I used to think “passed away” was just a euphemism. A way to avoid the hard truth. I thought, “Why do they say passed away, transitioned, or went home?” Just be plain. “He died." Don’t sugarcoat it.” My first grief counselor told me, “When you can say ‘died instead of something like passed away,’ you’re on the road to healing.” But the more I learned, the more I realized we “plain speak people” had it backwards. “Died” is the lie. It means cessation. The end of life. But you cannot cease to be. You ARE life. You Are Not Your Body Here’s what I mean. If you were your body, would you be the same person as the baby that was born with your name? Think about it. Your cells turn over constantly. Skin cells every few weeks. Red blood cells every few months. Most of your body replaces itself every seven to ten years. Virtually none of the cells in your body now are the same cells from when you were born. Certainly, none of the molecules. You eat, you assimilate, you eliminate. There’s constant turnover. Your body is made up of completely different stuff than newborn you, five-year-old you, or even you from a decade ago. The Ship of Theseus—the ancient philosophical paradox—asks: if you replace every plank of a ship, one by one, is it still the same ship? Your body is that ship. It’s been completely rebuilt dozens of times over your lifetime. Yet you’re still you. Why? Because what’s continuous isn’t your body. It’s your consciousness. Your Brain Is a Receiver, Not a Creator of Consciousness We’ve been taught that the brain creates consciousness the way a generator creates electricity. But the evidence points to something different. Your brain is more like a filter. A receiver. Like a radio picking up a signal that exists whether the radio is turned on or not. When the radio breaks, the music doesn’t cease to exist. The broadcast waves are still out there. You just can’t hear it anymore through that particular device. This isn’t just philosophy. Near-death experiencers tell us this consistently. They report expanded consciousness when the brain is compromised. Enhanced awareness when the filter is damaged. They describe experiences that are often more vivid, more real than normal waking consciousness. The brain seems to reduce experience, not create it. Dr. Pim van Lommel’s research showed NDEs occurring during measurable periods of no brain activity. How do you have a lucid experience with a non-functioning creator of consciousness? Because consciousness doesn’t originate in the brain. Even the Government Knows Consciousness Isn’t Local If you think the idea that consciousness exists beyond the body is just wishful thinking, think about this: the U.S. government spent over 20 years and $20 million studying it. From 1972 to 1995, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency ran a classified program called Stargate. The mission? To see if consciousness could gather intelligence from locations thousands of miles away. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute developed protocols for “remote viewing”—the ability to perceive and describe distant locations without being physically present. And it worked. Remote viewer Pat Price, a former police officer, was given only geographic coordinates for a target site in the Soviet Union. What he described was startling: a large building near water, people assembling a massive 60-foot diameter metal sphere from curved sections, workers struggling with welding because the pieces kept warping. He sketched what he “saw” in remarkable detail. Three years later, Aviation Week magazine published a story about the Soviet atomic bomb laboratory at Semipalatinsk. The sphere Price had described—which he’d drawn as about 58 feet in diameter—was real. It was designed to capture and store energy from nuclear-driven explosives. Russell Targ, a physicist, later said: “The accuracy of Price’s drawing is the sort of thing that I as a physicist would never have believed, if I had not seen it for myself.” The program achieved a reported accuracy rate of 65% or higher in later experiments. Remote viewers located a downed Soviet aircraft in Africa. They described hidden Soviet military installations. They identified the location of a kidnapped American general in Italy. For over two decades, the government used this capability because it demonstrated something they couldn’t ignore: consciousness can operate independent of the physical body. It can access information across vast distances without any known physical mechanism. Think about what this means. If your consciousness can “see” what’s happening thousands of miles away while your body sits in a room in California, then consciousness clearly isn’t created by your brain or confined to your skull. The government knows this. They studied it. They used it. They just don’t talk about it much. This isn’t fringe science. This is documented, declassified government research that ran for over 20 years because it produced results. Consciousness is non-local. It’s not bound by space. It’s not confined to the body. And if it’s not confined to the body in this life, why would it be extinguished when the body stops functioning? Immediately Outside the Body Let’s move from a subject in a lab to the real world. One of the most common features of near-death experiences is what happens in the first instant. People don’t report confusion or darkness or a gradual fading. They report finding themselves immediately outside their bodies, watching the scene unfold. About one in ten cardiac arrest patients reports a near-death experience. Of those, roughly a quarter describe out-of-body experiences where they observe medical personnel performing resuscitation efforts. This account from a woman who experienced complications during childbirth is but one of thousands of examples. The obstetrician yelled, “Get her into the O.R. now!” and suddenly she found herself—the essence of herself—floating in the corner of the labor room, near the ceiling, looking down on the scene. She watched as they rushed her body to the operating room and tried to resuscitate both her and her baby. She felt no emotion. Just observation. Just awareness. Or the case of Pam Reynolds, perhaps the most documented near-death experience in medical literature. In 1991, Pam underwent brain surgery to remove a dangerous aneurysm. The procedure required lowering her body temperature to 60 degrees, stopping her heart, and draining the blood from her brain. Her brainwave activity flatlined. By every medical measure, she was clinically dead. During the operation, she heard the bone saw start up—a sound she described as “a natural D.” She felt it pull her out of the top of her head. Suddenly, she was floating above the operating table, watching Dr. Spetzler work. She saw the surgical saw, which she said looked “like an electric toothbrush.” She observed the interchangeable blades stored in “what looked like a socket wrench case.” She heard the surgeon say, “Her arteries and veins are too small,” followed by “Use the other side.” Her eyes were taped shut. Her ears were plugged with speakers emitting clicks to monitor her brainstem. She was under deep anesthesia with no detectable brain function. Yet every detail she reported was later confirmed as accurate. How does someone with no brain activity, eyes taped shut, and ears plugged see, hear, and remember precise details about a scene? Because they were there. Just not in their body. There Isn’t Even an Interruption Near-death experiencers say something remarkable about the moment of transition. Some leave through the tops of their heads, some through their chest. Some just “pop” out. But, there’s no gap. No darkness. No void. No fade to black. You’re here, then you’re there. One woman told me, “It was like walking from one room into another. Completely seamless.” Another said, “I didn’t die. I woke up.” A third described it as, “I felt more aware than normal. My vision was brighter, more focused, clearer than normal vision. I was absolutely me—without the body.” Think about that. The moment we call “death”—the thing we fear most—isn’t experienced as an ending at all. It’s a continuation. A shift in location, not a cessation of being. The body stops. But you don’t. Dying Is Like Leaving Your Old Car Behind Dying is like leaving your old car behind when you get a new one. My car was just totaled. The car is left behind. Broken down. No longer functional. But I moved on. I was never the car. I was the driver. The body dies. Consciousness continues. This isn’t wishful thinking or spiritual bypassing. It’s what the evidence points to. What thousands of near-death experiencers report. What the research into consciousness suggests. What the government’s own classified programs confirmed. And it changes everything about how we understand grief. What This Means for Grief When my daughter Shayna passed, everyone told me she “died”, including that first grief counselor That word carried so much weight. So much finality. It meant I had to “accept” that she was gone. That she ceased to exist. That there was nothing left of the person I loved. But as I studied near-death experiences, spoke with mediums, researched consciousness, I realized the truth. She didn’t die. She couldn’t die. She passed away. She transitioned. She went home. She crossed over. Those aren’t euphemisms to soften the blow. They’re the most accurate descriptions we have for what actually happened. Her body stopped functioning. But she—the consciousness, the essence, the person I knew and loved—continues. This doesn’t eliminate grief. The loss is still profound. The absence is still painful. But it transforms the nature of what we’re grieving. We’re not grieving someo
