I am grateful to spend time listening to Liv Lane use Wonder Anew’s questions to learn more about the experience of her dad’s passing. I hope that her telling brings comfort and connection to anyone experiencing the loss of a beloved, and especially to a friend who is right now processing unbearable grief.

Liv, describe what happened that day in the hospital.

First, I want to say a little about my dad. He was this bright, bright light. I feel lucky to have had him for my dad. He was a visionary, leader and guide for a lot of people.

He was a big thinker.

He was the head of a global non-profit. I always felt like it was an honor to have him as my dad.

He got sick. He got cancer. By the following summer, he felt well. But then he had an infection in the fall, and it got into his bloodstream. Even though he had been living with cancer, none of us thought about him going. That wasn’t even a possibility in our thinking.

He was in the ICU. He asked me to follow up with people he had appointments with saying to let them know that he’d get with them as soon as he gets out of there.

I fed off his energy. I didn’t even think that this might be it. Four days later he slipped into unconsciousness.

He had had a restless night. He was really tired. He was not feeling good. We could tell he needed sleep. He had had a drug that helped him get rest for a couple hours so I encouraged him to use it. But he was resistant to it. I said, “Dad you’ll get some good sleep, you’ll be back, you need that and you’ll feel so much better.” He agreed. He got the drug in his IV. He fell asleep — and he didn’t wake up. We passed the two-hour mark. The three-hour mark. Hours and hours passed. My mom, my brother, and I decided to sleep overnight. We fell asleep on the floor next to his bed.

Sometime during the night, I felt my dad sitting next to me. It was pitch dark in there and I could feel his arm around my back with his hand on my shoulder. I knew that arm and hand in that position. He’d done it a million times before. But it felt really hot. He said, “So sorry Liv-er, but I guess I have to go. They say I have big work to do.”

Say a little more about what his words “they say I have big work to do” mean to you.

I believe it meant that he was being called Home, called to do work in spirit that he couldn’t do here. Here, our work intersected. At the end of his life, he was fascinated with and researching what makes kids come alive. He called it their “sparks” – that talent, that gift, that interest where you can see it in their eyes when they connect to it. I love that, but I use different language when I’m working with women to connect with their sparks.

I’ve always had this intuitive undercurrent in my life and work. As a kid, I saw angels and spirits. Luckily, my parents didn’t say I was crazy or that I was making it up. They were very open. My dad, we had lots of conversations. He totally believed what I said I was seeing and hearing, but he didn’t really believe that was possible for him. That he had angels too. He worried that if I talked about it, it would taint people’s perceptions of me. We talked a lot about working together, speaking together. I think he was just being a concerned papa who didn’t want people to think I was nuts. Even though he believed in what I shared about the presence of spirits and angels, he couldn’t prove it, he couldn’t research it.

But that night in the hospital, when I felt his arm around me, I realized he wasn’t sitting there– it was his energy. And then I felt him – or the energy of his spirit – move from me over to my mom, who was sleeping right next to me. I can’t explain how it happened, but he moved to her and through her. As soon as his spirit released or disappeared, my mom shot up from her deep sleep and said, “What was that!?”

We went over to his bed and he was alive, but soon after that they shut off the machines.

I was devastated. I felt like I had somehow failed my dad. Like the last words I spoke to him were a broken promise. I had said, “Take that medicine, sleep a little, and you’ll be back and feel better.”

So I was sitting by his bedside crying about this, saying out loud to my family that I felt so bad. His breathing had changed. We knew the end was close. And then, all of sudden his eyes shot open and he stared straight at me. He couldn’t speak, but I knew in that moment what was happening; his spirit had allowed his body to wake up one last time and release me from the guilt of that broken promise.

This was monumental for me because I realized that not only could I feel his spirit – like I had hours earlier, in the night – but that his spirit could hear me. He heard me crying and he willed himself to come back momentarily, to wake up so that I wouldn’t get stuck in guilt over his passing.

How has what happened affected you?

I feel like it was a gift in so many ways. Of course I had deep grief and missed his physical presence, but it was like the evidence from him—he was all about evidence – that what I’d long believed and experienced was true. That our spirits can connect, can hear and feel one another. I could feel the depth of that connection, and it felt like a permission slip from him – proof from him that we’d forever be connected.

How did your grief affect your connection with him?

I missed him so much in those first months that I could not bring myself to connect with him on the Other Side even though I could do that with other people’s loved ones. I wasn’t yet doing my intuitive work publically. I kept it close to the vest. I was actually delivering a lot of speeches and workshops to carry on my dad’s work, trying to figure out how to also make it my own.

I have a friend, Suzanne Krupp, who is a medium and who helped me. We don’t talk frequently, so she doesn’t know my schedule or what I’m doing from week to week. The spring after my dad passed, I decided I needed to take a solo trip to California to clear my head to have some reflection time. I signed up for classes with artists I love. I accidentally showed up for one class over an hour early. So I went down the street to a coffee shop. It was near the water. Near the bay.

While I was at the café, my phone rang and it was Suzanne, the medium. She said, “Your dad is here and he says you’re not taking his calls.” She said that my dad had been sending signs trying to get me to connect with him, with his spirit.

I understood what she was saying. I knew I’d been very resistant to his “calls” because I thought I would break into a million pieces if I did that. Because it would be this sense that he was really, really not here and I didn’t know if I could be in relationship with him in a different way.

What did you think would happen if you did “answer his calls”?

I worried that if it didn’t feel good and if I couldn’t really hear him, then maybe all of my work was a sham. If I couldn’t communicate with the spirit of someone I was so connected to, like my dad, then maybe I couldn’t really communicate with others on the Other Side. I started to think I was a failure. Maybe it was all fake, a lie.

I also worried that if I did connect with his spirit, I would so miss all the idiosyncrasies of our conversations and his humor. I wondered what else would I miss? I didn’t want to find out. I wanted to preserve my memories, the way that I knew him and loved him, and I didn’t know if I wanted to create new memories of him not being physically here.

People would say, “Have you heard from your dad?” And I’d say no. But underneath, I knew I just hadn’t been answering his calls. I didn’t want to admit that because it’s a jerk thing for a daughter to do. To not pick up the phone when your dad is calling from the Other Side!

I knew that I needed to go through the grief first.

Grief is a powerful human experience. It’s awful. Right? You know this. It takes you by surprise. I didn’t feel like I had the energy to sort of uplevel my vibration in order to connect with him either. And isn’t it funny that while I was trying NOT to connect my dad – the guy who hadn’t been so sure about his ability to connect with sacred realms – was trying over and over to connect with me, to get my attention. He finally did, and it shifted me to a new place.

It was like the call from that medium friend who had some specific things to share from him. She told me my dad said I was by the ocean, which she didn’t know. She said, “You’re not by the ocean, are you?” And I said, “I actually am. I’m in California.”

He wanted, through her, to let me know that I had done him proud in the work I was doing and that it was okay for my work around “sparks” to shift, that it was really important to do the work we were both passionate about – but in my way.

After a good cry, I walked back to that artist studio late because I’d been talking with my dad. All the other classmates had gathered around their tables. The teachers were already leading. And they had put little gifts at the place settings for each person. At my place, there was a note from the teachers that said, “May your spark be contagious.” I was kind of floored by that synchronicity and knew my dad had probably pulled some strings to make it happen! Yet another sign that he was doing his best to get through.

Eventually, maybe a couple months later, I connected with him myself – not through a medium – and I sobbed through the whole thing because it still felt different. His humor and playfulness were there, but not as clear as it is in the physical realm. It made me miss him, but it also invited me into so much awe about what we don’t see and what we don’t know.

Finally connecting one-on-one with his spirit felt a little like being on a phone call with him. As we were wrapping up, I saw movement out the back door and saw these deer in the backyard, which never happens. Now I’ve seen them several times since. But I don’t live in a wooded area. I live in a suburb. I don’t know where they come from. Well, they come from my dad, I’m quite sure. Long after that initial connection, he kept sending me hints he was around.

It’s like the tables had turned.

Because I spent my life trying to tell him, “Dad, this stuff really exists and it can be here for you, too.” And he would say, “I totally believe you but I don’t think I can do it.” So this was like this switch-a-roo. This time, he was like, “Liv-er, get on board! Tell folks this kind of connection is possible!” And I was like, “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Why did you feel like you couldn’t do it?

Even though during his life, I wanted him to feel the awe and wonder of connecting with the Great Beyond, I also felt like his earthly words “people may think you’re crazy” were more potent. So I had to work through that.

Of course, my apprehension was due to more than just his words of warning; there’s a stigma. But I gave credence to his concerns about it. I was, at the time, stepping in for him and doing speeches for him. And I heard his old words, “People will think you’re crazy if you bring that up.” Those memories were a lot louder in my head than the new whisper of “You can do this. You were right.”

There was a lot of back-and-forths. Some days, I felt totally confident and connected. On others, I didn’t. There’s a song called I Won’t Give Up by Jason Mraz. It came out shortly after my dad’s death, and it felt like a message from beyond – even though I didn’t fully understand what it all meant. You know I believe that I think spirits use electronics – like music players – to get our attention. So, two months ago, I was sitting in my family room, and that song came on, and I started sobbing. Suddenly, every word made sense.

He hadn’t given up. I hadn’t given up. I had found my way, expanding his work in my own way. Hearing that song again, I felt so emotional about looking at my life and what has transpired since his death.

I have this book now coming out now about finding your infinite purpose. I’m talking about finding your sparks – right, Dad? Like duh! I miss him like crazy.

So you believe you and your dad are working together. Today is the birthday of Infinite Purpose. About a year ago you gathered women together to explore their true calling.

It’s the birthday, and we created a book in crazy time. It feels like time and space had lifted, just like I felt when my dad’s arm was around me in the hospital.

It is like time and space lift is possible. I don’t know how. But I don’t get to. It’s clear from my dad and other spirits that I don’t get to know everything. It’s why we’re human. But there are things I have experienced, and I know you have too where it’s like, wait a minute now, the law of physics don’t apply here. There is something else going on at a vibrational level. There’s an energy exchange. It feels like parallel universes or something that I can’t put words to that though. But it feels timeless or like time stops. Rules bend. Amazing things happen. Because I am in the flow of what I call co-creation and the flow of connection to that which I cannot see.

Liv, we’re so happy to have the book Infinite Purpose. There’s this part in it, that goes something like this, “Every force in the universe is joined in celebration for today. Angels are singing, birds chirping, stars burning…” All of us have come together to support you. We’re dancing because we know that “the heart of the earth is beating [y]our song.” Thank you, Liv.