Is It Normal to Feel Closer to Spirit After a Loss?

A woman once sat across from me and admitted, almost apologetically, that she'd started praying more since her husband died. She wasn't raised in a particularly religious household, and she'd spent most of her adult life quietly agnostic about anything spiritual. But somewhere in the middle of losing him, she found herself talking to something bigger than herself, sometimes without even meaning to.

"Is that strange?" she asked me. "Am I only doing this because I'm desperate?"

I hear some version of that question often. People who never gave much thought to an afterlife find themselves wondering about it constantly after a loss. People who never prayed find the words coming anyway, late at night, in the car, in the quiet after everyone else has gone home. And almost always, they worry it means something is wrong with them. That they're only reaching for comfort because they're too weak to face reality on their own.

I don't see it that way at all.

Grief has a way of stripping away the noise that usually fills our days. Before loss, most of us are moving fast, distracted by work and errands and everything else that competes for our attention. Grief slows all of that down, sometimes brutally. And in that slower, quieter space, we start noticing things we would have walked right past before. A feeling. A thought that doesn't quite feel like our own. A sense that we're not entirely alone in the room.

I don't think grief manufactures those experiences out of nothing. I think it simply clears enough space for us to notice what was already there, waiting to be noticed. We're so busy in ordinary life that we rarely stop long enough to listen. Loss forces the stopping. And in that stillness, some people discover a closeness to spirit they never had access to before.

That doesn't mean everyone experiences grief this way, and it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong if you don't. Some people move through loss without ever feeling that kind of spiritual pull, and that's just as valid. What I want people to know is that if it does happen to you, it isn't evidence of desperation. It's evidence of an open heart, one that's finally quiet enough to notice what's always been within reach.

The woman I mentioned earlier eventually told me that her new relationship with prayer had become one of the only things that made the empty side of the bed feel less unbearable. She wasn't trying to explain away her husband's death. She was simply reaching toward something steady in the middle of something that had knocked her completely off balance. I think that's one of the most human things a person can do.

If you've noticed something similar in yourself since your own loss, you don't need anyone's permission to lean into it. Grief has already asked enough of you. Let this part be simple.

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Continue Reading? You might also enjoy Can Loved Ones Hear Us After They Die? What Years of Mediumship Have Taught Me, where I share what years of readings have taught me about staying connected after loss.

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