, constantly, in the background of an ordinary day, so quietly you never notice it’s there until it breaks.

Here’s the problem when someone we love passes.

The map doesn’t shut off. It doesn’t get the memo. It keeps generating the exact same predictions it always has, for a person who is no longer where the map insists they should be.

Six o’clock comes. The map expects the sound of the door. The door doesn’t open. The map doesn’t know what to do with that. So it runs the prediction again. And again. Not because you’re irrational. Because the map is doing its job. It just doesn’t have the one input it needs: an update it was never designed to receive.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for. Not the sadness, though there’s plenty of that. The malfunction. The part of your brain built specifically to locate the people you love, spinning, searching, coming up with nothing, over and over, for months, sometimes years.

That’s why we write books called Finding Him. Looking for Her. Why the entire language of grief sounds like a search party. Why so many of us feel, quite literally, lost. We’re not choosing that word for effect. Lost is the most accurate word available.

We’re not being poetic when we say that. We’re lost, and the oldest part of the brain, the part that has nothing to do with logic or belief, is still checking coordinates that no longer exist.

The brain can’t find her in space or time, so it returns ‘nowhere.’ We can’t accept that answer. So it runs the search again.

“Nowhere” was never the right answer, and it was never true either. It was just the only answer the map could give while it was still looking in space and time.

She’s not nowhere. She’s everywhere.

She’s everywhere I put my attention. Wherever I stand, if I look for her, she’s already there. In the kitchen. In the car. In the middle of a sentence I didn’t finish.

That’s not denial, and it’s not a nice story I tell myself to feel better. It’s just where the map points now, once you stop asking it to find a single location and start letting it find her everywhere at once.

The door still doesn’t open at six. But I’ve stopped waiting for it to. I look somewhere else now, and she’s there too.

The Sheep Detectives. I almost didn’t see it.

The trailer played in the theater one afternoon before whatever I’d actually come to watch, and I remember thinking it looked silly. A flock of CGI sheep solving a murder. Hugh Jackman, of all people, playing a shepherd. I filed it under “not for me” and forgot about it.

Then my friend Susanne Wilson told me she’d seen it. She said it was really about the continuity of life.

That stopped me. Because that’s the one subject I can’t walk past.

So, this afternoon, I watched The Sheep Detectives. And I was wrong about it in the best possible way.

Spoiler warning: I’m going to give away some of the heart of this film below. If you’d rather go in fresh, watch it first, then come back. I’ll be here. I won’t tell you whodunit. I wouldn’t want to ruin that fun for you. It’s still a fun detective movie, even with these spoilers.

Table Of Contents

* A Children’s Movie That’s Secretly About Death

* The Comfort of “They’re in a Better Place”

* The Trick That Nearly Breaks the Flock

* The One Sheep Who Couldn’t Look Away

* Why Grief Is an Act of Remembering

* Planted, Not Buried

* What Would You Refuse to Forget?

A Children’s Movie That’s Secretly About Death

On its surface, this is a whodunit. George the shepherd, played by Jackman, reads detective novels aloud to his flock every night, assuming they can’t understand a word. He’s just enjoying time with his sheep, whom he loves. Then, one morning he’s found dead in the pasture. The sheep, grief-stricken and armed with everything George’s mystery novels taught them, decide to solve it themselves rather than leaving it up to the bumbling policeman in the town.

It’s rated PG. It’s marketed to families. Reviewers call it charming.

But underneath the cozy mystery is something far more tender. This is a movie about how a flock refuses to face loss, and what that refusal costs them.

Craig Mazin, who wrote The Last of Us, gave these sheep a theology. They don’t believe sheep pass away. They believe that when a sheep is gone, it simply becomes a cloud. No one dies. Death is just a construct in the nighttime stories that George tells them.

Look up. There they all are. Drifting. Safe. Never really gone, never really here.

It’s a coping mechanism with a huge cost, which I recognized instantly.

The Comfort of “They’re in a Better Place”

We do the same thing.

When someone we love passes, we reach for the softest possible language. They’re in a better place. They’re watching over us. They’re a star now, a cardinal, a cloud.

Some of that comes from genuine belief, and I hold it myself. I’ve spent decades studying evidence for the continuation of consciousness. I’m not here to take anyone’s comfort away. Just the opposite.

But some clouds are just avoidance dressed up as comfort.

It’s the story we tell so we never have to stand in the pasture and admit that someone is gone from our arms. The cloud lets us skip the ache. It lets us keep grazing.

The sheep aren’t wrong that something continues. They’re wrong that they can love without ever looking at the loss.

The Trick That Nearly Breaks the Flock

Here’s the part that really got to me.

The sheep have an ability, and it’s more dangerous than the cloud myth. When something painful happens, they can decide together to simply forget it. A whole flock, agreeing to look away. The hard thing dissolves, and the grazing continues.

It sounds like mercy. Who wouldn’t want a button that deletes the worst times of your life?

But the film understands something most of us learn the hard way. You cannot forget selectively.

When the sheep erase the pain of losing one of their own, they also erase the sheep that passed. The name. The warmth. The way that one stood a little apart from the rest. All of it goes, because you cannot reach into a life and pull out only the sharp parts.

The good and the painful are braided together. Cut one and the whole thing unravels.

The One Sheep Who Couldn’t Look Away

But one sheep can’t play along.

His name is Mopple, a Merino ram who never forgets a thing. While the rest of the flock wills itself into that merciful blankness, Mopple holds it all. Every face. Every loss. The whole history of the meadow, including the ones who are gone.

He remembers his mother. He carries what no one else will.

For most of the film, that looks like a curse. He’s the one who aches while everyone else goes numb. He bears the weight of memory alone so the flock can keep grazing in peace.

Sound familiar?

In almost every grieving family, there’s a Mopple. The one who won’t let the loss be tidied away. The one who says the name at the dinner table after everyone else has gone quiet. The one accused of “not moving on,” when really they’re just refusing to trade a person for a cloud.

If that’s you, hear this. What looks like being stuck is often love that simply refuses to look away. You’re carrying something precious for people who aren’t ready to hold it yet.

And here’s where the film lands. In the end, Mopple tells the flock the truth he’s been holding all along. It’s our memory that keeps the ones we love alive. What looked like a burden was really love, still doing its work.

The man who directed this understood that firsthand. Kyle Balda lost his own mother suddenly at twenty-three, and by his own account, he sprinted through the first year without ever stepping into the grief. He forgot the anniversary of her passing entirely, then felt like a monster when he realized it. He put himself into this film to say what he wished someone had told him: we forget because remembering is terrifying. But this is not the way through.

Why Grief Is an Act of Remembering

This is the heart of what I teach, and I’ve never seen it dramatized quite like this.

We treat grief like a wound to be closed. Get past it. Move on. Stop dwelling. As if the goal were to feel less, to remember less, to finally set it down.

But grief is the proof that you loved well.

To grieve is to keep remembering. To keep saying the name. To let the good memories and the hard ones sit at the same table, because they came from the same person, the same unrepeatable life.

The flock’s tragedy is that they’d rather feel nothing than feel everything. And we can’t choose to feel some things. It’s nothing or everything. And in choosing to forget, they don’t just lose their grief. They lose their loved ones a second time.

I’ve held people in my coaching work who arrived wanting the same thing the sheep wanted: to stop hurting. And what they discover, almost every time, is that they don’t actually want the memories gone. They want the memories to stop being only pain. Those are very different requests.

Planted, Not Buried

My whole philosophy lives in three words: planted, not buried.

I’ve learned that the love and the loss grow from the same soil. I keep Shayna’s picture on my desk, on my watch, in the foyer of my home. I keep her close on purpose. Forgetting her to spare myself the ache would cost me the joy of her too, because the ache and the joy grow from the same root.

Shayna is still my daughter. Remembering her fully, the laughter and the longing both, is how I keep her present rather than trading her for a cloud.

Her angelversary was just a week ago. I woke up, and the first feeling I had was anger. It hurt. But the only way to avoid that would be to not remember.

That’s the choice the sheep finally face. To remember is to hurt. But to remember is also to keep loving. You don’t get one without the other. So instead of choosing to forget George, their beloved shepherd, they finally choose to remember.

So can we.

What Would You Refuse to Forget?

If you could press the flock’s button, if you could forget your deepest loss and feel nothing at all, would you?

Most of us, when we sit with it honestly, wouldn’t. Because the memory is the love, and love was the whole point all along.

Kyle Balda finally stopped running from his mother’s memory. That turn is beautifully expressed by Kyla in this film. A man choosing, at last, to walk back into the grief he’d once spri…

There’s a door you’re afraid to open, and even more afraid will come bursting open. You know the door I mean.

It’s the one at the top of the basement stairs. You crack it open, look down into the dark, and shut it fast. Because something down there is rattling, and you’ve learned the hard way that if you go down, it pulls you under.

So you keep the door closed. You stay up here in the light, where it feels safer. You reach for the next good thing, the next distraction, the next reason to keep climbing toward something better. But the rattling never stops.

If you’re grieving, you have a basement like this. I do. The fears that come with grief don’t show up in the open. They live down there.

I had panic attacks as a child because of God.

Not because of death, or darkness, or the usual things that frighten kids. Well, yes, those things, but not because I feared being alone in the dark. I feared being there with hod.

The god I was taught was watching, always watching, and I was never quite good enough. He had created me to be born “in sin”. I was never quite safe. I walked around in a state of low-grade dread I didn’t have a name for, because nobody told me it had one. I panicked when the house was too quiet, fearing my family had been raptured and I was left behind.

Hypervigilance. Religious trauma. A nervous system that learned early that the universe was not on my side.

I was in my thirties before I started to understand what had been done to me. I’m 65 now, and I’m still working it out.

I spent forty years certain I would die young. I was terrified. I’m sixty-five today. And the strangest thing happened on the way here: the fear didn’t get worse as the end got closer. It disappeared.

When I was young, that fear was intense. I honestly thought I wouldn’t make it past twenty-five. The terror followed me into my thirties and forties. I expected to die before I really lived.

Then something shifted. As I blew past twenty-five, then thirty, then decade after decade after that, the fear didn’t intensify. The closer I came to the actual end, the less I feared it. Four decades past that original deadline, I can tell you that transformation is real.

It came through spiritual work. Through asking what consciousness actually is, and coming to understand that we’re not just bodies bound for the grave. It came through loss, through Shayna, through years of looking at the evidence around near-death experiences and what waits beyond. That evidence changed me at the level of experience, not just ideas.

The Checkbox That Says 65+

So here I am. Just like that, on every survey, I’m in the highest category for the rest of my life. I’m 64+. The body doesn’t work the way it used to. Blood pressure, kidney concerns, prostate concerns, all the things that come with being called elderly. Though “elderly” still doesn’t feel like me.

I drafted this article on my morning walk, talking it out mile after mile. I love that technology allows me to do that. I can listen to books while I’m on my walk. I can take in a podcast.

I marked the day by adding to the route. My usual walk is six miles. Today I threw in an extra half mile, so I could log one mile for every decade I’ve been here. That’s how sixty-five feels to me. Not a finish line. A reason to go a little farther.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. The body breaking down isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

The Design of Temporary

We’re not supposed to be here forever. Earth is a temporary home, and I believe the aging process exists to keep reminding us of that. Why else would our bodies lose hair where we want it, grow hair where we don’t, wrinkle, and grow that paunch we’re always trying to get rid of? Time is precious and limited. The body’s slow breakdown is actually a mercy. A constant nudge toward presence, toward intention, toward paying attention to what matters.

That doesn’t mean I want to suffer, and it doesn’t mean I’m ready to leave. The truth is I love being here, at this time, on this Earth. I’ve seen amazing things in sixty-five years, and I want to see more. I’ve had an amazing ride, and there’s still time left. The steak and scallops I enjoyed on Memorial Day were still delicious. The week I just spent in Myrtle Beach with my daughter and her fiancé was still joyful. Knowing this isn’t forever doesn’t pull me out of it.

But it does change something.

The Real Spiritual Work Happens in the Mess

People talk about Earth as a school, a gym, a place you come to learn. Fair enough. The thing is spiritual muscle doesn’t grow in a cave. Ironically, after writing this, I returned to my desk and realized I had a podcast interview this morning with a monk who had renounced her vows and returned to the world to share a much-needed message. Hmm…

Meditating in isolation, reaching for transcendence, that’s beautiful. It’s just not what I’m here for.

I’m here to get involved in all the junk. My dog Stevie is having health issues, too. I have to set up an appointment for her. I’m dealing with a podcast deadline and two interviews on my birthday. I’m here to reach for something deeper while I’m standing in the middle of the ordinary and the difficult.

That’s harder than enlightenment in solitude. And it’s probably more the point.

The body keeps reminding me of what I already know spiritually. We’re not just flesh and circumstance. We’re consciousness having a temporary human experience. The work that actually grows us isn’t escaping that tension. It’s learning to fly spiritually right in the middle of it. Natalie Sudman said that to be in a human body is like being a fighter pilot flying 50’ off the deck through a box canyon. This isn’t for the faint of heart.

What Sixty-Five Taught Me

I’m grateful for the time I’ve had, and I’m committed to being as productive as I can for as long as I can. Not because I’m afraid of aging, but because presence and purpose are the same thing. They happen now, while I’m still here.

The checkbox that says “65+” doesn’t define me. But it does make something clear. The spiritual life isn’t somewhere else. It’s here, in the mess, learning to love it anyway.

Father Time, you may be coming for me. But I’m not going to slow down for you.

And that fear I carried for forty years? It’s gone. What took its place is steadier and quieter: I know that death is a doorway, not an ending. Once you know that, you walk through your days differently.

I have spent most of my life afraid of making the wrong decision.

Not in a paralyzing way — I functioned, I decided, I moved forward. But there was always a low hum of anxiety underneath it. What if I missed something? What if more research would have changed the answer? What if the other choice was better?

It took me decades to figure out what was actually going on. And once I did, something shifted. I’ll tell you what but you have to stay to the end.

First, let me tell you about a car.

I spent yesterday watching two women fight the same battle — and neither one knew it.

One was my client, sitting across from me in the morning, wearing her daughter’s engineering school sweatshirt. The other was a stranger at a John Edward show that night, who stood up to ask a question about skeptics — and then admitted that the “skeptic” was her.

Same wound. Same brain doing the same thing. Both wanted to believe. Both believed at one time. But both admitted they were sabotaging their own happiness. Their brains were sabotaging their fulfillment.

Maybe yours does it too.

The Problem With Being Smart

My client is not naive. She’s done the work — read the books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, sat with some of the most respected mediums alive. We’re talking Mark Anthony, Fara Gibson, Suzanne Wilson, and Suzanne Giesemann.

Some readings hit her like lightning.

Others didn’t land as well.

And here’s where it gets painful: her brain took both of those facts and used them against her.

The readings that didn’t resonate? “See — maybe it’s not real.”

The readings that were extraordinary? ”Well, they probably looked me up.”

It was like confirmation bias in reverse. She wanted to believe. But her “skeptical” side kept telling her she was deluding herself.

I sat with her and said something I say a lot: we live in a world with 200 years of materialist culture at its back. For most of human history, the prevailing view was that we are spiritual creatures with lives beyond our biological limits.

This culture tells you, quietly and constantly, that consciousness ends at death, that what you can measure is all that exists, that hope beyond the grave is wishful thinking. Religion- pre-scientific nonsense. Realists live by science, what we can prove, what we can measure in the laboratory.

You have to actively work against that materialistic current.

The faith that grief cracked open in you? It doesn’t maintain itself.

I’m Still a Skeptic Too

Here’s something I don’t say often enough: I haven’t arrived.

I’ve sat with some of the most gifted mediums alive. I’ve had breakfasts, lunch, and dinners with them. I’ve attended dozens of demonstrations. I’ve designed experiments that ruled out cheating. And I still walk into every one of these events questioning.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s the only honest way to do this.

I told my client yesterday that this isn’t a destination you reach — it’s a never-ending journey of discovery. You don’t get to a point where you’ve collected enough evidence, and you’re done. The questions keep coming. That’s not a weakness. That’s intellectual integrity.

This past week, I engaged with a woman on YouTube who had posted what I’d call a hit piece on Helping Parents Heal and the mediums we work with. She told me, pointedly, that she’d be willing to share what she knows when I was ready to listen.

I took that seriously, even knowing her history and her hatred for mediums.

I don’t want to only look at one side of this. The moment I stop being willing to hear the other side is the moment I’ve become exactly what I’m arguing against — someone who’s decided what’s true and stopped looking.

My client asked me directly: do I believe any mediums are fraudulent?

Absolutely. Without question.

I think fraudulent mediums — people deliberately deceiving grieving families for money — are a small percentage. But there’s a larger group that deserves the criticism it gets: mediums who speak in generalities, who fish for hits, who throw out vague statements and work hard to make something fit. They may not be frauds in the intentional sense. They may genuinely believe they’re making a connection. But they’re not doing what the best mediums do, and they give skeptics legitimate ammunition.

That’s a fair criticism. I’ll own that.

What isn’t fair is taking that legitimate criticism and applying it to everyone — including the mediums who operate at a completely different level.

Because here’s the paradox: the better a medium is, the more likely they are to get accused of fraud.

John Edward told a story that night about a woman he read for on Crossing Over — a reading so precise, so accurate, that she walked away an unbeliever. She was a believer walking in and an unbeliever after. It was too good. Her brain couldn’t accept it as real, so it recast it as deception. The same thing happened with someone I referred to a medium whose a friend with the utmost integrity. The sitter emailed me after and accused her of fraud. Why? The reading had been too accurate. The medium knew things so precise she must have looked them up. Evidential mediumship is about exactly that. But because the medium was too good. She must be a fraud. In this world of Google and Facebook, you have to dig deep to find something that people couldn’t look up.

Mediocre mediums get dismissed because they’re mediocre. Exceptional mediums get accused of cheating because they’re exceptional.

The cynical mind always finds a door out.

What I Saw Last Night

A few hours later, I was at John Edward’s show.

I want to be clear about something before I describe what happened: I’m not someone who takes this on faith. I’ve spent years building relationships with mediums — having breakfast with them, dinner, drinks. I’ve had one of them in my home. I’ve watched them behind the scenes, seen what drives them, understood why they do what they do. I worked for Thomas John for a couple of years. I’ve volunteered on John Edward’s platform for a year and a half. I speak regularly with others.

This is not performance for them. It’s a calling.

And I’ve designed experiments — with Thomas John, for example — where cheating was structurally impossible. Not just unlikely. Impossible.

So I come to these events with eyes wide open.

What John did last night wasn’t a magic act. It was not entertainment. It was something far harder to dismiss. And it’s something way more profound.

John is a teacher as much as he is a medium. You might come to his “show” wanting a connection. You might come to be entertained. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of life, your role in it, and how you can do better in this life and the next. That is what John wants you to get out of his show.

In the way of evidence, he described to a woman about the moment she had to tell her son’s father — a man she wasn’t married to — that their son had died. He described her driving to that man’s house. He described the house itself. He described them meeting outside and walking in — and then said they didn’t sit down.

Try to look that up.

He said someone had a horse that died. While working with her, he seemed to get a detail wrong — two horses — but the woman sitting directly beside her had lost a horse too. The energy of both losses had arrived together. The horses had been stabled together.

He spoke about a family’s time in a critical care unit, and knowing that staff don’t allow families to eat and sleep there, he asked whether they had been given special permission to stay. They had. It was unusual. He knew. He described detailed familial relationships between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, generational patterns and encouraged the person getting the reading to be aware and careful— teaching!

These aren’t things you get from hot reading — from looking someone up before the show. They’re not in anyone’s Facebook profile.

And all of that was almost secondary.

What John Actually Does for Two Hours

John Edward could just deliver messages. That would be enough for most people.

He doesn’t do that.

For two full hours — and another 45 minutes for the VIPs — he teaches. About how to live. About how to interpret the patterns in your life using whatever language speaks to you: astrology, numerology, past life regression. About how to recognize the ways you’ve been carrying wounds from before you even knew you were carrying them.

A woman in the audience asked the question I’ve heard a hundred times: What would you say to a skeptic who wants to believe? John said, “Skeptic or cynic?”

Then s…