Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Profound Insights Into Life After Death: What Deathbed Visions Reveal About Our Consciousness

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

A Death Doula’s Guide to Consciousness After Death with Mayim & Jonathan In this powerful and emotional Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown episode, licensed end-of-life counselor and death doula Dr. Martha Jo Atkins explores consciousness after death and what truly happens when we die. Drawing on decades of guiding people through their final moments, she reveals the spiritual, biological, emotional, and psychological changes that occur when consciousness leaves the body—offering profound insights into life after death and the mysteries of the dying process. You’ll hear jaw-dropping stories of deathbed visions, including dream shifts, visits from deceased loved ones, and shared death experiences where relatives actually feel what the dying person is experiencing. Dr. Atkins shares what she’s witnessed that made her believe in the afterlife, what understanding death can teach us about living, and her own supernatural encounters—from speaking to deceased loved ones in dreams to eerie hospice hauntings. Dr. Atkins also breaks down: - Why we’re so afraid to talk about death—and how doing so makes us more human - How sensory perception shifts as people begin to let go, and the signs that death is near - The difference between a natural death and dying before your time—and what that means for the soul’s journey - Could Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy help us process grief in healthier ways? - Why presence matters most in a loved one’s final days - How our treatment of elders reflects our values as a society, and why end-of-life care matters deeply Plus, Mayim opens up about the raw, painful, yet beautiful experience of caregiving for her father in his final days. Whether you’re grieving, caregiving, or simply seeking answers to what happens when we die, or wondering what leaves the body when we die, this episode offers rare wisdom and comfort for life’s most inevitable transition. To learn more about Dr. Martha Jo Atkins and her work, visit: https://marthajoatkins.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Family members say, my person is so confused today. What are you hearing them talk about? They want me to take the chains off. They're saying, lift me up, lift me up, up, up. They're not here in present time wanting to get lifted up in the bed. They want to get lifted up. I can say, right here with you, Dad. As much as you need to be lifted up, we're right here with you

until you get where you need to go. I don't know if it's psyche, if it's heart, if it's spiritual, but something's happening. If we're lucky enough to be in the liminal space with them and feel that, there's nothing like it. Dr. Martha Jo Atkins is a death dula. And someone who teaches about the incredible changes that occur physically, psychologically, and metaphysically, in the transition from this world to the next. And what we're going to talk about today, some of the phenomenal things that happen.

How many people have you been with as they've transitioned? I've been with more than a thousand. What are some of the symbols? Landscapes, animals, flowers, bridges, rivers, trains, and airplanes. There are many occasions where several people at the bedside have the same experience. It's indicating literally some sort of shared consciousness. And when it's family members, and they're right at the end of the bed and they're able to talk to them, there's a shift in the default network as people are separating from themselves.

I think of it like the spirit is separating from the body. and it's this extraordinary process. If angels and others are being summoned in to someone's bedside, who else is being summoned? There was some weird stuff that happened around a boat for a while. And the lights would start coming and going off all the time. And eventually we had somebody clear the space. Clear the house. Yeah.

What'd they do? Hi, I'm I am Biolic. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be breaking down something that is either a mystery to most of us or something that we hope to avoid thinking or talking about, but contains literally the answer to why we're here. It's a continuation of some of our conversations we've been having on consciousness,

extrasensory abilities, and really what life is made out of our waking reality and the potential for a reality outside of what we normally experience. When you think about ways to understand what your consciousness is like, here and what it might be like elsewhere, you might think of deep meditation practice, you might think of psychedelic experiences, but have you ever considered the process and the understanding of the process of dying? We're going to be talking today about some of the incredible things that happen spiritually and biologically, but psychologically and even metaphorically when we are transitioning from a consciousness in this body to a consciousness that is not in this body.

We're talking to Dr. Martha Joe Atkins. Her experience is one of witnessing and supporting approximately a thousand deaths. She is a death dula. And she is someone who teaches about the process of dying in terms of the signposts, the changes that occur. And what we're going to talk about today, some of the phenomenal things that are. happen and the way to allow those things to happen as a way to kind of understand our humanity even deeper. What's fascinating is what we can learn about how to live and some of the symbols and similarities that happen with people who are going through this process, including seeing dead relatives, connecting with angels, the types of questions people ask indicating that

their consciousness has begun to change and the inner work she describes on getting your affairs emotionally and psychologically in order preparing for that final transition. Martha Joe is also going to talk about a variety of circumstances that many of us are curious about, right? What if you don't have a good relationship with the person who's dying? What if there's strife in the family? What if there's estrangement in the family? What if there's a lot of people around? What if there's not a lot of people around?

And in particular, we're going to talk about something I had never heard about before. It's called a shared death experience. where bystanders are experiencing things in conjunction with the person who is passing. It is fascinating. I had never heard about this. We've talked about near-death experiences. We're going to talk about shared death experiences. Right before we get into this interview, we want to thank you so much for listening. We're working so hard to bring you amazing episodes that are covering consciousness, spirituality, physical health, and so much more. Please do us a favor.

follow us anywhere you get podcasts or on YouTube and check us out on Substack. MyNBialx Breakdown on Substack. Pleasure to have Martha Joe in person so we can talk about this really intimate but fundamentally critical component of what it is to be alive. Martha Joe Atkins, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. I'm a little bit scared to talk to you because, you know, you work. with an aspect of our existence that many of us don't want to think or talk about.

And in many cases, it's shoved away. There's a whole bunch of secrets and things that so many of us don't want to really engage in or know about. And not only is this sort of the world that you work in, it's something you've immersed yourself in for your entire life. So just as kind of a starting point, you are really in on the most intimate kind of secrets of the human experience. What would you say your sort of framework is for what you get to experience and also teach

others? Love. It's love. At the very core of it's love. It's intimate. It is a place where there's no BS. And it's a place where there's connection in a way that often. and doesn't exist other places.

What are some of the reasons that so many of us are afraid of even talking about death and dying? I think because we don't talk about death and dying. We don't talk about stuff. Then we get scared of it. And when we're scared of things, we don't talk about them. It's kind of a vicious cycle. We see in obituaries often, the person was surrounded by their friends and family, and that's all we hear about dying. and there's so much that happens.

I often hear people are so confused. They're in that place where they're not talking and we can't connect with them anymore. And I know that's not necessarily true. There's lots of ways they're talking to us and we can be with them. And that's part of why I love this work so much is the being with when people are able to communicate

and when they're not able to communicate that whole other experience of feeling the energy in the room and noticing and really being present and helping other people to be present. Do you think people are afraid of this not only because we don't talk about it because that end makes them have to reevaluate how they've spent their time?

And most people aren't really spending their time in a way that is reflective of why they came here? Yeah, sure, sure. And we're going to die too. That's the big deal at the end of it. We're going to die too. So it's hard to look at other people's experience. People in my circles are recognizing that more.

And in conversations that we have in classes I teach, we talk about that stuff a lot. And lots of people are on autopilot. They're just on autopilot. And you get off an autopilot when something happens to somebody in your family or something happens to you. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the end of life that comes from what many of us would call old age versus the kind of experience when someone is, let's say, ill and kind of is categorically dying before their time. What are some of the differences? I have been with a woman who I went to visit to bring her to our home for the dying, and she said, I want to die. She was Romanian.

She sounded very Dracula-ish. Ivan to die. And she was ready. My friend Mark, we went to the hospital. Somebody offered him a wheelchair because he looked like he. he couldn't walk anymore. He looked like a walking skeleton. And physician told him that they were not going to give him any more treatment. And that was the thing for him that made him stop. He was not going to stop until somebody told him. And then there's somebody like Andrew Gibson who just died.

And her experience was, I'm going to lean in and I'm going to feel all this and I'm going to talk about it. And one of her poems is about my heart breaking into a million pieces and I want to get out of here with it broken. I think she's a really beautiful example of what it could be. And people do the best they can. We're often scared. We don't want to hurt. We have these ideas about what it could be. We watch other people die and we wonder if it's going to be that way. Most of us might see one or two people in our whole lives be in the room with them when they die. Your dad died. Yeah, I was with, I've been with two of my grandparents when they passed. And then I was, I made my own kind of caregiver service for my dad.

What does that mean? Would you tell me? Yeah. So my dad really loved literature and he really loved music. And he had one of the Parkinsonian conditions, which basically is, it's not unlike Lou Gehrig's, you know, where the mind kind of stays intact and the body starts doing what it does. But he was, yeah, he was intact, you know, kind of meant he knew what was happening, which was very disturbing. But, you know, he couldn't do the things that he loved. He couldn't listen to music. He couldn't read. So I,

yeah, I curated all of our favorite songs. And I did, I mean, I guess it wouldn't like music therapy, you know, and I would play and, you know, when he still had a voice, you know, we would sing together, we would talk about memories of when we listened to this song, you know, we kind of did like stroll down memory lane. He also wanted to, I mean, I helped facilitate, meaning I asked him if he wanted to write messages to people close to him. Sure. My cousins and my mom, he forgot to do one to me, but I didn't really want it. And then my mother said, I think he should. And then that that was awkward. But yeah, I did that. And then I read to him. He was a huge James Joyce fan. And he always would laugh when I would try and read Finnegan's Wake, which was his favorite book,

because it's kind of like it's a jumble of words. And so it was, you know, he would laugh at me trying to make my way through this very difficult literature. How did you know to do that? I don't know. I mean, like singing, you know, when my grandmother passed, I was singing to her. singing is something that I think of as, you know, parents do for children. So that seemed, I don't know, when you're in that vulnerable position, both of you are vulnerable, it seemed like a comforting thing. Yeah, I mean, I guess love, right? You try and communicate love. I can't imagine, you know, how you encounter people that are not your parents, right? And walk them through this as well. I mean, it's holy work. It is holy work. You say that, and I get good.

goosebumps all up. It's, it is, it's an opportunity to hold people and you don't have to know anything about them. You just know that it's somebody that needs, deserves dignity and care and kindness and whole other ballgame when it's your person and your friends and your family. It's a whole other ballgame. For me, there's been lots of learning in being with people who are not my people. Having been with my dad when he was dying and watching him and watching my mother. There was lots to learn. And it just opened up so much for me. Do people die the way they live?

You know, you're that over and over. And I don't know. It feels trite sometimes. And other times it feels really true. Yeah. But I know people who have had rich, beautiful lives. One guy in particular loved his life. He did not die like he. He was devastated he was dying. That's not how he lived. He lived happy and joyful and he had what I would call demoralization. So he's hopeless in a way that he couldn't get past. So I don't know that it's true for everybody.

I remember when when my father, I mean, in the process, you know, we had hospice and we had a rabbi who, you know, kind of ushered us through this and we had a hospice nurse and we had a social work. worker and you know and they were like somebody came in i think they were new they didn't know me and my mother very well and they said you would want you to be happy and my mother's like oh you didn't know my husband and it was like you know he like we're very like you know jump in the grave like kind of all those jokes like that was you know he liked a lot of attention and he would have wanted to be mourned deeply with a lot of pomp and circumstance so we kind of laughed i mean it was you know those moments that you can find, you know, levity. Miami-Bialx breakdown is supported by Superpower.

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The little blue book? No, it wasn't blue. It was like the, it's like a boat and it's like the journey home. And it was lovely. It was very lovely. But, you know, you talk about many other kind of spiritual and emotional aspects of the process. There's certain things, though, that I wonder if you can sort of give us a little insight to. In terms of this journey, you know, there's a journey of the body. And whether someone is dying of old age or has, you know, a condition or a disease, there's a process physiologically that in many cases kind of follows a certain routine. But can you talk to us about kind of the emotional and spiritual journey that we go on when we transition from this world to whatever comes next? And also, what do you believe comes next? Okay, let me tell you story.

my friend Rachel called her mother. Mother's in her 80s and her mother says, I want to go home. And Rachel says, Mom, you are home. And she says, nope, I want to go home. And she's talking about going to some other home. And Rachel's ears perked up.

Rachel put the phone on speakerphone so the partner in her house could hear the conversation. And this continued on. And there was something about things like this. So Rachel got on an airplane and went to some. see her mother and was her bonus father was taken care of the woman. She, Rachel's mother was sleeping a lot. Lori's husband would go and run his fingers up the piano to wake her up because the routine that they were so used to wasn't the routine anymore. And he was mad that she wouldn't get up and have yogurt with him and do the things. So she's in a process where she's trying to do her

thing and she's a little bit separated from reality. Before that, that she was living her life and doing her things and she knew that she was going to die at some point she believed in heaven she's good Lutheran and this this was going to unfurl as it was going to unfurl through many conversations rachel ended up bringing her mother home and her mother died in their home a month later rachel cracked all of these things that were in the book and a few other things and you know her mother wasn't sick her mother hadn't been in the hospital since the birth of her last child and and rachel knew she was dying and the mother knew she was dying and there was no fight there was no this doesn't have to be this way there was no railing

against god it was none of that it was this is this unfolding gentle gentle unfolding that happened the emotional, spiritual, physical pieces of this, in hospice they talk about taking care of the whole person. It is all of that. And for some people, they haven't made peace with something or there's some kind of trauma that once they're a little bit separated, we talk about the default network in psychedelics and that there's a shift in the default network as people are separating from themselves, ego separating and they're loosing. I think of it like the spirit is separating from the body and it's this really extraordinary process. I've seen and heard people talk about experiences

they have in their dream time that allow them then to have a big release. An example is a woman who talked about horses that came and the horses stepped on her abdomen and she had some kind of cancer or something here. And as she was explaining that and holding her abdomen, she began to cry. And it was one of those let it all go.

And she was able to do that. We were right there with her. Yes, the horses came. We believe the horses came. I don't know if the horses came, but they came in her mind. The metaphors and symbols that show up are in my mind

clearly there to help the person let go and find their way forward. The people who show up, whether they're known or unknown are also seem to be there to help the person go. So sometimes bodies just set down. And then there's this unseen, these unseen things that happen. I imagine that there's a deep psychological process and spiritual process that people are going through at the end of their life. And we speak to a lot of people who have had near-death experiences who describe the process of near-death.

as a life review, starting to lose filter of this world and start to connect to other worlds. And those other worlds are sometimes have extrasensory capabilities. They're seeing entities that aren't there. They're seeing loved ones who have passed. And we've spoken to Bruce Grayson and others who talk about how the filtering system of the mind is slowing down. And so people are able to have a larger perspective. Now, you can then say, well, what is that larger perspective really, right? Is it a hallucination?

Are they making this up? What's happening on the other side that someone is getting closer to death has access to? And I'm sort of curious about the biological process that someone is going through where the body starts to shut down, but also the psychological, spiritual process. And I'm curious in your experiences, like, does that start a month out? Is it weeks out? Is it a day out? and tracking that with their sense of like either unfinished business or holding on and not wanting to let go of this world and sort of like thinking about it really as a metaphorical journey.

I know people who have a cancer diagnosis and they're in a place of it's treatable, curable and then it's just treatable and then it's not treatable, not curable anymore. And as they're in that process, their dreams change, their movement about their day changes, and they begin to pull in. And as someone is moving more and more into their own experience, they move into this place I call tucking in. And as they tuck in, they begin to sleep more. every once in a while they'll pop up and they may talk about when lady talked about the nuns on the hill she came out and she had she had seen some kind of vista with the nuns on the hill she was a good catholic other people are able to come all the way back and be fully present and fully here i see that stepping away and coming back and stepping away and coming back as part of the process of letting

go. Eventually, they're more away than they are here. And eventually, when they're here, they're looking at us, but looking through us. Did you have that experience with your dad? Yeah. It's really something. There's there are times where they want less to people around. They've had their very favorite people, and at some point they don't want those favorite people around. We often encourage families to talk about a sign, give us a sign or let us know when you're ready to have a certain number of people here. Some people want everybody and their dog there, and some people just want this little circle. So those kinds of changes are things that I look for that I count as this. is a little bit of letting go of regular life and tucking in because I'm about to leave my body.

Moving from being in the bed all the time and suddenly need to be on the couch in the living room and being a little bit here and a little bit there while they're on the couch in the living room. And then they go back to the bed, but they're different when they're in the bed now. It's not the same. They're not quite the same as they were two days before. When you say tucking in and that difference, is it just small observations? that you notice? Like, because some people you may say they're here, but they're not really here. For someone who hasn't experienced that, explain what you mean.

One of the things early on I noticed with somebody that is beginning their process is they may ask about what time it is. And they ask about what time it is 15 times. And they may do that for several days. And people get a clock and they try to help them orient to time. We know we want to help them know what time it is. It's not about time. They're reorienting in themselves. And there's this, this shift that's happening. So that's one. Another is they really need to be resting. And it's not, it's not necessarily sleeping. And there's a different kind of look on somebody's face, a different kind of way the bed is holding them. and for many there's the pain that begins to happen,

somebody gets on hospice, and many people don't want to give pain medicine because they're afraid the pain medicine is going to hasten death. That is not the case. Pain medicine relieves pain. Once a body is able to be comfortable, then the body is able to further move into its process. And as pain increases, to me, a non-medical person,

who's been around a lot of dying people, that is another level of experience for them that they're sinking in. So I don't, I hear from people, oh, they're getting worse, they're getting worse. And when I hear, oh, they're having more pain, we're going to hospice in the U.S. Medicaid symptoms. There's some places around the world that don't do that. We medicate symptoms so that the person can have an easier experience. And it's easier on the family, too, as that,

pain is relieved, people can settle in. It's hard when you're watching somebody you love and you feel like they're suffering. And in many cases, they are suffering. It's different, bone pain hurts, cancer hurts, dying doesn't hurt. It's the physicalness of how we get out of this body that hurts. And hospice is a beautiful, beautiful philosophy of care, way of being that help. families. You know, some of the most important life transitions in this country are very hard to get support for, you know, pregnancy, labor, trying to, you know, breastfeed, you know,

just like just things that sustain life and then these kinds of things, you know, that help sustain a different kind of transition, right? Yeah, yeah. They're not, yeah, they're not really supported, I think, in many ways. And I think, yeah, a lot of people just wish they didn't have to think Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, Kula Ross started doing her work because she would go in the hospitals and people would be in the back hallways. If you're dying, you got put in the back hallways and they just left you alone. And she went back and started talking to people and like, these people are still alive. We need to offer them something. And thank goodness for her. I mean, this was not that long ago, 19, early, early 70s. Her book came out in 69. And we're moving

into a time in our country where the baby boomers are going to start using the health care system and hospice system in a way that's never been used before. And we're not ready. We are not ready. There's not been enough funding for hospice as of late. The things have changed. The way government funding is has changed. And the number of people versus the number of providers, caregivers, nurses, that's just not, it's not there. How many people approximately have you been with as they've transitioned? I've been with more than a thousand. I've been doing this since I was in my early 20s. Wow.

Yeah. And there are people who've been with 10,000, 20,000. The hospice workers who've been doing this for 20, 30 years, have been doing a long, long time. I worked in children's hospitals, and I worked with kids who are bereaved and their families and then worked at this care home in San Antonio called a bode contemplative care for the dying. And we had just a small number of people that we worked with at a time, which gave me a really beautiful opportunity to watch people. I watch patterns and with them every day for hours every day and can see them and talk to them and feel it and smell it and know it and watched them when they started having their deathbed visions.

And, you know, the light in the ceiling in the second room, there were several people one after another would see a light. And one of the guys had, there was a kid in the ceiling that dropped a rope down, but the rope wasn't long enough for him to get, which is one of the things that is a hallmark of deathbed visions. There's this trajectory of experiences that happens for people. the people who are dying will often see people they don't know first they'll see people outside then they begin to hear people inside eventually may hear somebody from their family

eventually those people come into the room and when it's people they don't know if it's somebody they don't know there's still a little ways to go in my mind and when it's family members and they're right at the end of the bed and they're able to talk to them. That's a different thing. When they're looking up in this part of the room, so they're separated from reality a little bit more, and they're looking up here versus looking up in the corners of the room,

the delirium and the confusion and all that stuff gets discounted, and I don't think we should. I think it's part of the experience and there's more to it. So this kind of stuff happens, and then there's some reaching around the side of the room, like they're reaching to somebody. Sometimes they can tell you about that. Sometimes they can't.

And then there's this kind of reaching. When somebody's doing this and looking up, we don't have much time to go. You have big eyes. Did your dad do this? Did he do your reaching? No. And not everybody does it.

Well, yeah. I mean, also there's so much variability here depending on what's going on in the motor systems and all these things and where if you're dealing with like neurodegenerative things, which many of us are, it's like you get a whole different, you know, kind of profile. But I think it's so interesting the things that are similar and, you know, the things that, again, there's so much variability here. But I think what's so interesting is the things that you can find that are similar, right? It's so easy to say, oh, well, that didn't happen or that's not going to happen.

But it's more interesting to me to find these, you know, common things that, that's, you know, we see because, yeah, in many cases they do mean something. I want to process what you just shared with us. The fact that people are having near-death visions is a new concept to a lot of people. Yeah. Or deathbed visions is a concept that I think is new. The idea that people are seeing people that may or may not exist and that this is a common phenomenon. All over the world. All through the world that people are seeing people, that may be. may not exist people that have passed, that they may know, people that they don't know, that they're reaching, that they're having similar behaviors where they're indicating with their

hands, that area of the room that they're looking at may indicate to how close they are to passing. As people who may or may not be there get closer to them, and as this person either believes that these people are closer or has stronger visions or is hearing more. If they're across the room, they're further away from death, if they're closer. It's fascinating, and it describes or suggests to me this idea of being in between multiple worlds. I think we're all actually in between multiple worlds and the veil is quite thin. But if we think of death as the transition out of this world of this soul, then are these people gaining more extra sensory information, are there guides all around them all the time that are

there to help them on this journey? And these signs or behaviors are indications that that is happening. So when I teach people and I talk about metaphors and I talk about how we make meaning of things, I talk about you go to an ER, you go to the window, you say, I feel like I've got an elephant standing on my chest or I've got a belt around my middle and they will take you to the back because they think something's up with your heart. There's a there's a meaning correlation there. So when I hear family members say my person is so confused today, I lean in and I say, tell me what's the confusion? What are you hearing them talk about? They want me to take the chains off. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, that is, this person is a is,

pretty far along in their journey. They probably haven't talked very much at all. Every once in a while they're saying something like lift me up, lift me up, up, up. Do you want to move up in the bed? They're not here in present time wanting to get lifted up in the bed. They want to get lifted up, whatever that means to them. Take the chains off. My dad said take the chains off. And I leaned over and I messed with his hand and I said, okay, dad, they're off. He did the same thing with my brother a little bit later. These long stretches of quiet, though, happen. And in between, if you're lucky and you're close enough and you're paying attention and you understand that it's not confusion and you listen to it as a metaphor, what could it mean? What could it mean for you? What could it mean for them? And if I'm hearing,

lift me up, up, up, I can say, Dad, you're already lifted up. We've lifted up the bed. Or I can say, right here with you, Dad. As much as you need to be lifted up, we're right here with you until you get where you need to go. It's that place of meeting your person where they are and trusting that their experience is their experience. And that something in, I say in here, I think about, I don't know if it's psyche, if it's heart, if it's spiritual, it's all of those things. But something's happening. and if we're lucky enough to be in the liminal space with them and feel that because there's a feeling that goes with it and hold it with them, there's nothing like it.

What time is it? Take the chains off. Lift me up. Let's go. He's dying. What else do people say? I want to go home at the beginning of the journey often. I want to go home.

I want to get out of here. here. We often take that very literally. Another thing people will often ask for as they're starting in the trajectories, they want their luggage, they want their purse, they want their shoes, they need the map, and often family wills, you don't need any of that. There was a guy standing at the door. He wanted to go to the basketball court, and it was three o'clock in the morning. And he coached basketball at some point, and his wife kept trying to reason with him. We can't go. It's three o'clock of the morning and when I heard about it later, I understood that he's going back in time. He's going back to experiences that he's had before and he's living in them. It's not that he's watching them. He's

in it. So we know about life reviews. And when my dad was in the hospital, the nurse came in with a tray and dad was really frustrated with her. She said she stood there for a minute. He did this. My dad was a preacher. He was putting on a stole and he opened his book. And he said he was trying to teach. He was trying to teach sunny school. He was back somewhere teaching Sunday school and she interrupted him. So she put the tray down and she said, Pastor, I'm sorry. I'll come back later. And I loved that she met him right there and then he could do whatever he needed to do. That's not confusion. that's something where they're dipping into a place that helps them dip into another place later and dip into another place later. As people are moving further and further into this tucking in, talking is less, and it's just these little blips.

I mean, you're talking also about witnessing a shift in consciousness. I mean, the thing that it reminds me of is when you hear people who are supporting those on a psychedelic journey, right? Right. You would never say to someone, like if you're a therapist and you're doing, let's say, ketamine assisted psychotherapy or you're doing a psilocybin journey, if someone said like, I'm seeing this, you'd never have a doctor to be like, no, you're not. That's not happening. Yeah.

They would meet that person where they're at because, and I'm trying to look for the similarities, right? What it is is that if someone else is having a different experience in their consciousness, it is true. It's true for them. It's real for them and it has meaning. 1,000%. some of the physicians think people are lying, which, okay, that's, that is a way, that is a way to

engage with this. Or you can believe that everything is real for them and meet them where they are and, uh, be a peaceful, energetic person in a space where things feel really chaotic because they're trying to get out of themselves. Did your, did your dad move around in the bed and the bed clothes are all messed up and people try to fix the bed? No, I mean, he had, like, he had neuropathy and there was a lot of, like, other stuff and he had paralyzed vocal cords. So, like, his movement was very different, you know, he was very kind of slowed down, but he was very unsteady, you know, on his feet, which he was for years. You know, it's very hard to get a diagnosis for some of these kind of rare, you know, Parkinsonian-related things. There was definitely some fidgetiness.

There was a lot of hand stuff, which, you know, as a neuroscience trained person, I'm thinking, like, Basil ganglia, like it's a dopamine. And, you know, like I'm kind of going through everything they taught me in school about movements, about movements, Parkinsonian movements and deterioration and, you know, things like that, meaning degeneration in, you know, certain brain regions. My meaning making is they're in this place where they're shaking off. They're shaking off their body. It's a different way to look at it.

And I think they're both true. I want to ask a hard kind of cynical question. It's not my perspective. But, you know, when you were talking about these kind of like clinical, you know, in particular kind of clinical Western doctors who are kind of like, oh, like it's not real. Like this is just dying, you know, and it's that very sort of reductionist, you know, materialist world view. You know, when I think about how little we understand in our culture about dying in particular,

you know, I think that there are people, and I don't want to sort of demonize these people, but I think there are a lot of people who feel like the value of life is living. And the things that we do and we're healthy and able are the things that we should put the most research into, the most money into, the most support, the most therapy, the more medication. like that's what it's about, right? So that when people hit a certain point, and you know, we've all read, hopefully, you know, this isn't an obscure reference,

we've all read science fiction novels where, you know, when people get to a certain stage, they are no longer included, right? Right. In a society. And in some ways, that's what we do, right? When people reach a certain place. And I think that there is a sort of perspective

of like, what else do you want us to do with them, right? Like, they're dying. They're, forgive me, like, of no use. I wouldn't, I, this is. doesn't be saying it, but some people might say there's no use. So this is the, so the question is, and this is sort of like, who is Martha Joe, right? Why does it matter? Why does it matter to care? Why does it matter to love this way? Why does it matter? Is it energetic? Is it soul? Like, what, why does it matter?

Stephen Jenkinson says the way a society treats their dying is a great indicator about who they are. And I think that's true. I think the way we care for our elders, the way we care for our dying says a lot about us. We're all going to be there. Our elders are wisdom keepers and they are knowledge keepers. and when somebody gets to the end of their life, they're teaching us about what our own dying could look like. And we have an opportunity to be there to learn from them and to care for them. And I think there's lessons in both.

We can include our children in dying processes as they wish to be included or as we wish to include them. I know some people don't think that's a good thing at all. I think it's a very good thing for kids who want to be involved. And those kids, when they come in and they're with their person who's dying, afterwards I often talk to them about how they're going to be leaders for their peers because they know things that their peers are not going to know. And I just think it's a matter of how we treat people and that it's important.

What are some of the other symbols that are common that people see? So landscapes, animals, in the literature that talks a lot about religious symbols, but if you talk to people who are in the day-to-day, there's not so much of that. I talked about the nun on the hill. I don't remember a lot of other people talking about that. bridges, barriers, rivers, those things I've seen or heard people talk about. Flowers, there's a woman that talked about, did you hear the flowers? So there was some kind of space she had gone up to and she just was beautific and came back,

was able to tell us about that. And then the trains, yeah, trains and airplanes and doors. There will often be a door that's shut that is they can't get through. A little bit on the nose. Come on. And then eventually the door opens. The door swings open. My mother's uncle talked about the train coming and his brother was on the train and he said next time I'm going to go. I'm going to go get on the train with him. Kids have kid-friendly visions. Bruce Grayson, I think it was in his book. He wrote about a kid who loved race cars and it was red light, yellow light, green light.

And when it got to green, this kid had this vision of a green light, and that's when he was able to go. And then we had a kid at the bereavement center. His family recounted the story of, Daddy the Trains Here, I gotta go. People get ready, the song, you know. Get ready, that's right. Gotta go, got to go, got to go, got to go.

Yeah. I mean, thinking of children passing is obviously, extremely painful. Is there a noticeable difference between the process that a child goes through and an adult goes through? Kids often want to take care of their people and they want to stay around. For their parents, they want to stay around and be with them as long as they can. We had a kid with cystic fibrosis. Her mother wanted her to live and wanted her to live and wanted her to live. And when her mother finally said, okay, we can go home, the mother went to the elevator, and I know that elevator had not hit the floor before that child died.

And she needed, the kid needed to go, didn't need to go home, but needed her mother not to be in the room. And I think there's a really beautiful, tending, beautiful and sad tending that any of us can do for somebody we love who's dying. Sometimes people wait. You all heard those stories. You wait for somebody to come or they wait for somebody to come or they wait for somebody to go.

And it's really something. Talk to us a little bit more about this idea of timing and relationship. You know, it's almost overly simplistic to say that someone won't pass until someone who's living releases them. But talk to us about that energetic relationship. Yeah, and I don't know about this. We need to give permission. We hear this a lot.

We got to tell them I'm going to be okay. my gosh. I did it. I did it with my dad. Yeah, I did it with mine too. I mean, all he was worried about was my mother. Yeah. And I literally was like, oh, well, this is easy.

And I facilitated a, I mean, I facilitated a heartbreaker of a, you know, thing. But yeah, that's all he was, I mean, his whole life, that's all he was worried about. That's all they each lived for. It was like a very... What was the conversation? I mean, it's beautifully dramatized in your movie, but... I did. I made a movie after my dad died.

My parents, you know, were, like, deeply in life. My mom is not going to listen to this episode. I forbid it so I can talk about this. My parents were deeply in love and deeply enmeshed, you know. And so there was a lot of discomfort she had with this, you know, process of losing him, you know, because it was the process that was harder than the event, you know. It's that like, you don't know. You know, she's a very type A, like, you know, let's put it on the calendar.

It didn't work like that, you know? And he's very worried about her. and expressed to me a lot of concern about that. So, you know, what I did is I told him that I'm going to take care of her. Yeah. And I didn't get specific. I wasn't like, I will do this. And we will.

I just said, I got it. Yeah. We're going to take care of her. Like, I've got this and I have the ability to do that. And there was a real relief. Yes. When you say there was an actual relief, he isn't consciously, he doesn't have the consciousness or the. No, he was, yeah, yeah.

Or where was he in the process? I'm trying to understand what does that look like. What does that relief look like? I mean, you could barely hear him. You had to lean, you know, because his vocal voice. So, you know, I'm like, our ear would be like right up. It was like, because the whole room was waiting. No, he, I mean, he was speaking in shorter sentences, but he was there.

Like, he was there. And he, you know, there was like a sigh of relief. And I didn't imagine it. Like, it was like, oh, he really didn't know if she's going to be okay. And in that state he needed to hear. someone said. I was just like intuitively was like, okay, I can do that. And also when he did pass, I was like, I didn't say, I'm going to take care about to ship her off to like, you know, Burma. I took care of her dad. She'll have a great life there. She's in Burma in a trailer.

Just before you tell us about the conversation you facilitated between your dad and your mom, if I'm reflecting on what you just said. I'm kind of her apprentice. I'm going to start working with Martha Jow. Great. Just make sure you take care of it. I think your dad is whatever he was holding emotionally is preventing him from being in the full process of tucking in as you describe it. If the tucking in is doing the final work of our life, metaphorically, spiritually, I'm reconciling whatever I need to reconcile, then if I'm worried about someone, in the physical realm, I can't really go and have the freedom to navigate the non-physical

realm and sort of pack my suitcase and get myself ready and start meeting the people I need to and shaking hands with my angels who are going to help me in this transition and booking my train ticket or, you know, finding out when the flight schedules are to the afterlife. Like I need some time and space to do that. So I have to reconcile, which if people have unresolved trauma as they're going through this tucking in process, or they have unreconsiled issues like estranged relatives or anger or whatever it is, is that process more disjointed, flailing, painful? They're like, my grandfather, for example, had intense dementia. And when he passed, he was searching for his mom and he was trying to go back to Montreal

on a business deal and trying, you know, he was in Toronto, but there was this business deal that went bad, and he was trying to reconcile that. And then he was flashing back to times that he was in the Army in World War II. And I would imagine that all of those things that he never looked at in his healthy life, they never left him. They were just this baggage that prevented or made it more difficult for him to make that final transition. It's really an energetic question.

right? Like what's the energy of what we're holding? I love that he's got to go back and do a business deal. And there's often a thing about unfinished business that looks like there's some house that didn't get done or the jet's on the runway, but the doors are not on the jet or the wheels are not on the jet. When I hear some of those things, I wonder it's like they're almost ready, but they're not quite there. one of the women talked to me about her mother said can you can you see the can you see the table like through the wall yeah there it is mom it's the table it's all set everything's ready but they haven't poured the wine and she thought oh when they pour the wine she's going to go and that was it I have had conversations in front of spouses who were non-communicative the spouse that's here and the

children so that that spouse can hear that the person is going to be taken care of or where they're going to live and sometimes dying comes pretty soon after that. Maybe it's causal, maybe it's not. I don't know. One of the guys needed to go see his son who was in prison and somehow they've figured out how to get him to a closer prison in San Antonio and we took him and he got to go buy a son of Coke. He didn't take pain medicine until he got in the car to go back.

and once he got back in the bed, he didn't get back out of the bed. He was done. He had done the thing he needed to do. Some people are able to do that. Some people aren't. And sometimes we as the people around think we should really help this family reconcile or help them all be able to love each other. And Frank Osses-Desky is a longtime end-of-life educator,

and he says you can't do the work of a lifetime on the deathbed. And you can't. Some things you just. Gotta let go. Even doctors and nurses who don't seem particularly energetically inclined, when you think about the way death is spoken about, this is a common thing, right? Like, don't hang on if they want to let go. You know, we had to be educated about how if someone wants to stop eating, you have to let them

stop eating, right? So there's kind of some basic things that seem to indicate, though, that there's kind of this, like, on the horizon knowledge about what people hold on to and what they need to release. However, it's so not a part of our vernacular, right, for doctors or nurses to say, oh, energetically, this person's transitioning, right? It's just not, you know, kind of the language that we use. But as someone who has witnessed about a thousand people transitioning, right, I wonder if you can talk about are you tapped into something energetically where you can feel either what they're feeling, what they're processing, you know, when my grandmother passed, I was with her and it was just

her and me in the room. And it was like there was a silence beyond the silence. And I was like, she's gone, you know? And so I wonder, like, I wasn't tapped into anything particularly energetic, at least not consciously, but I'm curious, is this something you pick up on? Were you an energetically inclined person before? What does it feel like when someone dies? What I understand now is it's not just what you feel. It's what you smell. It's what you hear. It's how people are sitting in the room. It's what the bed looks like. There's a whole cacophony of silent and not silent things that are happening in that room, that all are indicators of something. And so I might walk into a room and have a sense that it's really loud and the person's just doing

these really imperceptible, almost imperceptible movements. And if we brought the energy in the room really way down, they might settle in a different way. And somebody else might walk in and go, oh, they're fine. Did you feel the silence beyond the silence? Yeah. Different than hearing the silence beyond the silence. Yeah. It was something, yeah. Yeah.

I think lots of people have that experience and may not understand that's what it is. They just know that something's different. And when you do whatever work you do, I mean, I can't walk into a room and know somebody's going to die in the next few minutes. I can walk into a room and recognize when somebody's in an active dying process. And they may be in that for three days. They may be in it for two hours. I just know that's happening and I can make phone calls. And if people want to come and be with them in that process, great.

And we don't know how long it's going to be. And we get to be with them as long as they want. I was in a room one time where person after person after person came in and said, it's okay for you to go. It's okay for you to go. It's really, you know, it's time for you to let go. You can let go. and I could feel myself going, wow, I don't know what, what would it be like if 15 people came in and told me it was time to go and do they really want me to leave?

I'm not ready. I feel like I've overstayed my welcome here. Really? Or could we say something different? So I started saying, we're going to be right here with you until you're ready to go. And then I read another guy, a guy talked about he didn't want to hear all that. he just wanted people to tell him that he was loved, that this repeated, it's okay for you to go, felt like they were shoeing him out.

Some people need that. Some people need something else. I'm inclined to, we're going to be right here with you until you're ready to go. So tucked deep into your book, we got to a signpost where it feels like the next stop is the Twilight Zone. And the signpost is something I've never heard of before. Okay. A shared death experience. Yes.

So a shared death experience is a profound experience whereby I loved one, caregiver or bystander, shares a dying person's initial transition from this world into the afterlife. I mean, you could write an entire book about this, and I would read it every day. So apparently, from what I understand, there are experiences such as hearing music, change in the geometry of the room, an upward pull on the body, a mystical light mist in the room,

which happened to Elizabeth Crone when her grandfather called her in an after-death communication, being greeted by beings of light and notions of a heavenly realm, as well as empathically co-living the life review of the dying person. I know. Trippy, isn't it?

I mean, the trippiest. So there's a whole body of research on shared crossings. William Peters and Santa Barbara is doing that work. He's had published research. William has a great story about this back when there was in hospice

in one of the hospitals. He's reading to the guy, both of them came out of their bodies and they're looking down. William says, I'm reading, out of body experience. experience the guys in the bed and they're the guys grinning at William and William said it was the wildest most wonderful thing and then they're back in their body. So wait, are they both saying that

they experienced this? There are many occasions where several people at the bedside have the same experience. I mean there's some plain of understanding in this moment where if enough people are in tune with it. A woman at abode talked to me about having that kind of experience. Her mother's in the bed. My friend was up with her mother. Again, mothers, they're out of body and watching dad come across to get mom. Dad has already passed. Dad has already passed.

And people who are not dying see the father coming to get the mother who is dying. One person. One person. Yeah. So, you know, in the how do we prove this? I don't know how we prove it. And I don't really care. I just think it's super cool.

It's meaningful for the woman. She's got an experience now after her mother dies grieving my mother, but I have this shared experience where I saw my dad coming and my dad was pretty excited to see my mom and my mom was pretty excited to see my dad. Like a shared life review, that's fascinating too. I mean, it's very hard, obviously, to document and kind of qualify these things. It's very difficult. But I'm also curious, is the bystander having their own experience of communion, you know, of a

sort with the person who is dying, or I'm sure that there are examples, we'll have to look into it, of basically a way to verify that they're each experiencing the same thing, the dying person and the, you know, the bystander, as it were. Williams got a lot of great research. And some of it goes even to dreams that other family members are having that are related to the person who's dying and being able to connect all those people. and it's fun. It's really fun. I mean, we talk a lot here about sort of, you know, if consciousness is not in the brain and in the body

and it can, let's say, lift out, it can travel other places, right? In all of our near-death experience episodes that we've done, we have many cases, right, where consciousness does not reside there. So in that sense, if there is this plane of connectivity, places when there's, I don't want to say trauma, because dying doesn't have to be seen as trauma, but where there is vulnerability. You know, that veil can get very thin.

Yeah. Speaking of veils that are thin, do you have communication to those who have passed? I have had dreams. They always happen in the morning, like between 4 and 5.30 in the morning, right at the twilighty part just before I'm awake. And they're very clearly different than other dreams.

wide hallways with people walking towards me and then somebody's in color and I recognize that person. I have had one dream where I heard somebody called me on the phone. I picked up the phone and I heard laughing and I knew immediately who it was. There was no talking, but I heard the laughing. I'm sorry, back it up. So the phone is ringing in my dream and I pick up the phone and I say hello. And it's Bruce. It's Bruce's died of a brain tumor.

Bruce's wife works at the place where I work. And I was Bruce. And Bruce was happy. And I thought, well, do I tell his wife? Do I not tell his wife? I told his wife. And she, you know, what do you say? She could have appreciated it.

She could have said, lady, you're crazy. Or is she could have said, well, how come he's not calling me? Yeah, right, right. And I don't know why that is. And maybe it's my own internal psyche making sense of my internal process making sense of Bruce dying. I don't know. Or maybe he is calling her and she can't pick up the phone. Connected in a different way.

Because I can pick up the phone. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's, it's trippy. And I wish I had more. I, I am, I'm in a place where they're pretty few and far between. And I'm really happy for the ones I've had. So I want to respect that you're being very diplomatic in terms of experience and what is provable. I want to know the craziest thing you've ever experienced, though.

Me too. I also want to know that. Do you think that all people's loved ones who have passed are trying to communicate or continue the relationship in some way? I listened to your episode with Teresa Caputo. Oh, yeah. And I had, she came to San Antonio a couple months ago and I watched her work. I've seen her on TV, but I hadn't ever seen her in person. I was blown away by her.

She's, she's something. She's receiving something. She is receiving something. I don't know how all that works. I know for my people who are dying, their eyes are open, they're seeing something. Sometimes they're smiling. Sometimes there's this kind of trying to make sense of something or it looks like they're trying to make sense of. something. Sometimes they're able to talk about all the, there's a party in the room and there's

all these people and they're naming off people. They've known. I just think that's all super cool. I have no idea if people are trying to reach us all the time. I've had dreams of my brother. I've had a couple of dreams of my mother. I've not had any dreams of my father. And I'm okay with all of those. The deeper part of that for me is she is somebody being relational and believing that person and somehow bringing some ease to their process. And that's amazing. You both are in a position of interacting with people who may be having incredible experiences and you yourself are having incredible experiences as you witness that. So we are curious, has there been something that has changed the way you think of consciousness, life after

this life, what comes next or what transitioning really is? two things we had a woman who came to abode the doors blew open with these beautiful french doors in each of the room the doors blew open she had not been communicative um this beautiful smile on her face her family went bananas and we didn't know what the bananas was about and she and the woman said a word that helped them understand who this was the boyfriend had jumped off of a bridge in San Antonio right before this woman and died right before this woman came into the space and the family understood that the, yeah, that the young man had come to to be with her. The doors blowing open.

The doors blew open. He came in the room. She's the woman who's dying, is kissing the air and makes a sound some kind of name that is what she called this, this young man. And it makes me have goosebumps on my face right now. Because I think how super cool is that? That whatever pain he was in, that seems to be gone now and he can come be here for her and maybe help her go wherever she needs to go. So that's professional.

Personally, right after my brother died, I was in my room very early in the morning this 5 o'clock time. and I felt someone holding my hand. It was as real as we are sitting here. And I thought to myself, why is Sherry in here? Sherry was my roommate, room down the hall, and I turned over and there was no one there. That feeling has never left me. And I don't know what that was, except that somebody was holding my hand. And I don't know if it was Jim or somebody else, but there was some comfort offered to me.

in a way that I needed, and I'm really grateful for that. One of the things, and we talked about this, actually, after our Teresa Caputo episode, there's so much beauty to how you talk about the dying process when you're able to facilitate that, and people who work in these spaces really are. They're angels, right? They're ushering people between worlds, you know?

It is. It's very holy. However, there are a lot of times when people are, trying to give support to people they have a very complicated relationship with. And you are walking into, God knows what, array of emotions, right? I wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of that complexity and not only how to you sift through it as sort of this facilitator, but what can we offer people who may have complicated relationships with someone who was their abuser, right? And someone who now is at a place in life where they are transitioning. In many cases, people soften as they get older, you know. So the

person who, you know, may have been a source of fear or abuse often seems very vulnerable and they're weak and, you know, can you talk a little bit about how we manage that? It's hard. It's really hard. When we had folks in those kinds of situations at abode, it would take them out to a different room as much as we could. And they just, they don't have to be there. I think that would surprise a lot of people to hear because I think so many people were just like taught to sort of like push through or, you know. Yeah. Yeah. A woman emailed me and asked me if she had to care for her parents.

And I said, no. Well, if the nursing home calls me or the hospice people call me, I said, you don't have to answer the phone. You just don't. They will figure it out. Your website also includes information about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Is this a tool that you use for people? And what is that like? Catamine is the molecule that interacts with our body that people, smarter than I am, say, most mimics dying. And so people can leave their body. There's ego dissolution. Pain goes away. You can travel around. You can

have an experience of being with loved ones who've died. Often people will show up or images them, dreams of them. And then there's coming back into your body and meaning-making about that. For people who are grieving, having a ketamine experience can open them to meaning-making about how their person might have died. if it was a traumatic death and they were worried or if it was a long prolonged death and they were worried. They then are having this experience with ketamine where they're traveling around in their psyche or in their mind or their consciousness, however that works. And there's beautiful exploration that can happen.

And then they get to have an expansion of how they thought about things before. However they thought of them before, they get to look at them in a different way. So we're not talking about for the person who's dying. So it's interesting. There's a hospice in Denver that's got a program for, they did a pilot program for people at end of life and using ketamine for that. And I was hot to try and get that started in San Antonio and hasn't been so easy to do. So you're using it as a tool to help people grieve? I'm using it as a tool to help people grieve and to help people explore what dying is, to have conversations.

about that and, yeah, deepening soul work. It's an empathogen also. Yeah. Which is some of its kind of magical qualities. Yes. It's a good tool. Hmm. What do you think people need to know about life before they die?

That connections with the people you love, spending time with the people you love, that's the good stuff. And love stays. You leave and love stays. I think it was the hospice nurse who said to me when my dad stopped eating, she said the place where he's going, he won't need food. Oh, what a nice thing. And it was like, it really, it touched me very deeply because, you know, it's so easy when someone's dying to get overly fixated on like, I have to fix this thing, right? If it's pain, like I have to take away their pain or have to unconvince them that they're seeing something, right?

And I remember with food, it's like, look, it takes up time. It takes, you know, so it's like when you don't have to feed someone and you have to think about that, it's incredibly strange. Yes. Right? Yes. But that's sort of what I took as comfort is his body is beginning the process to prove that it's just a vessel, you know? And the place that his soul lives, there is no need for that, right? Have you experienced people who physically die, but their spirits do not.

want to transition and pass over and they're either causing havoc or they're sticking around. Oh. I think about someone who is in your position and the potential for entities, spirits who are sort of, you know, sticking around, sticking to you. I imagine the death process is this sort of big culmination of energy, a sort of a flash point of energy. Yeah. I know a lot of midwives who talk about, you know, the getting addicted to the energy of birth. Because this is a miraculous spark of energy that happens when a being comes into this world. I haven't been around people who are passing, but I imagine that it's something similar where there's a spark.

You know, we had Dr. John Diel talk about the brain as it medically dies, just fires and all the neurons fire. and people's eyes open. Yeah. And there's a huge explosion of energy. Yep. So actually, I guess it's a two-part question. First, is that your experience that there's this explosion of energy and does that sort of, can you palpably feel the resonance of someone passing?

That's part one. Sometimes. Sometimes it's an out breath and that's it and it's so anticlimactic. And sometimes it's this agonal breathing with all this sound and you can see. see it coming all, this last breath coming all the way up and somebody's eyes will open and then they're gone. That kind of experience when there's a whole bunch of people in the room. I mean, it's, I'm going to use the word enlivening. It's enlivening for the people who are out here and that person is gone and they're having their aliveness wherever they're having it. But it's,

it's something. It sounds visceral. Yes, it is. But what is it like when someone, when you can sense that there's kind of a disease in their soul leaving their body. What does that feel like? I've only had that one time happily for me. My body in that room was not happy. And I have not had that experience other places. Did other people feel that too? Yes.

Yes. And that woman, like, there were a lot of drugs involved. So her brain was wild. The medicines did not work for pain control for her because she'd blown everything out. And when she would walk, it was like something was inside her body. Like it was the wildest thing. The staff and the folks who would come in all had ideas about her. And some people thought she was faking it.

And some people thought, oh, this is a drug thing. and all these different ideas about how she was. She ended up, the hospice ended up doing conscious sedation with her. And she was expected to live five days or so, and I think she lived too. So her body got still finally, and she was able to settle. But there was something in that unsettledness that went everywhere. I mean, that's fascinating. And also a little bit different than sort of what I initially imagine.

I was thinking, you know, in the explosion of energy of someone passing, almost a portal opens. And in that portal, if it portal opens, people can go one way and things can go the other way. And if people, angels and others are being summoned in to someone's bedside to take them around, who else is being summoned? And are those people all happy? Good guys. All happy? Yeah, you can think about it as good. guys. I could also think about it as, you know, maybe they have unresolved business that they're

looking for channels or people who are sensitive to help them resolve and they come to a space where someone is dying because there's, I don't know, there's a bus stop that brought all these people who are helping this person die and they just happen to get off and now they're lost wandering around and maybe they attach to your energy field. Also known as being alive. People show up and stay. That's right. There was some weird stuff that happened around a boat for a while. There was a paper towel dispenser that would start going off all the time.

And the lights would start coming and going off all the time. And eventually we had somebody clear the space. Clear the house. Yeah. What'd they do? She cleared all of us. Yes. Sage and feathered?

She saged and feathered and had us outside. And there was some drumming. And it was a whole thing. and it took a long time. And then everything was fine. Seriously. Did you notice a physical difference at all? I think I did, and I don't know if it was because she did that

or because we as a community came together and said, wow, a lot of stuff has really happened. And we're tired and we're going to come together and say these things out loud and connect heart to heart and do this shared experience together. So I don't know. It's hard to know what shifted. It's hard to know, but something shifted.

From people I know who have done this. work, often it is calling out whatever it is that's happening and sort of that conscious explanation and it kind of shines light on it, the sunlight as a disinfectant. Yes, yes. Mime's house was haunted for a while. It was. Oh, say more. My younger son, when he was younger, he had a very specific way that he would talk about

things that made him uncomfortable. And he said at one point that there was a darkness. and he was he was the kind of child who he said like he sees dead people like he's seeing things and he was he didn't speak till he was like four and a half and so he had a very different perception of the world you know especially he wasn't linguistically you know utilizing himself so yeah he said that there was a darkness and so I kept bringing in lamps right of course I was like oh okay you're scared of the dark like that's what I'm thinking you know and I'm putting lights and night lights and

No, there's a darkness. Still, he couldn't feel settled. The internet would never work. All electronics would continue to crash out. She had spectrum out like how many times, like endless times. I mean, half a dozen times. I was like. Yeah.

Yeah, so I brought. And she's like, I live in Los Angeles. Why the heck can I not get internet? I did. I had a friend. And she, I was like, this feels like a thing you would know. And she brought a couple ladies. And yeah, they swept the whole, like they looked everywhere.

They found the oak tree that seemed significant. There's still an amethyst that they told me to leave at the base of the oak tree. And I didn't tell her where the darkness was and she found it. Wow. There's enough rooms in the house that. Because Fred pointed out that spot. He told me. I knew the spot.

And yeah. Without telling the ladies. Yeah, yeah, I didn't tell her. They were like, oh, this is the darkness spot. Yeah. In your TED Talk, which is very, very popular, unbelievable. You end with Steve Jobs' last words. Can you tell us those words and tell us what meaning you make from them?

Steve Jobs' last words were, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow. I hope when I step across to wherever I'm stepping across, there is a delight and a wonder and an awe like I imagined he was experiencing. I don't know if that's really what it was, but I hope it was. I hope for me and the people I love that that's the kind of experience we get to have when it's time to go. Where can people find out more about your work? Marthajoatkins.com. And it's Joe J-O.

J-O-J-O-J-O-J-O. Okay, got it. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. We really, really appreciate this and the work that you do. Thank you so much. Break it down. Maim, can we ask you to tell the story of the conversation you facilitated between your mom and dad?

Oh, yeah. There's, so I do recommend if people haven't seen as they made us, which is the movie. Very good movie. Thank you. But there's, it's not autobiographical. I have a cameo, just saying. You do have a cameo. It's not autobiographical per se.

There's, there are things, though, that obviously are from my life and my experience, and there's a lot that's not. And it's up to everybody else to decide, not me. But this was one thing that, since we're talking about it in this episode, my dad at one point was, I was sitting with him. he was thinking about my mom and he told me that he was imagining her but now I'm thinking after this conversation he was seeing her at the age she was when they met and he was telling me how beautiful she was and his eyes were closed he was talking but his eyes were closed he was resting his eyes and she ended up coming towards the room and I motioned her to come but I told her you know don't say anything and he was talking about how beautiful my mother was and that when he first saw her she was so

beautiful and just how much he loves her and you know my parents like my dad was like he would write her poems and he was very he doted on her but i had never i don't really i hadn't really heard them talk a lot about their relationship and i said why don't you tell her that and he said i could never. I could never do that. And I said, open your eyes. And she was standing right there. And she was crying and he was crying. I mean, it was like such a crazy moment. It was so intense. And, you know, if I could have orchestrated it, like, that's what I would have orchestrated. And it was, there was some catharsis. I mean, she was deeply in grief. And he was able to comfort her. You know, considering, like, he couldn't even walk at that point, it was so powerful that he could give her comfort.

you know, because that's always like the role that he had, you know. It was very, very, very powerful. So very specific to the movie, the movie really captures that moment very accurately. Yeah, I mean, Dustin Hoffman and Candace Bergen really pulled it off. I mean, I was crying during that scene. It's an incredible scene. I did want to, if you will indulge me, it's a little poem by Linda Ellis. Okay.

And I've heard this read many times. And Martha Jo mentioned, you know, for someone who spends all this time, with people who are dying. Yeah, what are we here for? What should we be taking out of that? So this is a poem. It's called the dash. I read of a man who stood to speak at a funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning to the end. He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears, but said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years. For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth, and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth. For it matters not how much we own the cars, the house, the cash. What matters is how we lived and loved

and how we spent our dash. So think about this long and hard. Are there things you'd like to change? For you never know how much time is left that still can be rearranged. To be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we've never loved before. we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile, remembering that this special dash might only last a little while. So when your eulogy is being read with your life's actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they said about how you lived your dash? Yeah, I really was touched by what she said. I thought she might say like, there's life after death. But I really like how much space she holds for the unknown. You know, she really holds a lot of

space for, you know, she talks in her book, we're meaning makers. We want to make meaning of everything. And sometimes the meaning is this is the process instead of I'm going to know at exactly what stage this is happening and what's happening in the brain and what's happening chemically. The whole thing is the process. It's not, you know, even the words, hallucination, delusion, those have a negative connotation to them. What if you saw? And she's, she's lived a thousand fingerprints in watching a thousand people die, right? They're all different. There's not, you sure, there's signposts, there's things that we can learn, but every person is a process and every death is a process. I couldn't agree more. I hope both my death and my life is greeted by

Steve Jobs' last words. Oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow. I thought you were going to say greeted by Steve Jobs. That would be a wow. That would be. Make sure you're following us on Substack so we can continue all these conversations over there. So grateful that we got to have this conversation. conversation from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.