Feeling Her After She Died, What If I’m Not Imagining It?

I sit beside my mother, holding her hand, knowing she is close to her last breath. I had pictured this moment many times in the past few weeks, knowing it was coming and couldn’t be stopped, but what happened next was beyond anything I’d imagined.

I felt her as she left, from the inside. The closest I can come to describing it is a hug, not the kind of hug my mother and I shared when she was still in her body, but one beginning in my heart and radiating outward, carrying with it a rush of peace and warmth and joy and of being so deeply loved that I smiled. It’s a sensation I can’t rationally explain, and with it came a certainty, absolute, that everything was more than okay.

In the hours that followed, the grief came, because of course it did, but beneath it was something steadier, a current of her presence that arrived in that moment and never left. Instead of her absence defining my days, I feel her presence in a new (interior) way, and, most of the time, I feel what I can only call calmer than I have any right to feel.

As a researcher and practicing clinician, I know much of the literature over the past hundred years explains experiences like mine away, as projection, wishful thinking, or the mind softening an unbearable loss. But I know what I’m feeling, and over the past few years, the research has begun to offer a deeper account of consciousness and of death and of what it means to remain connected to someone who has left their body behind. And it lines up with my experience…

The Broken Radio

For more than a century, the dominant scientific view was, simply put, the brain produces consciousness and when the brain dies, consciousness ends. But this view has its problems, and Masi (2023) explains them neatly: in instance after instance, people with “less brain” demonstrate intact or enhanced consciousness. He cites savant abilities emerging after brain injury; patients with severe dementia suddenly gaining remarkable clarity before death; and children with massive hydrocephalus (virtually no cortical tissue) scoring well on cognitive tests. Each one is the opposite of what the brain-produces-consciousness theory would predict.

So researchers began asking, if the brain doesn’t produce consciousness, where does consciousness come from? Woollacoot and Weiler (2025), writing in the International Review of Psychiatry, examined the brain’s neural filters and offered an answer: there exists a wider consciousness and our brains simply tap into it and filter it into the smaller consciousness each of us experiences. When the filters are widened through deep meditation, psychedelic states, or near-death experiences, awareness expands and people report transcending time and space, access to information beyond the usual senses, and ego dissolution. Death is the ultimate removal of these neural filters and represents not the end of consciousness but its fullest expansion.

Woollacott and Weiler aren’t alone. Researchers Moreira-Almeida (2025) and Tallarico (2026) offer strikingly similar views, and together they make compelling arguments that consciousness is not produced by the brain, but received by it. When the brain stops, consciousness goes on, like a radio breaking but the music playing on.

Still Being With

Encouraged, I wondered what the latest literature might say about my sitting beside my mother’s emptied body and feeling her presence with me like a warmth.

First, it told me that my experience isn’t uncommon. Sweeney et al (2026) conducted a systematic review of 14 studies involving 1,971 bereaved participants, all reporting ADCs (after death communications). They concluded these were “relationally meaningful experiences” that “facilitated continuing bonds with the deceased.”

But the research went further still, asking if contact with the deceased could be verified. Delorme et al (2013) measured EEG during sessions where mediums were given only a first name and asked questions about the deceased person. Three of four mediums scored significantly above chance on accuracy, and their mental state showed electrocortical signatures distinct from ordinary thinking, from imagination, and from recalling a known living person. When Paraná et al. (2019) examined a letter written by the Brazilian medium Chico Xavier, said to be written on behalf of a deceased person, all 29 objectively verifiable details in it, names, dates, and highly private events, were rated a “clear and precise fit,” leading the researchers to conclude that ordinary explanations such as fraud, chance, information leakage, and cold reading were highly unlikely… and leading a reader such as myself to believe that nothing short of contact with the deceased could account for it.

My Mother

For a long time, my mother was afraid to die, seeing it as the final separation from everyone she’d ever loved. In the weeks prior to her death, I told her what I believe: death is not the separation she feared, but its opposite, the raindrop falling back into the ocean, the homecoming to the largest village there is.

I believe this now more than I did then, because now I feel it. She’s not gone, not distant, simply here in a way that is more than memory and stronger than grief. She crossed over, and instead of losing her, I found her in a new way, a hug from the inside that has not ended.

That’s what the research is beginning to recognize: Mom’s consciousness wasn’t extinguished; it was liberated, freed from the neural filters that contained it in a single body. And I, still here in filtered consciousness, felt her expanding consciousness, warm and immediate, arriving from inside.

My mother is with me. I’m certain of it.