‘You  are liquid love in human form.’ – Abraham Hicks

Love and light were recurring themes at the recent Art of Dying conference in New York, where more than 30 professionals, who tend to the dying, deceased and the grieving, spoke about their experiences. Olivia Barham, a death midwife, told how when her mother died, she got permission to wash her body in hospice and recalled ‘I was crying tears of liquid love as I held her. I felt an energy field and expansion like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.’

Peter Fenwick, the British neuropsychiatrist, who has amassed an extraordinary trove of stories of death bed phenomena (in particular how spirits reach out to the dying and to loved ones in the room) told how when a friend died, ‘Rivers of golden light made up of love were streaming through the room…light is a part of most transcendent experiences.  It usually has an amazing quality of love, compassion and transformation.’

Megory Anderson, a theologian who works with hospice and hospitals summed up the conference when she said: ‘Death is a powerful spiritual experience.  It is in that liminal space where the soul connects to the transcendent, even when it is messy and not peaceful.’

I’ll be posting more from the conference in the next few weeks, especially Jeanne Denney’s lovely theory about the pulse of life and death.  And Dr Kenneth J Doka on grief.  Dr Doka, a senior consultant in the Hospice Foundation of America, reported that  60 percent of people have some form of post death experiences (of a loved one reaching back to contact them). ‘We have a continuing bond and we don’t detach,’ he said. He told  his own story of a loved one’s spirit contacting him and the extraordinary sensation of love. ‘Every cell of my being felt like it was individually hugged.’