I sat beside my mother, holding her hand, knowing she was 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 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, 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.

For more than a century, the dominant scientific view was, simply put, that 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........

© Psychology Today