Spirits in the Material World: I Don’t Believe We Are More Than a Body. I Know It.

For most of my life, I was not wandering around looking for ghosts.

I was not lighting candles in a velvet cape, whispering into the veil, asking Uncle Larry to knock twice if he approved of my life choices.

I was a mother. A professional marketer. A practical person living a practical life.

Then Vern died — my beloved fiancé and best friend of twenty-three years.

And everything I thought I knew about reality cracked open.

Vern was not just a love story. He was the rarest kind of friendship — the kind that grows roots over decades, survives seasons, and somehow becomes the love of a lifetime. We had finally found our way to each other in the way people dream about: a love that felt as if it echoed across lifetimes. The kind of love where someone sees all your flaws, all your unfinished places, all your tender human messiness — and loves you anyway. Not in spite of it. Through it.

Then, just as we were beginning our life together as a couple, he was gone.

Except he wasn’t.

And that is the part that changed everything.

When Death Didn’t Behave

After Vern crossed over, I began experiencing things I could not explain away.

And believe me, I tried.

Because when something impossible happens once, you can dismiss it.

When it happens twice, you can blame stress, grief, coincidence, bad sleep, or the emotional casserole your brain makes when your heart has been hit by a truck.

But when it happens hundreds of times over seventeen years?

At some point, denial starts to look less like skepticism and more like a full-time job with no benefits.

Since Vern’s death, I have witnessed hundreds of events that fall into what people often call psi phenomena: signs, synchronicities, mediumship evidence, intuitive knowing, paranormal activity, communication across the veil, and moments where reality seemed to lean close and whisper, “You’re not getting the full story here, sweetheart.”

These experiences did not make me believe consciousness survives death.

They showed me.

And once you know that, you cannot unknow it.

The Mediumship Reading That Blew the Door Open

One of the major turning points came shortly after Vern died, during a mediumship reading that became a spiritual awakening for me.

According to a public testimonial connected to medium Vickie Gay, I provided no identifying information beyond my first name. Yet the reading reportedly included specific details about Vern’s accident, the fact that we never made it to the altar, details from our everyday life, and words that felt unmistakably like his. The testimonial states that I later spoke with many mediums, but only a few made a true connection, with that reading standing out as the one that confirmed Vern’s consciousness continued.

That kind of moment does not land in your life like an idea.

It lands like a lightning strike.

Not because someone says, “Your loved one is with you.” Plenty of people can say comforting things.

It lands because they say the thing they could not know.

The private thing.

The oddly specific thing.

The phrase that feels like it walked out of your kitchen, wearing your beloved’s voice.

That is when grief becomes something else.

Not gone. Never gone.

But widened.

Because suddenly death is no longer a brick wall.

It is a locked door — and something on the other side just slipped a note underneath.

I Went Looking for Answers

After that, I did what any grieving woman with a marketing brain and a newly shattered worldview would do:

I investigated.

Because apparently my coping mechanism was, “Let’s research the afterlife until reality taps out.”

I studied paranormal phenomena. I explored world religions. I sat with mediums. I trained. I investigated. I listened. I questioned. I doubted. I cried. I got weirdly brave. I got humbled.

I began as a skeptic of all things unproven, a materialist.

I learned nothing was what I thought it was.

Not death.

Not consciousness.

Not love.

Not the human soul.

And definitely not the limits of what we are capable of perceiving.

This Is Not Just About Vern

At first, I wanted to find Vern.

Of course I did.

When someone you love dies, you do not begin with metaphysics. You begin with one unbearable question:

Where did you go?

But over time, the question changed.

It became:

What are we?

Because if Vern could still reach me, if consciousness could continue beyond the body, if love could communicate across death, then the implications were much bigger than my personal grief.

It meant the human story we have been handed is too small.

It meant we are not just biological machines stumbling through a temporary meat-suit appointment.

It meant the body may be a vehicle, not the whole traveler.

And listen, I respect the body. The body is doing its best. It carries us around, digests tacos, grows eyelashes, and occasionally remembers passwords. The body is a marvel.

But it is not the whole of us.

Not even close.

Seventeen Years of “Nope, That Was Not a Coincidence”

Over the past seventeen years, I have witnessed far too much to dismiss as coincidence, imagination, or grief playing tricks on the mind.

In my book, Finding Vern, I chronicle a small but life-changing portion of those experiences — the kind of moments that cracked open my understanding of death, consciousness, love, and what it means to be human.

I have seen signs arrive with impossible timing.

I have seen mediumship bring forward details that should not have been accessible.

I have felt presences, followed intuitive pulls, witnessed paranormal activity, and experienced moments where the veil seemed less like a wall and more like a curtain moving in a wind we do not yet understand.

And yes, I know how this sounds to people who have never experienced it.

I know the look.

The polite smile.

The “That’s nice, Grandma found a feather” energy.

But here is the thing: personal experience is not meaningless simply because science has not fully explained it yet.

Science is beautiful. Science is necessary. Science gives us language, measurement, humility, and tools.

But science is not finished.

The human intellect is still catching up to what the soul already knows.

Why I Created Aurora’s Lantern

Aurora’s Lantern exists because I do not want people to suffer inside a worldview that is too small for their experiences.

I want people to feel the freedom of knowing they are more than a body.

More than a diagnosis.

More than a resume.

More than grief.

More than the worst thing that ever happened to them.

More than a “meat suit” with a calendar app and unresolved childhood patterns.

I created Aurora’s Lantern for the seekers, the skeptics-with-a-crack-in-the-door, the grieving, the curious, the spiritually hungry, the intuitively gifted, the people who have had experiences they are afraid to say out loud.

The ones who have seen something.

Felt something.

Known something.

Dreamed something.

Lost someone.

And wondered, quietly:

Am I crazy, or is reality much bigger than I was taught?

You are not crazy.

You may simply be standing at the edge of a larger map.

My Message to the World

I do not need every person to believe what I believe.

I am not here to drag anyone across the veil by their sensible shoes.

But I am here to say this:

I have seen too much.

I have experienced too much.

I have loved beyond death too deeply to pretend that consciousness ends when the body stops.

For me, the question is no longer whether psi phenomena, mediumship, NDEs, shared-death experiences, UFO encounters, synchronicities, and spiritual communication are real.

The question is how long it will take our culture to build a worldview large enough to hold them.

Because what if the stories people have whispered for centuries are not superstition?

What if they are data points?

What if grief, intuition, dreams, signs, and anomalous experiences are not glitches in human perception, but glimpses of a larger intelligence?

What if love is not merely an emotion, but a connective force?

What if death is not an ending, but a change in frequency?

And what if the most radical truth is also the most healing one:

We are not separate.

We are not alone.

And we are so much more than the body we temporarily call home.

That is why I wrote Finding Vern.

That is why I kept searching.

That is why Aurora’s Lantern exists.

Because once you have seen the lantern light beyond the veil, you do not keep it to yourself.

You turn around.

You hold it up.

And you say:

Come closer.

There is more.