Episode 80: Story Time with Sandra #2

Bedside Visions, Signs, and an Interesting NDE.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast,
a paranormal podcast network where we offer you podcasts of
the supernatural and the unexplained. Getting ready now for Shades
of the Afterlife with Sandra Schamplain. The thoughts and opinions
expressed by the host our thoughts and opinions only, and

(00:22):
do not necessarily reflect those of I Heart Media, I
Heart Radio, Coast to Coast a out employees of premier
networks or their sponsors and associates. You are encouraged to
do the proper amount of research yourself, depending on the
subject matter and your needs. Hi. I'm Sandra Champlain. For

(00:45):
almost twenty five years, I've been on a journey to
prove the existence of life after death. On each episode
will discuss the reasons we now know that our loved
ones have survived physical death and so we welcome to
Shades of the Afterlife. Today on the show, we have
another story time with Sandra. I got such great compliments

(01:08):
on the first one, I thought we can do it
again with new stories. Before I do, I just want
to share a little life tip that I recently just
figured out. My mom's eightieth birthday is on the horizon,
and I've got a special gift planned for her. I
have ordered all kinds of fun short videos of different

(01:31):
people wishing her happy birthday, from family members to Kermit
the Frog to impersonators. There's a great site called five
which is f I V E r r dot com.
I'm not a paid advertiser for them or anything, but
it's what people will do for five dollars. So there's

(01:51):
a gentleman singing happy birthday to my mom with camels
behind him, and so many other things. Well, I'm putting
together of this montage of video clips that I will
present to her on her birthday, because what do you
get for someone who has everything? Well, it's a labor
of love. A video like this. I have found for

(02:12):
the last two weeks as I've been collecting these videos,
the anticipation I'm feeling of her watching it and the
joy she will feel, well I am feeling that joy
right now. So for the past two weeks, I keep
finding myself playing one of the videos, thinking how is
she going to react? So here is a little food

(02:33):
for thought. When you have something in the horizon, something
where you're making a difference for another, something that may
be a surprise. Let yourself get caught up in imagining
what it will be like to surprise that person. For me,
the moment she watches a video will be great. But
I can't even tell you how much joy I have

(02:55):
felt this past two weeks. So that just goes to
show whatever it is we have horizon impacts who we
are being today. So make sure you have things in
the future set that can inspire you and make you
feel good. All right, now, on to the episode. I
have a great book called Surviving Death by Leslie Keene

(03:20):
and Leslie is a journalist who her book was brought
to the attention of a filmmaker. You may have seen
it on Netflix the mini series Surviving Death. In the
mini series, you can meet Leslie find out about some
of her explorations. I had met her at a conference

(03:40):
a few years back and she gave me a copy
of her book. So there's some really wonderful stories in it,
and I thought we could have a little story time.
Leslie is an award winning journalist. She's a New York
Times best selling author, and her book Surviving Death is
based on facts and scientific study that include chapters by

(04:01):
medical doctors, psychiatrists, and pH d s from four countries. Yes,
I'm reading the back of the book. And in the book,
Keen enriches the narrative by including her own unexpected, confounding
experiences encountered while she probed the question concerning all of us,
do we survive death? I also would like to include

(04:23):
some stories from people who have had signs from loved
ones recently, because I think they're fantastic to hear what
happens with others, and that might allow you to be
on the lookout for some of these signs yourself. Plus,
I've uncovered a few jokes about the afterlife, so why
not put a smile on all of our faces? So

(04:44):
let's start with the first story. This one is called
actual Death Experiences from chapter eight of Leslie Keenes Surviving Death.
Pam Reynolds was a classically trained songwriter and orchestrator with
three children who live in Atlanta. In at the age
of thirty five, she was diagnosed with an aneurysm, a

(05:07):
bulge or ballooning in her blood vessel that can leak
or rupture. It was deeply embedded in her brain stem,
and she was told she had very little time to live.
She tried the one rare procedure that could give her
a small chance at life. Doctor Robert Spetzler, director of
the Barrow Neurological Institute and the Chairman of Neurosurgery in Phoenix, Arizona,

(05:32):
performed the risky surgery in which Pam was rendered as
reversibly dead as one can be. Spezler, a world renowned
neurosurgeon who specializes in cerebrow of vascular disease and skull
based tumors, has published more than three hundred articles in
a hundred and eighty book chapters in the neuroscience literature.

(05:54):
Spensler explained what happened to Pam in a two thousand
and seven interview. Pam Reynal had what is called a
giant Bassler artery aneurysm in the base of her brain.
To get there, you take off part of the skull,
including the roof of the eye. By taking away the bone,
you can create a space that goes right down along

(06:15):
the skull base, and then that gets us to the
area we need to expose for the aneurysm. You're going
underneath the brain. We use hypothermic cardiac arrest to treat
these very difficult aneurysms. For this technique, you lower the
body temperature down to sixty point eight degrees fahrenheit, which

(06:36):
is sixteen degrees celsius. You do that by hooking the
patient up to a heart machine, which cools the temperature
down until you get to that target temperature. The cardiac
team inserts a catheter into the groin that goes up
the artery, and then another which goes into the vein.
You have a catheter on either side of the heart

(06:56):
and that takes over the heart function. Then for up
to an hour, you can shut off that machine and
basically drain the blood out of the body, yet the
patient can still be resuscitated. Once the aneurysm is clipped,
the process is reversed, the pump is started back up
again and the blood is pushed into the body. The pump, now,

(07:19):
instead of cooling, warms the blood and gradually the body
temperature comes back up. Pam's whole body was extensively monitored
and her brain was monitored with e e g. Which
our brain waves and with what are called evoked potentials.
These are ways to make the nerves send very small
signals to the brain and normally you can average them

(07:41):
out and get a strong signal. You can use this
on someone who is as deep with anesthesia as you
can get now in a hypothermic cardiac arrest, those waves
completely disappear. They're gone, they are flat. There's absolutely no
brain extivity that we can detect. The surgery was successful

(08:04):
and Pam survived, but she was not unconscious, despite the
fact that she had no brain activity. Here to present
that story is Pam Reynolds herself. This information has never
before been made public. It is exclusive for this book. Sadly,
Pam died of heart failure in two thousand and ten

(08:25):
when she was only fifty three, almost twenty years after
her surgery. Here is her story. The doctor said that
the most they could do for me was try a
surgical process, but they could pretty much guarantee that it
would not be successful and death would be an imminent outcome.
I didn't have much choice. I had three little children,

(08:45):
so I had to go through it. Doctor Spetzler performed
the operation, but there were more people in that room,
and then I would have ever guessed to be in
an operating room during the stasis operation, which the doctors
who perform it have coined stand still. They cooled my
body down, and my heart stopped, my brain waves stopped functioning.

(09:06):
They tilted the end of the gurney up and drained
my blood like oil from a car, into a heart
lung machine, thereby shrinking the aneurysm. I'm told that's what happened,
but as I understand it, I was not there when
this was happening. I had been put to sleep. Doctor
Spetzler has since assured me that I was nearly comatose.

(09:29):
There is no way that I could have heard or
seen anything. My eyes were taped shut, and my ears
had speakers inserted in them, making a loud, clicking sound,
which were used to monitor the response by my brain. Nonetheless,
I began to hear a tone. It was guttural. It
was unpleasant. I did not like it. It drew my

(09:51):
consciousness like water from a well. And having done that,
I sort of popped out of my head to see
what this horrific noise was. My spantage point was rather
like sitting on the shoulder of the surgeon, and in
his hand I saw an instrument that was making the
offensive noise. I have heard the word saw all my life.

(10:11):
My father used to saw my grandfather used to saw.
Brain surgeons used saws. I had assumed they were going
to open up the skull with a saw, but this
was no saw. This thing was held more like a pencil.
It looked like a drill and actually reminded me of
an electric toothbrush. There was an open case very close
to it, and it had bits in it, and it

(10:33):
looked like the case that my father kept his socket
wrenches in when I was a small child, and I
noticed that one of these bits was attached to this
toothbrush thing. This was the thing that was causing the
noise that disturbed my slumber, and it was a very,
very very deep slumber. The feeling of exiting my body

(10:53):
was incredible. I've never weighed five hundred pounds, but it
was as if I had and I had just lost it.
I could move around at will. The thought process took
me where I wanted to go. I felt no more pain,
no more suffering, no more fear, no more anxiety. Even
for the sake of my children. All of those things

(11:14):
just disappeared when I left the body, and I was
free to wander around at will, unobstructed. It's clear to
me that while I knew what they were doing. They
didn't know I knew what they were doing. They thought
I was that thing lying on the table. It was undescribable.
It was beautiful to know that I was no longer

(11:35):
part of that thing. And by the way, I did
look at this body like it was just that a thing,
not me, not my body. Me was outside of it.
Being out of my body put me in a position
to be able to observe many things that were happening
in the operating room. Even as they were conducting surgery

(11:56):
on me, I heard a female voice, and the voice
was saying that the vain and arteries were too small.
I was concerned because they were working in an area
around my arteries, and I thought that this was brain surgery.
I had heard these horror stories about doing surgery on
the wrong place or removing the wrong limb. So I

(12:16):
tried to communicate to the lady who was communicating the
doctor about my veins and arteries being too small, that
that's not where she needed to be at all. And
it was at that point I realized that she could
not hear me. We're going to go into our first
break now. Her story is so amazing, how much she
could see even though she was technically flatlined. But before

(12:38):
we do, here's your first joke. What are supermarkets in
the afterlife called Heaven eleven? Let's go to the break.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the I
Heart Radio and Coast to Coast, a m paranormal podcast network.

(13:12):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain
and it is story time and I'm reading a story
from the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane. In this story,
we're hearing the words from Pam Reynolds, who underwent an
operation for a brain aneurysm. The doctors had told her
that there was a high probability of death, but she

(13:35):
went through with it anyways. So last we heard, she
was witnessing her own operation from outside of her body.
Here's more of her words. I began to sense a presence.
The feeling was like having someone looking over your shoulder
and yet there being no one there. So I sort
of turned around to look at it, and instead of

(13:57):
a person, I saw a very tiny pinpoint of light,
And as I focused on that light, it started to
pull me. And the pulling had a physical sensation that
went with it. It was like from my tummy going
over a hill real fast, and it pulled me. And
the closer I got to the light, the better I
could see the figures. The first figure I knew was

(14:18):
my grandmother, and I heard her voice calling me. But
it wasn't a voice that was made of vocal cords,
and it wasn't the same kind of hearing we have.
It was something different, and of course I went immediately
to her. There were so many people there, many I knew,
many I didn't know, but I knew somehow we were connected.

(14:39):
Didn't know how, but I knew. The people were wearing light.
They seemed to be made of light, the ones I recognized.
It's as if there had never been a separation between us.
There was that love, that warmth, that protection, and I
felt that I had been brought to this place to
be protected so that my body could be prepared, and

(15:02):
it felt wonderful. Then I saw my uncle, who had
passed away at the ripe old age of thirty nine.
He didn't use his mouth to communicate with me. He
did it in another way that I remembered from my
early childhood. He had the look he would look at
me and I would understand. And it didn't take long
until I understood that everyone communicated in this fashion. They'd

(15:26):
look at you and you just understood. I also describe
it as the knowing, because you just know, and all
of these people had this ability to just kind of look,
and I knew the quality of communication was much better
than what we have here because there it moves with
the speed of light. It's rather like being on the

(15:49):
other end of a pulsing laser. All you have to
do is think it, and the thought process is sent out.
There's no misunderstanding and what gets said, what gets said
is the truth. I asked my grandmother regarding the nature
of this light. My communication was is the light God?
And there was great laughter and she said, no, sweetheart,

(16:12):
the light is not God. The light is what happens
when God breathes. That was the communication. The physical landscape
was non existent. It was as if the bodies were
floating in mid air. There was light and shadow, but
it didn't seem to fall on anything. And that's what
convinces me that I was probably not in heaven. It

(16:35):
had colors like you wouldn't believe, but I probably was
in an in between place. I was on some sort
of a bridge on the way, because, let's not forget,
they would not let me into that light. The sound, however,
is an entirely different matter that really interests me as
a musician. I've been taught from the cradle that if

(16:56):
you put two tones too close together, what you get
is to coordance. But in the place where I was,
every being had their own tone, and every tone was
so close to the next. And yet when these tones
were put together, when everyone was sounding off, it was beautiful,
It was harmonic. It was beyond anything that I could

(17:17):
ever have dreamed of composing or directing. Here, I became
concerned as to whether or not I was really there.
I looked at my own hands and held them up
to my face. I saw something. I knew I was there.
I could feel me. The odd thing was, I didn't
feel so different than I feel here, and yet there
was no density in my flesh. But still I held

(17:41):
my hands up to my face to secure the knowledge
that I was still there. There came a time that
I knew I had to return to the body. My
uncle was going to take me, and that was fine.
I was okay with that until I saw the thing
and then I was not at all pleased. He told me,
think about your favorite food. Won't you miss your favorite foods?

(18:05):
Won't you miss your children? And I figured the children
would be okay, and then he said to me, it's
like jumping in a swimming pool, baby, just jump. I
looked down and saw the body jump with the first defibrillation.
I definitely did not want to get into that thing because,
to be honest with you, it looked like what it

(18:26):
was dead. I knew it would hurt. So my response
to him was, I know it's disrespectful and I'm a
southern girl, but it was a no. So he pushed me.
I hit the body at the second defibrillation of the
heart at the exact time that they achieved sinus rhythm,

(18:46):
and there I was alive and somewhat uncomfortable. It's taken
me a long time to forgive my uncle for that.
Getting back into the body was kind of like jumping
into a pool of ice water. It was shocking. Literally,
I could feel the shock and it was very unpleasant.
They used the paddles for the first time to try
to start my heart, and they didn't work. But the

(19:08):
second time they used them, combined with his pushing me
back into the body. They worked. I opened my eyes
and all of a sudden they were packing things away
and everything was done. You're not supposed to wake up
until you're in the recovery room. I woke up in
the operating room long enough to tell one of Dr.
Spetzler's neuroscientist fellows, who is today my friend, how extremely

(19:32):
insensitive he was under the circumstances, and to complain a
little bit about being shocked. He laughed at me and
told me I just needed to sleep some more. Afterward,
Dr Spetzler listened very closely to everything I said to him.
On the following day, he very firmly explained to me,
beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was not

(19:54):
a hallucination. He told me that what I described had
actually occurred. For examp Umble, they did have to to
bib relate me twice. Now, not even Doctr Spesesler remembered
that until he had my records and went over them,
and he found out, yes, it's true. The voice I
heard was indeed female, and later my doctors introduced me

(20:15):
to her. She was the head of the cardiovascular team
and she was doing a cut down. This is the
methodology by which they drew the blood from the body.
The first photograph I was shown of what I would
come to understand as the midas rex bone saw was correct,
and I called the physician doing research on this and

(20:36):
told him it was incorrect. It would be another year
before I would again have an opportunity to see a
midas rex bone saw, and this time it was indeed
the one I had seen. It did, from what had
been my vantage point, appeared to have a groove that
went into or around the bit, and it did look

(20:57):
like an electric toothbrush. When I had heard this thing
while out of my body, it was humming gutturally at
a perfect natural D. While in the doctor's hand I
don't know what it would hum if you laid it
on the table, but in his hand it was the
perfect natural D. I could clearly hear that tone. CBS

(21:18):
did a test on the saw, and at first they
said it didn't make a natural D, but a C
the next lower note on the scale, I have intrinsic
perfect pitch. No way, So I called the producer and
asked him what their methodology was for the test, and
they said that they got some styrofoam and laid it

(21:40):
down on that. I said, no, put it in a
living man's hand. Put it in Dr. Spetzler's hand. They did,
and it came out a perfect natural d I was
a believer when I left the hospital, and I wasn't
the only one. There were several staff members there who
said I wasn't the only case that they had seen

(22:01):
that was unusual in this regard. I know consciousness survives
the death of the physical body because I've had that
experience personally. Beyond that, I cannot, in truth know anything.
But in my opinion, what happened to me is evidence
of an afterlife. But let us weigh my opinion before
we call it a fact. What it is for me

(22:23):
could be totally different than what it is for you.
My arrogance extends as far as musicianship, but when it
comes down to science and philosophy, I completely lose my
sense of arrogance. Having this n d E, I no
longer fear death. I fear separation. I thought at first
that I wouldn't even fear separation, but there is no

(22:45):
experience that makes the separation okay when you lose someone.
But when my time comes, I will embrace death. In fact,
I know people who are dying right now, and I
envy them their journey. It's a wonderful, wonderful place to go.
But I just don't like being left behind. I don't
think any of us do. Some skeptics have argued that

(23:08):
Pam woke up during the process, and through anesthesia awareness,
she was able to hear what was going on in
the room so she could extrapolate enough to paint a
visual picture afterward. They attribute all elements of Pam's experiences
to physiological processes. Yet, in order to help monitor her brain,

(23:28):
Pam had speakers inserted into each ear that emitted continuous
loud clicks at a rate of eleven to thirty three
clicks per second at ninety to one decibels. That sound
was as loud as a lawnmower or passing subway train.
No one can observe or hear anything in that state.

(23:49):
Dr Spetzler said, I find it inconceivable that your normal senses,
such as hearing, let alone the fact that she had
clicking modules in both ears, that there is any way
for her to hear through normal auditory pathways. In addition,
Pam's eyes were taped shut. Pam's brain should not have
been capable of generating anything at all, Yet she was conscious,

(24:12):
and she reported that her conscious awareness was located outside
the body and was in no way dependent on her brain.
Some things I love about Pam's story is that the
doctor is open to talk about near death experiences. More
and more doctors are once they're finding out that other
doctors are sharing about it, so that's great. And that

(24:34):
there's some verifiable evidence what she did experience these sounds,
the natural d that she says was verified. Also that
the bone saw did look like the electric toothbrush exactly
how she saw it. I'm going to leave you with
just a quick funny. What do vegans eat in the afterlife?

(24:56):
And the answer is the Beyond Burger And for those
of you who don't know, in the United States, they
have plant based vegan products and the company is Beyond.
We'll be back in just a second. You're listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the I Heart Radio and
Coast Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades

(25:38):
of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and on this segment,
I want to read a little bit more from the
great book Surviving Death by Leslie Keene. Her last name
is spelled k e A. And in case you want
to pick up the book. But before we get onto that,
I want to give you another joke. And why make
light of the afterlife? Well, the truth is it's a

(26:01):
joyful place. It's a place where we can have anything
we want, do anything we want, be with the people
we love and pets included. The hardest part is being
here on earth, being left behind, experiencing grief. So if
I can put a little smile on your face, I'm
going to do that. Well, actually, let me give you two.

(26:22):
Here's one. Did you hear about the new Italian restaurant
that opened in the Afterlife? It's called passed Away? Get
it like passed Away pasta? I know I'm crazy. Okay,
here's another one. Did you hear about that new show
on TV with the nun who ruled over Heaven? Now
this is multiple choice. Guess what the name of the

(26:44):
show is A The Heir to Heaven, b Hi, I'm
up Hi? Or see Girls Rule the Afterlife? Well, whatever
you answered, it was wrong. It's none of the above.
Get it none and u n None of the above? Yes,
I know this is eight year old humor, but you

(27:05):
know it's the best I can do. All right, let's
continue on this next part that I'd like to read
you is by Dr Peter Fenwick, who is a neuropsychiatrist
in the UK. He has published over two hundred papers
on brain function. He has been part of the editorial
board for a number of journals and he's had a

(27:28):
longstanding interest in the mind brain connection, the problem of consciousness,
and has conducted extensive research into the end of life phenomena.
So this is by Dr Peter Fenwick. Throughout the centuries,
mankind has wondered what happens after death, and virtually every
culture throughout recorded history there are indications of rituals associated

(27:53):
with the dead, and evidence that they might have been
buried with some sense of expectation of an afterlife. Hunter
gatherers believed that the dying would leave their bodies and
journey to their ancestors. The concept of journeying at death
is still central today to the understanding of death in

(28:13):
most parts of the world. The reductionist scientific culture of
the West is almost alone in its unshakable belief in
the finality of death. The slowly progressing scientific dominance of
a materialistic view has led us to abandon the concept
of the transcendent. It is argued that consciousness is formed

(28:36):
entirely by the brain. The idea of the journey after
death has almost completely disappeared from the scientific perspective, and
we are left with a random universe where dying is
simply a mechanical process. However, recent studies of the mental
states of the dying suggest that this is too limited

(28:57):
a view. I am a neuropsychiatrist, which means that I've
been trained in the understanding of the brain and its functioning,
as well as in the nature of the mind, so
I stand in the zone between mind and brain. I
have studied the dying process and written scientific papers in
peer reviewed journals to disseminate a new view of what

(29:19):
actually happens when we die, and to ask what the
experiences of the dying could contribute to our understanding of consciousness.
A number of studies has suggested that before dying, many
people will experience death bed visits from dead relatives, which
reassure the dying that the process of death is not

(29:40):
as terrifying as they may have believed. The first attempt
at a systematic scientific study of these apparitions was made
by Sir William Barrett, a physicist whose interest in the
topic was aroused when his wife, an obstetrician, told him
about a patient of hers who began to see visions

(30:00):
as she lay dying. She mentioned seeing not only her
dead father, but also her sister. Her sister had indeed
died three weeks earlier, but the patient, because of her
delicate condition, had not been told the fact that, so
far as the patient knew, her sister was alive and well,
but she had seen her in the company of her

(30:22):
father that she knew to be dead. So impressed Sir
William that he began to collect similar experiences. His book,
Deathbed Visions concluded that these experiences were not merely a
byproduct of a dying brain, but could occur when the
dying patient was lucid and rational. He also reported a
number of cases in which medical personnel or relatives shared

(30:47):
the dying patient's vision. I began to study these deathbed
visions myself in two thousand and three after a review
of the scientific literature persuaded me that this was an
area that had not and properly addressed. My examination has
not been limited to death beta visions, but includes many
other end of life experiences e l e. S such

(31:11):
as the dying moving in and out of alternate realities,
or caregivers witnessing light at the moment of death. With
a group of colleagues, we started the process by looking
at accounts of what happens when people die. We drew
up a questionnaire asking about these phenomena and gave it
to the members of a palliative care team in North

(31:33):
London and to medical staff, nurses, care workers, volunteer and clergy,
and two hospices and a nursing home in the South
of England. In order to control for culture, we also
carried out the study and three Dutch hospices. In addition,
we collected over fifteen hundred email accounts from the general

(31:54):
public and interviewed doctors, nurses, auxiliary staff and chaplain, giving
us a good idea of the detailed mental states of
the dying. Analysis of this data has provided a comprehensive
picture that is far from the mechanical model of death.
We found accounts of people having premonitions of their own

(32:16):
or another's death, tales of clocks, stopping, strange animal behavior,
light seen in the rooms of the dying, and shapes
seen leaving the body. Did these events actually occur or
were they just fantasies of the dying. The data have
also shown quite conclusively that these e l e s

(32:37):
are far more common than has previously been acknowledged. One
recent paper suggests that, in fact, they occur in over
sixty of those people who die while conscious. The present
consensus is that over fifty of those dying consciously will
have an e l E and are likely to get
reassurance and help from the dying process. Us Here we

(33:01):
will focus on those e l s and bear some
relationship to the near death experience or the survival of
consciousness after death. All of them suggest that consciousness is nonlocal,
more a field structure than something created by the brain.
This is revealed at the approach of death, when consciousness

(33:22):
begins to separate from the body and enter into expanded awareness.
So he goes on to talk about deathbed visions. Deathbed
visions have been largely ignored by the medical profession. Though
they are well known to and often reported by nurses
and relatives who care for the dying, They are not
dependent on religious belief, though they may be influenced by

(33:46):
culture and strong Christian societies. For example, angels are often seen,
but these are very seldom reported in more secular societies.
Often the occurrence of a vision is inferred by those
watching because of the way the dying person behaves, rather
than anything they say, and often, of course, by the

(34:06):
time they die, they are already beyond speech. In this case,
it may be a change and expression their face lights
up as they have seen someone they recognize and love,
or they may reach out as if towards some invisible
presence so absolutely real to these apparitions seem that the
dying person is often witnessed interacting with them and expecting

(34:30):
others to do the same. One of the many nurses
who has witnessed this told us this story. I was
attending a patient with a fellow nurse again around four
in the morning. The male patient asked us to stand
one on each side of him because he wanted to
thank us for looking after him. Then he looked over

(34:50):
my shoulder towards the window and said, hang on, I'll
be with you in a minute. I just want to
thank these nurses for looking after me. The patient repeated
himself a couple of times, and then he died. A
district nurse told us this very typical story of an
eighty eight year old lady. She used to visit once
a week to help and supervise the family who were

(35:12):
giving her care. She eventually became weaker and was semi conscious,
only reacting to painful stimuli. She died, and I visited
the next day to help. Her daughter said that she
was lying peacefully and suddenly sat bolt upright with a
beaming smile on her face, and said, Joe, how nice

(35:34):
of you to come and see me. Joe was her
deceased husband. Then she lay back down and died soon after.
The daughter was very sensible and practical and really believed
that her father had just visited. What virtually all these
experiences had in common was that they were very seldom frightening.

(35:56):
The dying are always pleased to see their visitors and
calm or even joyous after the visit. The visits are
also comforting to the family, who are told about or
witnessed the positive effect on the relative. In our own studies,
the most common visitors were parents, spouses, and other close

(36:18):
relatives four percent. This is similar to the near death experience,
in which dead relatives, friends, and spiritual beings appear about
forty one of the time. Could both experiences be representing
the same other dimensional reality. One of my favorite stories
of a deathbed visitation was talking to this lady on

(36:40):
an airplane. She suggests before her mother had died, all
she was doing was complaining, I really want a cigarette.
I really want a cigarette. And of course she couldn't
have a cigarette in the hospital. And then just before
she passed, her daughter says, you're no longer asking for
a cigarette, and she says no, because your dad is
here and I don't want him smelling the smoke on me.

(37:03):
Ah sweet. Anyways, we're going to go into the break,
but I can't leave you here without one last afterlife joke.
It's something you've heard before, but you're going to hear
it in a whole another way. Ready, Why did the
chicken cross the road to get to the other side.

(37:25):
I know I'm silly, but I love it. Let's take
our break and then we'll talk about some signs from
our loved ones. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife
on the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast, a
m paranormal podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife.

(37:59):
I'm Sandrew Champlain. We were having some story time and
now I want to use this segment to talk about
signs from our loved ones, and I want to have
a very real conversation with you now. If you are
someone who has recently had a loved one pass, I
give you such sincere condolences. It is the hardest thing

(38:23):
that we humans will have to go through ever. Ever,
it is the most bitter kind of pain, and grief
is an absolute nightmare. So with that, I do have
some help. If you want a free copy of my book,
you can certainly have one if you go to We
Don't Die dot com, go to the store page, click

(38:44):
on audio book and use coupon code free f R
E And when you open the book, there's also the
PDF version if you'd rather read it. Chapter ten is
How to Survive Grief. I give you everything I've got
to understand and the world of grief. Why it has
to hurt so bad, what's happening within our biology that

(39:06):
makes it hurt so bad, How we are readjusting to
a new reality, how our circuits aren't firing correctly, how
we're very tired, how we go through a whole range
of emotions, were often forgetful. There's so many things, so
please make sure you use that. That being said, the

(39:28):
real conversation I want to have about signs from our
loved ones is not if you are newly bereaved. This
is for those of us who have had a loved
one who has passed, and it's been some time now,
some time that we've had that our emotions aren't always
on edge, that we don't cry at the drop of

(39:50):
a dime, that we've had a little space between when
our loved one has passed, and now now, certainly our
loved ones can give us signs at any time. Certainly
they can. There are so many stories of people suffering
really horrific grief, and a favorite song that you might
have shared with your loved one will come on the radio,

(40:11):
or you might get a whiff of their cologne. They
are doing everything possible to let us know we are
still here, we haven't died, and their love is as
strong now, if not stronger than when they were alive.
But it's very hard for them to get through. There
are things that we can do on our side to

(40:34):
help more signs come in now. We still have our
personalities when we cross over. Someone who is very shy
and quiet may not start turning the lights on and off.
Someone who is younger, who might be really smart with
technology and may have worked on computers, you could get

(40:56):
some random emails from their email address, even though there
is no possible way that they could physically send them.
Our personalities go along with the signs we give. We
are also given the choice when we're in the afterlife
if we want to give signs. There are some people
that know that it's only a blink of an eye

(41:17):
and you'll be together again, as there's no time in
the afterlife, so while they might do some signs, they
may not be as active as others giving you signs
that they're still alive. When we cross over, we have
a world very similar to what we have here. We
can create with our thoughts, we can communicate with our thoughts,

(41:39):
and it's a pretty cool place to go forward with
your education as a soul, so to speak, lots to learn,
lots to do things that we couldn't do here on
earth or we didn't get a chance to do, we
can do over there, so it sounds pretty cool, right. However,
they may be busy doing that that they're not concentrating

(41:59):
two hours a day, seven days a week trying to
give us signs. Like I said, there are things we
can do to help get more signs, and one of
the things is to be really committed that you'd like
signs and you'd like to keep this relationship as strong
as possible. Our friend Sonya and Aldi, who I've shared

(42:22):
about many times, who is a subject of the new
documentary film, gets so many pictures, images, words, messages that
comes through her technology. It's insane, it's amazing. And when
I ask her what is the single best piece of
advice you could give someone who wants to record electronic

(42:46):
voice phenomena or wants to try to get a picture
of their loved one in through technology by filming static
or something like that, her words are commitment, commitment, commitment.
She feels very strongly that there's a team of scientists
on the other side that are working with loved ones
trying to do this, and if we just show up

(43:08):
once trying to do an experiment, and then maybe we
try it again a few months down the road, well,
they don't take us as seriously as someone who week
after week has a schedule and is working with their
loved one to either get signs or work with technology
like this, because the afterlife is real, and because we

(43:31):
are still people when we get there, we have to
keep talking to them getting signs. Doing these different experiments
really takes keeping the relationship alive. If you choose that
you want to lose weight and you want to exercise
and get a strong body, we all know what we
need to do right eat less than exercise. Knowing makes

(43:53):
no difference. It's really having a plan and really being
committed to it. What's difficult with our loved ones in
our unseen world is we can't get or we may
not get immediate gratification. Whereas if you exercise you can
actually feel yourself getting stronger or losing weight. You can

(44:14):
step on a scale. Our loved ones work so subtly
through our imagination. They use our energy to do some
of these signs. How they do some of it, I
have no idea, and I do think once we get
there we will figure it out. But for the time being,
we need to offer everything we can. So have a

(44:38):
calendar schedule times that you'll sit and talk to your
loved one, even if you're sitting at your kitchen table
like I am right now, there's an empty chair across
from me. Picture your loved one sitting there, have conversations
like you would if they were alive, because they are.
You can journal things. You can say, I'll meet you

(45:01):
same time tomorrow. You can do something like close your
eyes and ask them to step into your personal space.
Depending on your relationship, that is, you can ask them
to put a kiss on your forehead. And the more
present you can become, the more you'll start feeling these
subtle changes of energy. We talk a lot about being

(45:24):
in the present moment. A busy brain cannot pick up
loved one's signs. It just can't. You're too busy thinking
about the past or the future, or checking your phone
for messages, and meanwhile, your loved one might be sitting
in the car right next to you. It takes a
present mind, living in the present moment to pay attention

(45:45):
to what's happening. So that's a little bit of tough
love about getting signs. We'll know how it all works
once we get there, but for now, if you want
more signs, my request is that you put in a
little of the world to let your loved one know
that you're willing to work with them. You set a

(46:05):
time and you pay attention. Like I said, they work
through our imagination. You could get a slide show of
memories that just show up in your mind. You could
pull up to a car and the license plate is
your loved one's name. If you're paying attention, you'll notice
that'll be a sign. So I'm going to leave you
with some signs that I've just recently found from great people.

(46:30):
Let these be an idea for you. Okay, here's a
nice one. Speaking of license plates, this is from Annie.
A few months after my mother passed, we were very
close and I saw a license plate that read Lucy.
I was stunned. Her name is Lucy and she was
born in I saw that license plate two more times

(46:55):
and was able to take a picture of it. She
has sent me hundreds of signs since two thou and
in three and I either see or hear her name
almost every day, so I know she's always with me.
And this one from Gina. I got a side hug
on my shoulder from my father in law one day
when I was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes.

(47:17):
I thought it was my husband, but when I turned around,
he was not there. He was sitting in his den.
I was scared, but my first thought went to my
father in law, Carl, because we were very close. Like
I said, they worked through our imagination, so we can
use our psychic sense, our intuition to let us know
who is there. And how about this one from Michelle.

(47:40):
The day my dad died, it was pouring rain. It's
Arizona and there was no chance of rain. The sky
cleared hours later while we were waiting for the police
and the paramedics and the crisis team to leave, suddenly
there appeared a double rainbow. It disappeared, and the officers
then came out and said you can leave. A week later,

(48:01):
I had the urge to clean out my kitchen cupboard,
the top one with the stuff I never use. There
was a card in there that said, daughter, if only
you could see how beautiful you are through my eyes
from my dad. I broke down crying for a couple
of hours. I stepped back up on the ladder again
to check the back of a cupboard and there was

(48:23):
a postcard of a double rainbow. I have lived in
this home for three years and never saw this and
it was not mine. Well it is now. I'm so
grateful and I see double rainbows everywhere. My friend William Peters,
who is the author of At Heaven's Door, talking about
shared death experiences, told the most beautiful story of a

(48:46):
gentleman who had passed and he was so filled with life.
His nickname was the human exclamation point. And they had
a celebration of his life after he passed and put
flowers in the ocean, really beautiful with just hundreds of people,
and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky until
one cloud formed, and it was exactly an exclamation point.

(49:11):
As we said in the beginning, our loved ones communicate
through thought. Just because we are in a human body
doesn't mean we don't connect the same way. So it's
so important that we send out our thoughts to them
and we are open to receive their thoughts to us.
It does come in the way of imagination. Please don't

(49:34):
fall into the human behavior of thinking, oh it's just
my imagination. It is them and they love you, and
their love is real. So remember to go to We
Don't Die dot com, check out the Sonya Naldi movie.
It just want to a Film Award for the Best
Research Documentary. I love you, I'm glad you're listening, and

(49:56):
we'll see you next time. This is Sandra Champlain and
you've been listening two Shades of the Afterlife on the
I Heart Radio and Coast Coast AM Paranormal podcast Network.
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife,

(50:17):
wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for
listening to the Heart Radio and Coast to Coast a
m paranormal podcast network.