Before I get into the juicy bits, I need to offer a quick recap of the last year. I’ll make this quick, promise! I’m still in the learning/pre-professional medium stages. I continue to have experiences with the other side, but usually I’m simply practicing online with other mediums. We trade readings with each other to hone our skills, and it’s extremely helpful! BUT, I find this to be harder, actually, than readings with “normal” folks. As an example, and it may sound silly, but I talk to my grandparents every week; There isn’t a lot unsaid at this point. So, naturally, I find that the spirits coming through aren’t doing so with a lot of urgency because, like I said, my medium friends and I talk to them all the time! If you’ve been following along, you know that’s a lot different than most of my readings in the past… i.e. those ones that tend to come out of nowhere and hit me with a hard shot of anxiety. I now know that means someone up there is tapping me on the shoulder to stop what I’m doing and listen, ’cause they’ve got something important to say!

That said, the prospect of doing readings for people (people who REALLY need it) is scary for sure. When someone puts their trust in me to bring their loved ones through, the responsibility I feel to make sure I am getting it right can be overwhelming. (Which is why I’m still merely practicing!) SO, as a rule, I have made it my mission to simply convey what a spirit is telling me as best I can. I trust that they know what their loved one needs to hear, and will try their best to get that across through me.

Which brings me to tonight’s fireside chat. How many times have you heard someone hoping that a person who passed didn’t suffer? It’s a common human sentiment- we want to think they passed quickly, or even better, that they didn’t even know it was happening! Makes complete sense.

But I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t matter.

This epiphany all started with a reading I recently did for an old high school friend, Kat. She had lost her husband within the past year, and had been posting about her experiences/feelings of being a new widow on Facebook. Her openness gave me the green light to send her a message offering some words of support. We had traded a few texts back and forth when all of a sudden… BLAM. The anxiety hit HARD. Thank goodness I knew from enough past encounters to know exactly what this was. And I also knew from intuition WHO it was. It was my friend’s husband, Brad.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I couldn’t grab a pen and paper fast enough. I was on the verge of what I imagine a panic attack would feel like- and when I did finally have writing tools in hand- the information flowed fast and furious. I ended up with two pages of single spaced notes within a few minutes. The anxiety subsided once I had transcribed what Brad was telling me, but it wasn’t until I finally sat with Kat over FaceTime that I really assessed what her husband had conveyed. The first 1/2 page, a full 25% of my notes, was all about what was happening to Brad when he was dying. I felt uncomfortable reading it back to her. At the time it was coming through, I was simply a vessel writing the information as it came. But as I read it back, I sat there thinking “is all this necessary? Why would Kat need to hear this?” To this day, she never did clarify what exactly it was that took Brad’s life, but I could gather from the information it was probably a stroke, or something along those lines. Brad had went into great detail about what his death felt like, how his right arm had been numb, and even made sure to tell me that he was indeed in quite a bit of pain as it was happening. He also told me that he was very scared. I couldn’t believe I was telling her this as it came out of my mouth- it seemed hurtful!- but I had to fall back on to my tried and true rule: if Spirit conveys it, they want you to say it.

One one hand, I think that Brad was trying to prove to her that it was indeed him by giving me this information that I would have had no other way of knowing. But at the same time, it was just like having a chat with a friend. I don’t think he saw those details as being hurtful for his wife, it was just what he would have said if they were sitting there talking like they would have done when he was alive. He was just describing what had happened to him and how he felt.

I still don’t necessarily have the explicit answer to “why all the gritty details?” but as I sat one day last week contemplating that very question- what I did get instead was a download of information from Spirit.

First of all, as much as we HOPE our loved ones didn’t suffer during death- there’s always going to be those that did. That’s inevitable. So then what? Have our darkest fears been realized?

The answer lies in how you view the continuation of life after our passing. If you believe that we are simply here to live this one life and then simply turn to dust once it’s over, then yeah… that would SUCK to spend your last moments in extreme pain. SUCKY SUCK SUCKERTON.

The way I see it, though, and the example Spirit gave me, is that it’s kind of like childbirth. Not all of of us have experienced childbirth firsthand, but we’ve all heard the horror stories of extreme pain. Maybe we’ve even seen someone go through it! My own experience fits this bill. When I had my last baby (Sayde- who is my now 17 year old,) it, too, was SUCKY SUCK SUCKERTON. I had no meds to take down the pain, and I even remember thinking that I had had enough, and if given the choice at the time I would have said, “Yeah I changed my mind. Let’s not do this. Let’s just call this whole thing off.”

As we all know, that wasn’t an option.

After enduring pain I would have never thought was possible to survive, it was over just as fast. (She was born “en caul” by the way, which is a fancy way of saying my water never broke; she was born in an intact amniotic sac. It was like I birthed a balloon! But that’s for another blog post, I guess.) My point is, none of us now go around professing our sadness for how bad that freaking hurt, do we? Can you imagine if we approached every new mom telling them how sorry we were for their suffering? “Oh, I see that you have a new baby. I AM SO SORRY FOR YOUR PAIN.”

This was the same sentiment I got from Brad. While the first 25% of his message was about pain, the last 75% focused on happier things. He described seeing all the people at his funeral and lamenting in jest how it would be so cool to know during life that we were all loved so much! He wanted his wife to know that he thought she should get another dog. He said how cool it was that his brother in law spoke at his funeral- that he hadn’t expected that. He was OVER the pain. It clearly wasn’t playing a part in his life on the other side anymore.

This, of course, applies to everyone in SPIRIT. That pain is OVER.

In other words, Kat would be doing herself a sad injustice if all she focused on was how her husband Brad spent his final moments here in his earthly body, instead of now looking for him sending his love with butterflies, “specifically orange ones,” he noted during our reading.

People suffer every day, of course. When they survive, we tend to focus on the life they have after that. “Oh look at you! You’re doing great!” But if someone dies while suffering, we all too often focus on just the end, even though they, too, are still doing great.

We can stop that now. As Spirit says, “It doesn’t matter.”

Kat has recently started a new youtube channel chronicling her thoughts and experiences as a new widow. Take a look at: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCCuO6v0QEd_Xkebq2C9n8Kw