Chapter 23
"I Saw My Mother After She Died"
Sensing the Presence of the Deceased

Richard came to see me on a Thursday afternoon, five months after his mother's funeral. He sat down in the leather chair in my office without taking off his jacket, which is how I knew that whatever he had come to say, he had been rehearsing it for a long while.

"I need to tell you something," he said, "and I need you to tell me whether I'm losing my mind."

He was sixty-one years old, an accountant, a man who knew the difference between a number and a feeling. He had cared for his mother through the last hard year of her decline. When she died in early April, he had buried her with the dry, exact grief of a son who had been preparing for years. He had handled the estate. He had written the thank-you notes. He had gone back to work the following Monday.

Then, two weeks before he walked into my office, something had happened on the back porch of his house — the porch his mother had loved, where she used to sit on summer evenings with a glass of iced tea, watching the light come down through the oaks. Richard had been reading a book. He looked up. And his mother was sitting in her old wicker chair across from him, hands folded in her lap, wearing the pale blue sweater she had worn a thousand times.

"I saw her," Richard said. He pronounced the word saw slowly, as if handling something fragile. "I was not asleep. I was not drunk. I had not been thinking about her that morning — I had been thinking about a client file. I looked up and she was there. And then I blinked, and she was gone."

He paused. His hands were shaking a little.

"Pastor, I've read the Bible my whole life. I know what it says about necromancy. I know what the pagans do at the graves of their ancestors. I am not that person. I did not summon her. I did not want this. I was just reading a book." He stopped, and for the first time in our conversation his voice caught. "I don't know if I'm grieving badly, or losing my mind, or —" he stopped again — "or if my mother is, somehow, still able to love me. And God, for some reason, let me see it for a moment."

He looked at me for a long time.

"I haven't told anyone," he said. "Not even my wife. I don't want them to think I'm unstable."

What Richard did not know, sitting in my office with his jacket on and his hands shaking, was that he was not alone. Not even close. He was joining a company of millions — grieving men and women across every culture and every century — who have sat on the porch, or at the kitchen table, or beside the bed in the dark, and sensed, sometimes dimly and sometimes with astonishing clarity, the presence of someone they had buried.

This chapter is for Richard. It is for the widow who still talks to her husband at the kitchen sink. It is for the mother who feels her son's hand on her shoulder on the morning of his birthday. It is for hundreds of thousands of Christians who have had an experience they cannot quite explain and have told no one, because they did not know they were allowed to.

You are allowed.

What We Mean by a Sensed Presence

In the research literature, these experiences go by different names. Grief researchers have sometimes called them "post-bereavement hallucinations" — a clinical term that, as we will see, does not quite fit.¹ Pastoral writers speak of "sensed presences." Roman Catholic and Orthodox tradition has, for centuries, spoken of such experiences within the broader category of the communion of saints.³⁰ Popular Christian language sometimes calls them "visitations." For our purposes, I will use the phrase sensed presence throughout this chapter, because it best captures the broad range of what we are actually talking about.

A sensed presence is an awareness — sometimes faint, sometimes vivid — that a deceased loved one is near. It is a member of the larger family of experiences we addressed in Chapter 22 on after-death communications (ADCs), but it is a narrower category. ADCs include every kind of apparent communication from the deceased: a dream, a voice, an object that moves, an unmistakable touch. Sensed presences are specifically the experiences in which the bereaved person knows, in a way that is hard to put into ordinary language, that the deceased is with them.

The sensed presence may take several forms:

— A quiet, wordless awareness: "She is here with me."

— A fleeting visual glimpse: seeing the deceased in a favorite chair, standing at a doorway, walking down a hall.

— An auditory trace: a voice calling one's name, a familiar phrase, a single sentence.

— A tactile sensation: a hand on the shoulder, a weight on the bed, an embrace.

— An emotional or relational presence: the unmistakable feeling of the deceased's characteristic warmth, humor, or steady love, unaccountably present in the room.

— A dream that continues, somehow, into waking awareness: the loved one has been there, and you still feel the atmosphere of them when you open your eyes.

Sensed presences are usually brief. They are usually unbidden. They typically come not when we are reaching for them, but in the quiet, unguarded moments of ordinary life: while washing dishes, while walking the dog, while sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning, while reading a book on a porch. In the overwhelming majority of documented cases, they bring a feeling of peace.² Then they pass, often leaving the bereaved in tears — not the tears of despair, but the tears of a person who has been, for one blessed minute, not alone.

You Are Not Alone

If you have had an experience like Richard's — or the woman at the kitchen sink, or the father at his son's grave — the first thing you need to hear is that you are not alone. You are not, as a matter of well-documented research, even rare.

In 1971, a Welsh general practitioner named W. Dewi Rees published a study in the British Medical Journal that quietly upended the psychiatric understanding of bereavement. Rees had interviewed 293 widowed persons in his country medical practice — ordinary people from ordinary walks of life, not religious enthusiasts, not seekers after the paranormal — about their experiences since the death of their spouses. What he found surprised the medical community.

Nearly half of the widows and widowers he interviewed — 46.7 percent — reported some form of post-bereavement experience of the deceased: a sense of presence, a voice, a glimpse, a tactile touch. And what surprised Rees even more was this: these experiences were not associated with psychological instability. They were not more common among the mentally fragile, the socially isolated, or the poorly educated. They were not a symptom of pathological grief. They were, Rees concluded, a normal feature of bereavement — so normal, in fact, that it was striking how few of his patients had ever told anyone about them.³

The Rees study did not fall into a vacuum. Between 1965 and 1969, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of Chicago, and London — supported by the Harvard Laboratory of Community Psychiatry — had been conducting what came to be known as the Harvard Bereavement Study. The results were published in 1974 as The First Year of Bereavement. The researchers had not originally set out to study experiences of the deceased. The topic came up, over and over, unprompted, in their interviews. Eventually they began to ask about it directly. Thirteen months after bereavement, 47 percent of the widows in their sample agreed with the statement, "I have the feeling that my husband watches over me." Other forms of presence — hearing the husband's voice, briefly seeing him in his favorite armchair, sensing him moving from one room to another — appeared throughout the interviews.⁴ The researchers, like Rees, concluded that these experiences were "both normal and healthy" for the widows, and that the older therapeutic goal of severing the bond with the deceased was not, in fact, the path to recovery.⁵

Two decades later, a landmark volume titled Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, gathered studies from around the world and extended these findings into new populations.⁶ In Japan, bereaved spouses routinely maintained conversations with deceased partners at household altars. In the United States, bereaved parents regularly reported sensing their dead child's presence — sometimes for decades. Among the Compassionate Friends, a support network for bereaved parents, researcher Dennis Klass found that the majority of parents experienced a living sense of their child, which they did not want to give up and which did not hinder their healing. If anything, it supported it.

More recent research has confirmed and extended these findings. Christopher Kerr's work at Hospice Buffalo found presences — both of the dying person's deceased relatives and of the survivors' own deceased loved ones — common around the dying bed.⁷ Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick's research in the United Kingdom, reported in The Art of Dying and in academic journals, found similar patterns in British samples.⁸ Louis LaGrand, a grief researcher who devoted much of his career to this subject, documented hundreds of cases from his interviews with the bereaved.⁹ Cross-cultural studies from Iceland, Sweden, Wales, China, Japan, India, and Australia show that sensed presences are not a quirk of one culture or one religion. They appear, with remarkable consistency of feature and frequency, across the whole human family.

Jenny Streit-Horn, in her doctoral dissertation surveying fifty years of after-death communication research, found that the frequency of such experiences within the first year of bereavement falls between 50 and 85 percent, with lifetime frequency in the general population estimated at roughly one in three.¹⁰

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. One in three people, across the whole population, has had some kind of experience of a deceased loved one. In the first year of grieving, the majority do. What this means is simple: if you have sensed the presence of someone you have buried, you are not a statistical outlier. You are not imagining. You are not weak. You are not losing your mind. You are participating in one of the most widely documented — and most widely silenced — experiences in human life.²⁸

Why You Haven't Heard About This

If sensed presences are this common, why have most grieving Christians never heard about them from the pulpit? Why have so many carried the experience in silence for years, afraid that telling anyone would mean they would be thought unstable?

There are several reasons. It is worth naming them gently.

The first is cultural. For most of the twentieth century, Western medicine and psychology operated under what philosopher Charles Taylor has called an "immanent frame" — a default assumption that the material world is all there is, and that any apparent experience of anything beyond it must be a trick of the brain.¹² Under this frame, a grieving widow who said, "I felt my husband's hand on my shoulder last night," could expect one of two responses: pity ("that's just your grief") or concern ("have you been sleeping? eating? talking to anyone?"). Neither response invited her to say more. She learned, quickly, to stop saying anything.

The second is professional. Early twentieth-century psychiatry, under the influence of Sigmund Freud's 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, treated ongoing attachment to the dead as a form of psychological failure.¹³ "Grief work," in the Freudian model, was the labor of detaching emotional investment from the deceased so that one could reinvest it in the living. If a widow was still feeling her husband's presence two years after his death, something was wrong. It took the Rees study, the Harvard Bereavement Study, and the continuing-bonds literature several decades to begin dislodging this assumption. In many corners of our culture, it is not dislodged yet. We explore the Christian response to this model more fully in Chapter 24.

The third reason is pastoral — and this one I name with sadness, because it is closest to home. Well-meaning Christian leaders have sometimes told bereaved people, with the best of intentions, that any experience of the deceased is "probably demonic" or "the work of the enemy." This counsel usually draws on Deuteronomy 18:10–12, which prohibits necromancy — the attempt to summon or consult the dead for guidance. The prohibition is real, and we will honor it in this chapter (and more fully in Chapter 25). But the great majority of sensed presences have nothing to do with necromancy. They are not sought. They are not summoned. They involve no mediums, no séances, no attempts to wring predictions or guidance out of the departed. They are, most often, brief, unbidden moments of comfort — gifts, not conjurings.²⁹

To treat every sensed presence as demonic is to fail to make the kind of careful discernment the Bible itself calls us to make. It is also to condemn a great many grieving Christians to unnecessary fear and isolation over experiences that — when we examine them in the light of Scripture — often look much more like a gentle mercy of God than a work of the enemy.

The fourth reason is simple: shame. Most bereaved people, even those whose experiences have brought them deep comfort, fear being seen as unstable, unfaithful, or morbid if they tell what has happened to them. In one study of after-death experiences, fifty-four percent of participants had never told anyone before being interviewed for research.¹⁴ These are not fringe, attention-seeking personalities. They are widows and widowers, mothers and fathers, adult children whose parents have died — ordinary Christians carrying an experience that has lifted them, and carrying it in silence because they fear what the telling might cost.

One of the quiet purposes of this chapter is simply to give you permission to tell.

The Range of What People Actually Experience

When bereaved Christians finally do speak about their experiences, what they describe falls into a recognizable range of patterns. The patterns are worth sketching, because seeing them written down often brings the same relief a rare disease sufferer feels when she discovers that her symptoms have a name and have been described many times before.

The most common experience is a generalized sense of presence — a wordless, quiet awareness that the deceased is near. There may be no visual image, no voice, no touch. There is simply a knowing. Many bereaved describe it as a soft warmth or a stillness in the room. "I knew he was there. I cannot tell you how I knew. I just knew." Researchers in the Harvard Bereavement Study found this quiet awareness to be by far the most commonly reported form — more common than visions, voices, or tactile sensations.¹⁵

A second pattern is the location-specific presence: the awareness of the deceased in a particular place. The chair at the kitchen table. The pew at church. The garden. The hospital room. The bed. The chair at the desk. Bereaved people often describe feeling the loved one "in" that spot — not wandering the house, not floating by the ceiling, but present in a specific, concrete location. Researchers have noted that this location is often a place the deceased particularly loved or particularly associated with themselves.¹⁶

A third pattern is the anniversary or milestone presence. Presences often intensify at certain dates: a birthday, an anniversary, the anniversary of the death, Christmas, the birth of a grandchild the deceased will not meet. Some bereaved describe these as the clearest experiences they have had — as if the deceased knows the date, and is near for it.

A fourth pattern is the brief visual glimpse. Researchers report cases in which the bereaved sees the deceased for a few seconds — standing at the foot of the stairs, sitting in a favorite chair, walking down a hallway. The figure is usually seen as the deceased appeared in health. Often the figure looks at the bereaved, smiles, and is gone.¹⁷ In the Rees study, 14 percent of those who reported any experience of the deceased described a visual one.

A fifth pattern is the voice: hearing one's name, a familiar phrase, a single sentence. These are usually brief — a word or two — and usually in the deceased's characteristic tone. Rees found that auditory experiences were nearly as common as visual ones.

A sixth pattern is tactile: the sense of a hand on the shoulder, a weight sitting down on the edge of the bed, an embrace. These are often reported at moments of particular exhaustion or distress — as if the deceased has come to steady the survivor through something hard.

A seventh pattern is the dream-presence: a dream of the deceased that is so vivid, so ordinary in its flavor, so different from other dreams, that the dreamer wakes convinced the encounter was real. Some researchers call these "visitation dreams" to distinguish them from ordinary grief dreams, which tend to be confused, anxious, or fragmentary. Visitation dreams are typically described as calm, orderly, unambiguous, and deeply peaceful.¹⁸

These categories blur, of course. A single bereaved person may have several kinds of experience, or one experience may combine several patterns — a sense of presence, then a voice, then a sense of departure. What is consistent across the research is that the experiences are specific, ordinary in their details, and usually — almost always — peaceful.

What the Bible Permits Us to Say

Scripture does not give us an explicit doctrine of sensed presences. There is no chapter of the Bible devoted to what bereaved Christians should think when they feel a dead parent in the room. But this is not, as some have argued, a reason to dismiss the experience. Scripture does not give us an explicit doctrine of many ordinary features of Christian life either — the experience of peace when praying for a sick friend, or the sense of God's nearness on a hard morning, or the unexpected memory of a Bible verse that meets a crisis at the right moment. Scripture gives us a framework within which we can wisely receive these things, and it gives us limits beyond which we must not go.

Let me lay out what the biblical framework permits us to say about sensed presences.

First, the righteous dead are conscious and aware. The believer who has died in Christ is not in an unconscious sleep, not in annihilation, not in a timeless absence. The believer is with Christ, alert, known, and loved. Paul tells the Philippians he would prefer to "depart and be with Christ, for that is far better" (Philippians 1:23) — a comparison that makes no sense if "being with Christ" were unconscious. Jesus tells the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Paul tells the Corinthians that to be "away from the body" is to be "at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). We lay out this case in detail in Chapter 2; here we simply note the point: the Christian dead are awake. They are with Christ. Whatever else we say about sensed presences, we must say it within that framework.

Second, Scripture pictures the righteous dead as aware, in some degree, of the life of the Church. The "great cloud of witnesses" of Hebrews 12:1 are not a static crowd of statues. They are witnesses. Moses and Elijah, long dead, appear on the mountain with Christ and speak of his coming death at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31) — a detail we explore more fully in Chapter 7. The souls under the altar in Revelation 6 cry out to God and ask "how long" (Revelation 6:10) — they are aware of time, aware of injustice, aware that the story of the Church is still unfolding. We treat Hebrews 12:1 and the communion of saints more fully in Chapter 24. For our purposes here, the point is this: Scripture does not imagine the righteous dead as cut off from all awareness of their loved ones still on earth. Whether and how they are granted such awareness is not fully spelled out. That they can be, is.

Third, Scripture records moments in which God opens the eyes of the living to see spiritual realities ordinarily hidden from them. When Elisha's servant wakes in terror at the armies surrounding their city, Elisha prays, "O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see" (2 Kings 6:17). The servant sees the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire. The spiritual reality was always there. What changed was the servant's perception. (We treat this passage more fully in Chapter 5.) Likewise, Stephen, at the moment of his death, is granted a clear vision of heaven opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55–56) — a scene that everyone else standing around is apparently not given to see.

Taken together, these three pieces of the biblical framework give us permission — not to claim more than we know, but to hold the category of sensed presences with Christian hope rather than Christian fear. The righteous dead are alive in Christ. They are aware, to some degree, of the unfolding life of the Church. God sometimes opens the eyes of the living to realities ordinarily unseen. If, in the kindness of God, a bereaved believer is granted a momentary awareness of a loved one who is with Christ — an awareness that lifts them, draws them to Christ, and leaves them comforted — we are under no biblical obligation to treat that experience with suspicion. We are, in fact, free to receive it as a gift.

What Scripture Forbids

Scripture is equally clear about what is not permitted, and we must say this plainly. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 commands: "There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord."

The language is severe because the practices are severe. In the ancient world, and in many places today, necromancy is an active attempt to compel or solicit communication from the dead — to use the dead as a resource, a consultant, an oracle. The necromancer wants information. He or she wants guidance. The practitioner lights candles, sets out objects, speaks the name, uses a medium, attempts to summon. The Old Testament story of Saul at Endor, where Saul in his panic employs a medium to bring up Samuel (1 Samuel 28), is the paradigmatic warning: Saul is desperate for information from Samuel that he cannot get from God, and he crosses a forbidden line to try to get it.

Sensed presences, as the research describes them, are almost never of this character. They are unbidden. They are not sought through technique or ritual. The bereaved is usually doing something ordinary — reading, washing dishes, walking — when the presence comes. The bereaved is not asking for information. The bereaved is not setting out objects, speaking the name of the dead with intention to summon, or using any medium or technique. The experience happens, and then it passes, and the bereaved is left with a sense of peace and a tearful gratitude.

The line Scripture draws is not between "I have had an unbidden experience of my deceased mother's love" and "I have not." The line Scripture draws is between receiving what comes to us as a gift and seeking to compel or solicit communication from the dead as a practice. The first is, at worst, something to weigh prayerfully. The second is forbidden.

If you are reading this chapter because you have had an experience like Richard's and you fear you have sinned by having it, hear this: you have not. An unbidden moment of awareness, received with peace, drawing you toward Christ rather than away from him, does not put you under the condemnation of Deuteronomy 18. It puts you within the company of a very large number of Christians, across many centuries, who have received such moments with thanks. What matters next is how you hold it.

Who Is Doing the Sensing?

If we grant that sensed presences are real experiences — and the research certainly supports that — what exactly is happening? Who, theologically speaking, is doing the sensing?

Christians who have thought carefully about these experiences have given several answers. Each has something to commend it. I will lay out the most serious possibilities, and then tell you, as a pastor, how I hold the question.

Possibility one: God grants the bereaved a perception of the deceased's continuing reality. On this view, the bereaved is not necessarily in direct contact with the deceased. Rather, God, in his kindness, grants a perception — a knowing — that the loved one is safe, alive, and still bound in love to the one who is grieving. The experience is real. The loved one is real. But the mechanism is God's gift of perception, not a direct exchange between the bereaved and the deceased. Many Reformed Christians have held something close to this view. It has the advantage of making God the clear agent of the experience, which removes any concern about necromancy or communication with the dead.

Possibility two: the deceased, by God's permission and in God's providence, is aware of the living and sometimes is granted to communicate that awareness. On this view, which has a long history in catholic and orthodox thought, the righteous dead — whose conscious existence we have established — are allowed by God to know something of the life of those they love on earth, and are sometimes allowed to make their continued love known. This would be one dimension of what the creed calls the communion of saints.²⁷ There are things we cannot prove on this view. Scripture does not tell us everything. But the view is coherent with the biblical pictures of the cloud of witnesses, the souls under the altar, and the awareness of the dead that appears throughout redemptive history.

Possibility three: the Holy Spirit uses the living memory of love to grant comfort. On this view, the bereaved's experience is not exactly a direct encounter with the deceased but is the Spirit's own gift of comfort, working through the deep grooves of love that the deceased carved in the bereaved's life. The loved one's presence is real in the sense that love is real — but the bereaved is not perceiving the deceased directly; rather, the Spirit ministers through the love that remains.

I do not think we need to choose between these possibilities as rigidly as some would want. My own view, as a pastor, is that more than one of them is often at work at the same time. God is always the primary agent. The Spirit is always the comforter. Whether the Lord sometimes grants the departed to know and to communicate their continuing love to those on earth — as Catholic and Orthodox tradition has long held — I am not in a position to know with certainty. What I will not do is dogmatize on the mechanism in a way that shuts down the experience itself. Scripture does not dogmatize on the mechanism. Neither will I.

What matters, pastorally, is this: if your experience has brought you peace, has drawn you closer to Christ, and has not urged you toward any forbidden practice, you are on safe ground. You can receive it as a gift. You do not need to be able to explain the mechanism. Most of us cannot explain the mechanism of any of the real gifts of our lives.

"But Isn't It Just Grief Hallucinations?"

For over a century, the standard secular explanation of sensed presences has been that they are a kind of hallucination — the grieving brain, under the intense stress of loss, generating perceptions of the missing loved one as a coping mechanism. This is the explanation you may have heard from a well-meaning doctor, a therapist, or a secular friend. Is it right?

Let me respond carefully. There is something true in this explanation, and there is something missing.

The true thing: the grieving brain is under enormous stress. It is common, in extreme grief, for the mind to "see" or "hear" the missing loved one in a way that is clearly an internal projection. A mother hears her son's footsteps at the door at his usual time home from school, though he has been dead for a month. A widower, half-asleep, reaches across the bed and is startled to find his wife not there, though he had been reaching in a dream-state that did not know she was gone. These are real, and they are well understood as grief's disorientation. They are usually brief, usually painful rather than peaceful, and usually fade as the bereaved's mind relearns the new, difficult reality.

The missing thing: sensed presences, as the research actually describes them, do not generally fit this picture. When Rees sat down with his widows, what he found was not a cluster of anxious projections that faded as grief subsided. He found experiences that:

— Were unexpected. Most of the bereaved had not been thinking about the deceased at the moment of the experience.

— Were specific. The deceased appeared characteristically — in a specific place, with a specific posture, sometimes saying a specific thing.

— Were peaceful. They brought comfort rather than distress, which is the opposite of what we would expect from grief-anxiety.

— Did not diminish with time. In contrast to most features of grief, which tend to fade as the grieving person adjusts, sensed presences often continue for years, even decades.

— Were associated with better grief outcomes, not worse. Those who reported them were not more psychologically impaired; in many cases, they were functioning better.¹⁹

When Roberta Conant interviewed Boston widows who had had repeated, vivid experiences of their deceased husbands, she found that the widows themselves rejected the label of "hallucination." These were not, they insisted, grief-induced illusions. They were "astonishing," "unbidden," "vivid," and peaceful. The widows noticed the difference between a moment of grief-disorientation (which they had also had) and the distinct class of experiences that did not feel like disorientation at all. And Conant noted that the widows who had these vivid experiences showed markers of successful grief adjustment: increasing happiness, new friendships, positive shifts in self-concept, renewed purpose.²⁰

In other words: the "grief hallucination" explanation may well describe a certain smaller class of bereavement experiences. But it does not describe, well, the class of experiences we are examining in this chapter. To call Richard's experience on his porch a "grief hallucination" is to use a theory to explain away the data rather than to explain the data. A careful observer — even a secular one — should be willing to say: these experiences exist; they are widespread; they are not pathological; we do not yet have a full account of them. That is a scientifically honest position. It is also, I would add, theologically generous — because it leaves room for the Christian account to breathe.

A Long Christian Witness

Experiences that we would today describe as sensed presences are not a late invention of modern grief research. Christians have been having them, and writing about them, for a very long time.

Saint Augustine's Confessions, one of the great works of Christian devotion, ends with a long reflection on the death of his mother, Monica. Augustine writes of his ongoing sense of her in the weeks and months after her burial — her faith, her prayers, her continuing love — and of the way these drew him toward God rather than away. Augustine does not claim to have seen Monica appear. But the book makes no sense unless Monica, for Augustine, remains a real presence, not a mere memory. He continues to speak to her and of her in the present tense; he continues to believe her prayers are before God; he continues to feel, after a fashion, her nearness.²¹

Medieval Christian literature — devotional, hagiographical, narrative — is filled with accounts of departed saints and loved ones appearing briefly to the living. Much of this material is late, uneven, and has to be weighed carefully. But the quantity of it is notable, and it testifies that the broad Christian tradition has not regarded such experiences as, in themselves, forbidden or demonic.

At the dawn of English Protestantism, Puritan pastors like Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather collected what they called "remarkable providences" — unusual works of God in the lives of ordinary Christians. Their collections include cases that today we would call sensed presences: a dying man's wife aware, in another town, of the hour of his death; a grieving father granted a moment's sight of his drowned son. The Puritans, hardly enthusiasts of unbiblical spirituality, reported these cases soberly and attributed them, broadly, to God's providence.²²

In more recent Christian memoir, such experiences appear without fanfare. C. S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, records a moment well after his wife Joy's death in which he had an unexpected, quiet sense of her — not visual, not auditory, but unmistakable. Lewis, a careful writer and a careful Christian, does not make theological claims about what happened. He simply records it, and he records that it was good.²³ Nancy Guthrie has written gently of moments when she has sensed her two children — both lost as infants — as she raised her older son.²⁴ Jerry Sittser, in A Grace Disguised, writes of the felt nearness of his mother, his wife, and his daughter, all lost in a single accident — a nearness that, over the years, has shaped rather than distracted him.²⁵

These are not fringe Christians. They are careful, biblically grounded writers, widely trusted for their theological sobriety. What they record is not contact with the dead in the necromantic sense. It is something quieter and gentler: the felt reality that the loved one is not gone, that love has not been undone by death, that the deceased is kept in the Lord's keeping and that some trace of that keeping reaches the living in moments of grace. This is the Christian tradition's broad witness, and it is consistent, in its chastened form, with the research we have surveyed.

Where and When They Come

Researchers have noticed something else about sensed presences, which has pastoral value. They tend to come in particular kinds of moments.

They come in places associated with the deceased. The chair. The bedroom. The kitchen. The garden. The sanctuary. The chair at the dinner table.

They come at moments of emotional weight. An anniversary. A birthday. The morning of a grandchild's birth. The afternoon after a difficult decision that the deceased would have helped with.

They come in moments of quiet. Washing dishes. Walking alone. Waking at night. Reading on the porch. Many bereaved people describe the experience as coming precisely when they were not expecting it and not consumed with grief in the moment — which is part of why researchers have concluded that such experiences are not a simple projection of grief-anxiety.

They come most frequently in the first year or two after the death, though they may continue intermittently for many years. Some bereaved experience strong presences early on that fade as integration occurs. Others experience their first presence months or even years after the death — often at a significant milestone.

What pastors and caregivers can say to a bereaved Christian who asks, "When should I expect this to happen?" is: there is no when. You cannot summon it. You cannot schedule it. You should not try. But if it comes, it will most likely come in one of the patterns the researchers have seen: somewhere the loved one loved, at a moment of quiet, perhaps on a significant date, unannounced and unsought, and it will most likely pass before you can name what happened.

How to Receive an Experience

For the Christian who has had a sensed presence — especially for the one still sitting in my office like Richard, in his jacket, still shaken by what has happened — the question that matters most is: what do I do with this?

Here is my pastoral counsel, drawn from Scripture, from the Christian tradition, and from the experience of walking with many bereaved Christians.

Receive it as a gift. Whether the mechanism is a moment of God's own perception given to you, a permitted awareness of your loved one's continuing love, or the Spirit's comfort working through the grooves of love still cut in you, you do not need to understand the mechanism to receive the gift. Gifts are for receiving, not for dissecting.

Weep if you need to weep. Richard cried in my office that afternoon. Many do. The tears are not evidence that the experience was not good. They are evidence that your heart is tender and that what you received has touched the deep place where you miss the one you love.

Thank the Lord. Whatever the exact nature of the experience, it came from a God who is kind. Thank him. Speak it in prayer: "Lord, thank you for that moment. Thank you that my mother is in your care. Thank you that love is not undone by death. Keep her safe. Keep me faithful."

Do not try to prolong it through any technique. Do not light candles in an attempt to summon. Do not set out objects. Do not try meditation practices designed to produce such experiences. Do not visit mediums. These are not the ways of the Christian, and they grieve the Spirit. The gifts of God come on his own schedule, and to seek to compel them is, in the end, to refuse them as gifts.

Tell one trusted person. A pastor, a trusted Christian friend, a mature believer who will listen without rushing to interpret. Do not tell the person at the grocery store. But do tell someone. One of the grim findings of the research is how often the bereaved carry these experiences alone, in silence, because they are afraid no one will listen. A witness makes the experience easier to hold. It also helps protect you from the rare cases in which an experience may genuinely need careful evaluation (see Chapter 25).

Let it draw you closer to Christ, not to the deceased. If an experience of your loved one's presence turns you toward prayer, toward worship, toward deeper trust in Jesus — it is good. If it turns you from Christ toward preoccupation with the dead, toward seeking further experiences, toward a life centered on the deceased rather than on God — that is a warning signal. Good gifts from God always have a direction. They point, always, back to him.

When Experiences Fade

Some bereaved Christians come to me in the other direction. They had strong experiences of their loved one in the first year. Now, two years in, the experiences have faded. They do not feel the loved one as close. They are frightened that the loved one has forgotten them, or moved on, or that something has gone wrong in their own faith.

Nothing has gone wrong. This is ordinary.

The experiences of the first year of grief are often the most vivid because grief itself is most vivid then. The heart is open in a way it is not, and cannot be, forever. Over time, the bereaved's capacity for ordinary perception returns. Groceries need buying. Grandchildren need watching. The work of the world reasserts itself. The acute openness of the first grief settles.

This does not mean the loved one has forgotten. It does not mean the loved one has "moved on" in some way that leaves the bereaved behind. Those with Christ are more, not less, aware in the intermediate state than they were in this life. The fading of sensed presences is not about them. It is about you. Your grief is integrating. You are learning, slowly, to carry the loss without being swept away by it. The presence remains; your perception has been gently reorganized.

And the bond remains — which is what we turn to in the next chapter.

When an Experience May Need Careful Evaluation

I have said that the great majority of sensed presences are benign, peaceful, and drawing the bereaved toward Christ. I want to be honest, though, about the minority that are not. The goal of this chapter is not to make Christians credulous but to help them be wisely generous — able to distinguish the comforting gift from the rare experience that genuinely deserves careful evaluation.

Two points about this list. First, it is short. Most experiences do not fit any of these warning markers; most are brief, peaceful, and draw the bereaved toward Christ. Do not let this list make you fearful of every good thing. Second, the discernment is not about the form of the experience — visual or auditory, vivid or quiet — but about its direction and its fruit. Good experiences of God's comfort, whatever their form, bear the fruit of the Spirit: peace, joy, love, and a deeper trust in Jesus. Experiences that bear other fruit require closer examination. This is the ancient pastoral test — "by their fruits you will know them" (Matthew 7:20) — and it is still the right test.

Back to Richard

Richard sat in my office that afternoon, waiting for me to tell him whether he was losing his mind.

I told him he was not. I told him that what he had experienced on the back porch was within the pattern of human bereavement that has been documented across cultures and centuries, and has been carefully described in the peer-reviewed research of our own generation. I told him that many, many Christians — including writers he trusted — had had similar experiences and had received them with quiet gratitude. I told him that Scripture does not condemn an unbidden moment of awareness of a loved one who is in Christ. I told him that necromancy is forbidden and is something quite different from what he had experienced. I told him that his mother was not a wandering ghost in his backyard. His mother was with Christ. And in the kindness of a God who knows how hard we ache, he had been given a moment's sense of her continuing love.

He cried, hard, in my office. He said he had been carrying the experience for two weeks as if it were a burden. He had not realized it was a gift.

Before he left, I asked him how he had felt, sitting on the porch, when he saw his mother.

"I felt loved," he said. He thought for a moment. "I felt — I felt like she was okay. And like I was okay. And like something I had been afraid of wasn't true."

That, I told him, sounded a lot like peace. And peace is a gift of Christ. "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid" (John 14:27).

He went home to tell his wife.

For Your Reflection

Sit with these questions gently. You do not need to answer them all. You do not need to answer them quickly. If one lands, sit with that one.

1. Have you sensed the presence of a loved one who has died? What did it feel like? What did you do with it afterward?

2. Have you told anyone? If not, what has kept you from telling? What would it take, for you, to tell one trusted person?

3. If you have not had an experience like this, how have you felt about that? Have you felt that something was missing, or that God was withholding, or that your faith was lacking? (None of these is true.)

4. What do you need to hear from Scripture about your loved one's ongoing safety and conscious life in Christ? What passage has brought you the most comfort so far? Which passage do you wish you understood more deeply?

5. If you have had an experience, can you name the fruit of it? Did it bring you closer to Christ, or did it turn your attention away from him?

6. Is there a place or a date that is difficult for you — a place where your loved one loved to be, or a date that marks something significant? What does God invite you to bring to him at that place or on that date?

7. If a friend came to you tomorrow and said, quietly and with a little fear, "I think I saw my dead father in our living room last night," how would you want to respond? What would you want to say to them?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Most congregations you serve are full of people who have had experiences like Richard's. They have not told you. Many of them have not told anyone. If the Rees figure of 46.7 percent holds across populations — and the Harvard Bereavement Study's 47 percent, and the continuing-bonds literature's consistent findings — then in any congregation of two hundred you will have dozens of people carrying these experiences silently. The work of the pastor and caregiver here is not to produce experiences. It is to be the kind of listener to whom those who have had them are able to speak.

Key pastoral observations. First, grief-silenced experiences tend to worsen with time, not resolve. People who do not tell anyone often come to think of their experience as either imaginary or sinful. Neither is usually true, and both conclusions deepen their sense of isolation. Second, the bereaved will often test you before they tell you. They will float a hint — "I had the strangest experience the other day" — and see whether you take the bait with curiosity or with suspicion. Take it with curiosity. Third, even careful believers often carry the unspoken fear that what they experienced was demonic or forbidden. They will need to hear, plainly and pastorally, the distinction between necromancy (forbidden) and the unbidden awareness of a loved one (not forbidden). Fourth, the Rees finding and its successors mean that your pulpit counsel on this topic will reach more people than any other single ministry topic you handle. Most Christians will never read a book about NDE or DBE research. They will, however, bury a parent, a spouse, or a child, and many of them will have an experience.

What to say. These are sentences you can keep in your pastoral toolkit:

— "Many bereaved people — most of them, actually — sense their loved one's presence at some point. It is one of the most common experiences in grief. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you."

— "Tell me about what happened. Take your time."

— "There is a difference between trying to contact the dead, which Scripture forbids, and receiving an unbidden moment of awareness, which it does not forbid. What you are describing sounds like the second kind. It's okay."

— "Your loved one is with Christ. The Bible tells us this clearly. If God, in his kindness, gave you a moment of awareness of her continuing love, that is a gift. You do not have to be afraid of it."

— "Have you been able to tell anyone else? Would it help to talk more about this, or is today enough?"

What NOT to say. Some well-meaning responses do real damage:

— "That is probably not possible. Your grief is playing tricks on you." This dismisses the experience and teaches the bereaved that you are not a safe listener. Even if the experience were nothing more than grief, this framing is harmful. And the research suggests that it is not just grief.

— "Be careful — that could be demonic." This is the most common mistake I hear made. It introduces fear into an experience that was likely peaceful, and it misapplies Scripture. Save the demonic category for the rare experiences that show clear warning markers (see Chapter 25). Do not pre-emptively weaponize it against ordinary bereavement.

— "You need to let go and move on." This reflects an outdated grief model that the research has decisively corrected (see Chapter 24). Continuing bonds are not pathology; they are part of healthy bereavement for most people.

— "That sounds like denial." In the vast majority of cases, it is not. Denial would look like refusing to accept that the loved one has died. Sensed presences coexist with full acceptance of the death.

— "Don't dwell on it." The bereaved is not "dwelling." They are responding to an unbidden experience that they did not ask for. Telling them not to "dwell" teaches them to bury the experience rather than hold it.

Questions to ask. If you wish to draw out the bereaved person without interrogating them:

— "Where were you when it happened? What were you doing?"

— "What did it feel like? Was it peaceful, or was it frightening, or something else?"

— "Has it happened more than once? How often? In the same place or in different places?"

— "Did it draw you closer to Christ, or did it pull your attention away from him?"

— "Have you been able to tell anyone about it? How have they responded?"

Watch-outs and cautions. Several pastoral landmines are worth knowing. First, do not over-theologize the experience in the moment. The bereaved does not need a systematic-theology lecture. She needs a listener. Build the framework over time, not in a single conversation. Second, do not prematurely try to "interpret" the experience for the person — do not say, "What that meant is…". You do not know what it meant. Neither does she, fully. Honor the mystery. Third, do not set up an expectation that such experiences will happen to everyone. They do not. A bereaved person who has not had one is not spiritually deficient; the experiences are distributed widely but not universally. Fourth, be alert to the rare bereaved person who begins actively seeking experiences — consulting mediums, attending séances, attempting rituals. This moves from received gift to forbidden practice, and it calls for careful pastoral conversation (see Chapter 25). Fifth, remember that a small number of experiences are genuinely distressing or show warning markers. For these, you need the full discernment framework, which we develop in Chapter 25. Most will not require this. A few will.

Next steps. After a conversation about a sensed presence, I find it helpful to do three things. First, pray with the bereaved — thanking God for the life of the deceased, thanking him for the moment of comfort, and asking him to keep the bereaved anchored in Christ. Second, leave them with a short written resource — perhaps this chapter, perhaps the Guthrie or Sittser books listed below — so that they can process what you have said at their own pace. Third, check back in two to three weeks. A single conversation rarely settles a long-held experience. A follow-up signals that you are not just a one-time listener but a trustworthy presence over time.

Finally, a word about your own reading. If this chapter's ground is new to you, I commend to you the Rees paper itself (widely available online), the Klass/Silverman/Nickman Continuing Bonds volume, and Louis LaGrand's Love Lives On. The research is not light reading, but it will season your own pastoral instincts so that the next time a Richard walks into your study with his jacket on and his hands shaking, you will know what he has come to tell you — and what you need to say.

For Further Reading

W. Dewi Rees, "The Hallucinations of Widowhood," British Medical Journal 4 (1971): 37–41. The landmark paper that opened this field. Short, clinical, readable.

Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1996). The volume that reshaped the modern understanding of healthy grief. Several chapters deal directly with sensed presences.

Louis LaGrand, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved (New York: Berkley, 2006). A thoughtful, accessible synthesis of the research on sensed presences and after-death communications, written for general readers.

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying (London: Continuum, 2008). British research into end-of-life and post-death experiences, rigorous and respectful.

Nancy Guthrie, Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2002). Not specifically on sensed presences, but the finest pastoral voice in contemporary Christian grief writing, and worth reading whenever one is carrying a loss.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). Lewis's raw journal of grief after his wife's death, including a brief, careful account of an experience that sounds very much like what this chapter has described.