After my mother passed away, I had an experience that I understand as communication from her from what I believe is an afterlife. I don’t want to debate or question that experience—I genuinely believe it happened, and my wife also witnessed it.
Because of that, I hold two things at once: I know she has died in the physical sense, but I also believe she still exists in some form. That belief brings me comfort and has changed how I relate to her death.
At the same time, I’ve been wondering whether this experience has affected how I’m processing grief. It happened a few months after she died, and I sometimes feel like it may have interrupted or altered what would normally be a more straightforward grieving process.
I feel like I don’t fully fit into either a secular or religious framework for grief. I’m not looking to be convinced otherwise about what I experienced, but I do want help understanding how to grieve in a way that is psychologically healthy and consistent with what is known about grief processing. Right now, I’m trying to understand whether I’m actually integrating the loss, or whether something about my experience has left that process incomplete or paused.