71: The Afterlife is Life's Teacher - An Interview with Dr. Raymond Moody

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Welcome to Grief and Guts. I'm your host, Melissa Dugulecki. It is my honor and privilege to serve you by sharing stories, tools, interviews, and strategies that will help you transition from what do I do now? How do I get through this? Those feelings of overwhelm and uncertainty to truly standing in your power. From my grief journey in losing my daughter laden in 2014, that I learned, practiced, was exposed to all these tools, but they are not grief specific. In fact, they apply universally to all of our unique situations. You've already done the hard part by showing up, by opening up to something new. So without any further ado, let's get to the good stuff that's going to help you in your journey.

Let's dive in. So, Dr. Moody, I don't know what Lisa might have filled you in on, but I have a podcast and I'm actually writing a book called Unrecovered Just about learning to feel, to find happiness in our challenges and losses instead of waiting for it to go away and get better. And a lot of this is all inspired, actually, from a turning point for me when I first met you in January of 2015, like, gonna get. I'm gonna get emotional. This is a lot. You were just a beacon of hope for me. And a lot of what I learned from you. Sorry, I teach, and I not teach in the way that you do, but just let people know, like, you know, there's a greater purpose and picture, and I share a lot of your work, and it just provides so much hope. And I went by myself, you know, after I lost my daughter and I couldn't make sense of anything. And I think that was the first time when I heard you speak and when I showed you my daughter's pictures, that it felt like there might be some. Some greater purpose or meaning or understanding of what felt unimaginable, you know? So I just want to thank you.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that.

One of the things that you talked about was this commonality in all of the work that you studied. And would you mind, actually, before I get into that, just speaking to how you got into studying, you know, near death experiences and grief and just give people an idea of the work that you've done, which is so vast. I know.

Well, I think my career had to do with, more than anything else with the fact that I wasn't religious when I was a kid. My parents didn't impose religious things on me until I was about 12 years old. My dad started going to church, I remember, three times. And in Retrospect, that was his midlife crisis, right? But it was just by then, I was too old for that to take. But I grew up interested in astronomy. So at age 18, I went to the University of Virginia to study astronomy. But I had gotten interested in philosophy in high school. So I took a philosophy course, and the first book we read was Plato's Republic. And I was just hooked. I decided then and there, literally, the first few pages of Plato's Republic, I decided I wanted to be a philosophy major in reading. The Republic was the first that I came across anybody who took the idea of an afterlife serious. I always honestly thought it was just a joke that people had done, you know, the cartoons and the New Yorker and so on. But reading Plato's Republic, I immediately realized Plato took the question of life after death serious. At the end of the republic, there's this story about a warrior who was believed dead and had what we today call a near death experience. And I remember being intrigued by that story. And I asked my professor about it, and he said that these early Greek philosophers studied cases of people who almost died and were revived. But I had no idea it had anything to do with the modern world until three years later when I met a man, Dr. George Ritchie, who had actually had such an experience. He was a professor of psychiatry at uva. And I heard George's experience, and I realized immediately that George was real. That was the first one I heard. And then when I was a philosophy professor, I heard others from my students and from my colleagues at the university. Then after three years of teaching philosophy, I went to medical school and continued to hear these stories. So that was the evolution of my interest in this, in terms of the grief as word spread around the campus that there was this philosophy professor who had interviewed people who almost died. The local civic clubs who always need a speaker. I was invited to come to these civic clubs and found always there was somebody there in the civic club who had had this experience. Because it was by then, in the 70s, cardiopulmonary resuscitation was so common that many, many people were having these experiences that although they had always happened, suddenly there was just a lot more people who were having them, because people were being brought back from close call with death. And these, you know, very distinguished men would come up to me and say, Dr. Moody, I never told anybody this, but. And along with the people who had had an experience who talked with me, there were also people who were interested in this because obviously they were reaching out to this to give them some Sort of comfort in a loss or in a grieving process. And that is how I transitioned over to, in effect, I was doing grief counseling, in effect, even before I went to medical school. By the time I went to medical school in 72, I had been de facto a grief counselor because I didn't learn mine from the medical side. Mine came more from my interest in philosophy and so on. That's how my career in these things evolved. The idea of an afterlife was then, and to a degree is now still very counterintuitive to me. Because, you know, the great psychologist William James said one time in one of his books that if you grow up in a religion, then at least it is what he called a live option to you. That is, he said, you may believe it, you may disbelieve it, but either way, it's in your mind as a live option. Now, in the process of going through this for now decades, I've got to admit, I give up. I say, there's an afterlife. I also want to immediately say, I'm not trying to convince anybody else of that when I am convinced that logic, as we have and 2020 is not going to solve the problem, because logic, which comes to us through another one of my heroes, Aristotle, is predicated on literal meaning. But when you get into talking about life after death, you leave the world of literal meaning behind. I never fell for that thing about oxygen deprivation to the brain on two grounds. Number one, in reality, in the real world, nobody knows how the consciousness and the brain are related. That's the reality, however much any very optimistic young neuroscientists want to say otherwise. I had a great professor of neuroscience. He and I used to sit around talking about this, and he was saying, you know, Raymond, consciousness. He said, pretty soon we'll have it all worked out with the brain and the chemicals. And I said, I don't think so, David. We're a long way from understanding consciousness. Then about maybe 25 years later, he invited me to the medical school where he was teaching to talk to the students. And the first thing he said when I got off the plane, he said, raymond, you were right, you know, that he had acknowledged, you know, consciousness is a mystery. But, you know, there's a certain kind of optimistic mind that just can't let that be true, right? They've got to say, oh, we're right on the way, you know, and that's a good thing, because eventually maybe it'll pay off. So that's one thing. But another reason is because very commonly, people who are at the bedside of somebody else when that other person dies. Very commonly the bystander have all of these features that we think of as a near death experience, like leaving their body and going part way toward a light with their dying relative and even seeing the empathically co living the dying life review of the person who's passing away. So the bystanders are not ill or injured. There's no oxygen deprivation to their brain. So something else is going on. And what we don't know yet, but we now have means to find out. My assertion is that changing the logic that we use by supplementing it with new ways for thinking about things that don't make sense, we can actually reformat our mind to think logically about the life after death. I'm saying that as a claim because I want to stir people up. Yeah, I mean, my book on this, by the way, is called Making Sense of Nonsense. It was just published by Llewellyn. It consists of exercises and texts that enable you to actually reformat the way you think. Eventually people who've been through this process will have near death experiences by chance. And it's what I long ago realized, that when they do, they'll have an entirely new way of coming back to tell the rest of us about it. It's already happened once. A very wonderful distinguished scientist and artist, an elderly man who had been to one of my seminars several years before, subsequently had a near death experience and changed the way he formulated his experience and the way I had predicted so this will happen. And so, you know, I want people try to try to refute me. Philosophy is a really different field from others. It's kind of like basically you put your ideas out there as rigorously as you can and you want other philosophers to try to bat them down because if they can't, that gives you some indication you're on the right path. But if they find a hole in what you think, well, you're better off for that because by correcting your mistake, you can get closer to the truth. So I really mean this. I think we've reached the point now where we can really investigate this in a genuinely rational way.

Yeah, I agree. I see a big movement and shift in, you know, generations and really embracing, you know, different levels of consciousness and really understanding like our being at a cell, like at the level of our soul rather than just our physical being. And something I believe I remember you talking about was almost that, I remember correctly, you were saying, whether it was your children or other children you had interviewed, almost looking down and picking, like, that's gonna be my family, like, that's gonna be my life. And that ties into this idea of soul contracts, which is something I'm really curious about. And I'll say in my grief journey, opening up to this idea. I didn't understand or believe in soul contracts before. Right. But you first opened my mind up to it and it gave me this thought of like, well, I can't just sit here in my grief then and be upset. Like, if there's a purpose or if this was chosen, if this was picked, like, I need to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing right now. So can you talk a little bit about soul contracts and that idea of kind of picking, like, what is going to happen in our lives before we go in?

I had heard of that from various people over the years, but where it really made a big impact on my life was when my own adopted kids started talking like that. I have two grown sons who are on their own and they're doing great. Then my wife adopted two young ones at birth and they are 21 and 19 now. Both of my young kids found out about my book Life After Life from reading about me on the Internet. My subject is logic and philosophy of language because really philosophy of language is where the action is. If you're really trying to think about this question of life after death, I won't say why. Well, one reason is this all we have from these people who have near death experiences is their stories. Right. So you think about it. Well, these people were obviously trying to figure out the best form of language to try to convey that experience they had to the rest of us. So doesn't that mean it's very important to look at words, what kind of language they use? Right. Because that's all we have to go on. And I'm at a stage in my life, honestly, where anything I could say other than there is life after death wouldn't be on track because I don't know what else to say.

Yeah, I remember you, you saying that, you know, you've come to believe in all of your work and all of your studying that we come here with. Like, you've done so many interviews of near death experiences and all of these different stories. And there are two similarities I want to ask you about, but one was this idea that we come with this purpose to kind of move up, to kind of like move up, like in our evolution, like of our wisdom and. But that we're here for the purpose of learning how to love. I was wondering if you could just speak about your thoughts on that.

Well, that is definitely what people tell me. One thing I learned fairly quickly as a psychiatrist is that people seem to be chasing things. Some people, to my astonishment, chase fame or power or money. In my case, I've spent my life chasing knowledge. But people chase different things. What I have noticed about people with near death experiences is that whatever they were chasing before the experience, they come back saying that what this is all about is learning to love.

Yes.

And they also say that it doesn't make any. Having that vision in which you see everything you've ever done, and you empathically co live sadness you brought about in other people's lives through your actions, and you empathically co live the good feelings you brought about in people's lives through your good actions. That you become immediately aware that the purpose of this life is to love, to learn to love. But sadly, it doesn't prevent you. You from doing otherwise. In other words, it's still just as much of a struggle as it is without a near death experience. George Ritchie told me that he said, you know, Raymond, he said this experience makes your humanity even more of a burden in a way. And what he meant was, to put it crudely, I mean, George was a very gentle soul. But to put it more crudely as I would, he's like, let's face it, it's really hard to get through the average day without wanting to choke at least one person. Yeah, maybe two or three. So that's the human condition. Even after you have this near death experience, which, you know, makes life really interesting. And another thing that a lot of them say is that in this life review where there are scenes where the they're learning something, that this being of light who is there with them kind of focuses in on this. And a sentiment I've heard from many people is. And to put it in George Ritchie's words, because I'm thinking of him, it's like he said that this process of learning, I gather, is something that goes on quite literally to eternity. Like you never stop learning. And that is a very inspiring thing for me because I've never really been able to understand how anybody wants to do anything other than just learn things. And it gets better the older you get. I feel that one of the worst things we've done to our young people in the last 40 years is to abandon the classical model of education. Because I just learned from my own experience that when people get about 50 to 60 years of age, they wake up with a curiosity about, oh, where did all this come from? And really at the age of 60 or 70, it's very hard to get back into reading Plato and Aristotle. You know, you got to do that when you're young.

Yeah, I appreciate that so much and I love just this idea. I think it's inspiring to think that we're here to learn and evolve and that it's a lifelong quest and that it's even beyond our own lifetime. Right. It's a continuing like, it's almost like each generation contributes to a learning and then every generation keeps pushing it up and then if we, you know, cycle back in, we're just continuing to kind of push and evolve in our learning.

That's right.

And so you, you alluded to this idea of like a white kind of highlight reel. Like almost everyone kind of reported in these near death experiences that they saw like this highlight reel of their life and they had to kind of feel that, you know, the good things they've done for people, but then the painful things they've inflicted and how, you know. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more on in your work? Like what that, what that is like.

Yeah. You know, as a professor of logic, I can tell you that it's very hard and the real world to make inferences about near death experiences. Either the inference that they're caused by oxygen deprivation, but to the brain or the notion that they represent an afterlife, it's just hard to say. Yeah, but one thing I think we can say as an airtight, logical conclusion about near death experiences comes from these life reviews that people have. People say that they, at a certain point in this experience, the physical world kind of disappears and they find themselves surrounded by a sort of holographic panorama which consists of every single thing they've ever done in their lives. And time, time disappears. There's no time. And you see every single action you've ever done. But when the action results, you are empathically embedded in the consciousness of the person with whom you interact. So if you see yourself doing an unkind or mean spirited action to someone, then you feel the hurt that you've brought about in their life. Or if you see yourself doing it kind hearted, loving action to someone, you feel the good feelings. Now several rather remarkable things follow from that that are amazing in their own right. Let's not even think for a minute about life after death. Let's just think about what we can infer from these experiences. Isn't it true, based on what we know about those life reviews, that at least for some of us, life is a two phase process. First we live it forward from the perspective of the actor or protagonist. Then we have 180 degrees switch around and we watch the same action from the point of view of the other characters. Now what that means, without doubt, is that for many of us, life is a two phase process. Now that's a startling implication in my mind. And you know, more than anything else, I can sort of get a handle on that. You know, the afterlife is a harder one to conceptualize, but that life itself has a two phase structure that's pretty significant to me.

Yeah, I love thinking about that. And it almost makes it seem like, you know, when you put something out there to be really nice and kind to somebody, of course it's to be nice and kind, but it's kind of this feeling of like, well, I'm gonna get it back eventually too, you know? Yeah, I might as well be really nice to everybody.

Yeah. Another implication from that experience is if you think about seems to suggest that at some higher level we are all the same person.

Yes, we're all.

Because in the life review, if for that moment you are in your life review, the person with whom you interacted, that establishes the identity. If you're identical to that person, then they're with you.

I love that. And I wish, honestly, I mean, it's the way I live my life now and since losing my daughter Laden. And sometimes I wonder if her purpose was to have me understand all of this without actually going through my own near death experience. And part of me wonders if because of my nature, I'm such a. I've always been better at taking care of others, that's changed. But if I almost had to learn these hard lessons through taking care of someone else because losing her, honestly, I think hurt me more than had I had my own experience, truly. And so I feel the sense of guilt around it because I feel like, well, why did I have to have that happen to learn? And I've just been working really hard to be like, well, what am I supposed to learn and share and what am I supposed to be doing? Because, you know, if there is a greater purpose and if it is about loving and if we're all interconnected, I want to contribute to learning like this kind of leveling up, you know.

Yeah, that's a tough one. I'll tell you to skip ahead, I'll tell you where I've come on that. And that is, you know, one of the big philosophical problems. I almost wrote my doctoral dissertation on this, but Changed the topic in philosophy of language instead. But one of my original ideas was to explore the notion of personal identity, like what constitutes the identity of a person. And this has a long history in the West. It's like it started long before Plato. But where it reached in Plato's time was that Plato thought that the body is just an illusion. It's like always changing material thing that you can't make any judgments about. Whereas the soul or the consciousness is immaterial and eternal. Right. And so that was pretty much official even in the Middle Ages. I presume you could be burned at the stake for not believing that. But then once that sort of started loosening up, Thomas Hobbes, for example, was the first one I know anyway to point out that the notion of an immaterial substance doesn't make any sense or is unintelligible. And then Locke, working on the problem, said that life, I mean, your personal identity is your memories. And I was a forensic psychiatrist for a while, working in the maximum security unit with the criminally insane. And I tell you from that experience, memory is not all that it is supposed to be. So what is the nature of your personal identity? Where I have come on this is that I think your personal identity is your life story. Consciousness itself has a narrative structure, right? Just as you're going through your day and your conscious identity yourself, when some new event happens, what happens is you integrate it into your story. Like your. Your life story gets fuller and longer. So where I have come to on that is that. And this sounds psychotic, even though it sounds psychotic, I think it's correct. And that is that I think that this thing we're in is analogous to a theater. It's like these are the movies.

Yeah.

Plato said something similar. He said reality itself is static, it's just unmoving and thing that exists eternal. He said, time is the movies of eternity. Said it's like moving pictures of eternity. And I think that's kind of right. And that you know who Beverly Sills is.

Mm.

I didn't really know who Beverly Sills was, although she was really at Baron White. She was kind of a friend of mine actually, because after life, After Life was published, Beverly called and said, let's get together and went to New York and all. And she told me about her near death experience, but I didn't. I. Beverly never talked to me about her work. And I guess she realized I'm not so good at music, I'm tone deaf. But anyway, it's just a thoroughly wonderful lady and she was Telling me about how there was some role that she was very famous for playing. And she said on the night that after a long time of playing that role, she finished with that role, she walked off the stage and she was reflecting on how that was the. Her last performance of a role that she had been involved with for so long. Now, flash forward however many years, and she had her near death experience. And she said, she said, raymond, the closest way I could describe to you how that near death experience felt was that night I walked off the stage leaving that roll behind. And I think, you know, this is the movies.

Yes.

And it's like, I gather that you. You go through one movie and then you go through this incomprehensible process and then you're back on another storyline, is what I gather, you know, life is narrative. And Elie Wiesel, you're too young, but he was, you remember who he. He was a little before your time. He was. Do you know who he was?

I don't know.

Yeah. Ellie was a Nobel Prize winner in literature, I think, in the 60s. But he was just a fine and gentle, wonderful scholar, and he was in Auschwitz and he lived through it. And in one of his books, Elie Wiesel said, God made man because he loves stories. God weaves them all together, you know, some people might say, and being a logician, I have scruples about that. And I want to go on to explain that you could easily argue there that I'm committing by that view, a logical fallacy. Because what I'm doing is I'm taking one area of human existence, namely the theater, and I'm projecting that out as a model of the hope. And that would be a logical fallacy. But I think that the reality is it happened the other way around. I think the reason we have the theater is if you look at the history of the theater, it's a miracle how it happened. Basically, they had an old harvest festival in Athens, which had been going on forever, and there was a chorus that would tell these stories. But on one of the performances, for reasons unknown, Thespis, a single individual stepped forward out of the chorus and spoke his own lines. It created a sensation. So the king said, well, let's have a contest, see who can do the best of one of these. So the first winner was Aeschylus. Second winner, Sophocles. Third winter, Euripides. It went from two characters with Aeschylus to three Sophocles to the cast with Euripides. And that took 50 years.

Wow.

Now, what I think that shows is that the theater came from the fact that people like Aeschylus and Sophocles, being reflective, realize that quality of life anyway, that when people get to a certain age, they begin to think of their life as a kind of story. Now what I'm saying is that the storytelling thing is in us already and that that's where the theater came from and of us. Yeah, I was down in the Bahamas after my lecture, I talked about this point of view I had, and Swami Swarupananda came up and said that's exactly what the Hindus decided.

Wow.

Yeah. He says, they say this is like a play or a drama.

That's so interesting. I believe that more and more, you know, I believe more and more it's a beautiful way to think about it too, you know, And I think it allows us to bring in some lightness and some like to make more space for joy and love and play and just, I don't know, just enjoying this film, this whatever it is, this play, this, it is.

And also, as you and I both know, I mean, it's like the grief is part of it too, you know, it's like people with near death experiences tell me that it makes having a near death experience makes the grief even more acute in a way, because you can't rationalize anymore.

Right.

You know, I've seen people, religious people with views about the afterlife. I hear them say things like, oh, well, I'm not gonna cry about grandma or be sad about Grandma because I know from my religion she's in a wonderful place. Well, that's stupid. That's just ridiculous. That's rationalization. People with near death experiences can no longer rationalize, right, because they've had a direct experience. So what they say is that it makes the grieving process even more acute because you don't have the rationalization available. You can't say, oh, I'm not going to grieve because I know that grandma is in a beautiful place. If that's just a rationalization, it's one thing, but if you've been there, it's no longer a rationalization. And so you realize that the point of the grief is that you miss Grandma, right?

Oh, I love that. I love that you're distinguishing those, you know, those two things so they can coexist. And one other concept that you talked about was in the near death experiences, almost this bargaining, right, with a higher power, whether you believe it to be God or universe or source or whatever may be, but this bargaining for a higher power. And obviously you Only interview people who bargain to come back. Right. To not die. And I'm really curious to hear more about that. And also, like, when I was envisioning my daughter doing that, she was only four months. Like, how does that work for, you know, is it soul based? Right. Versus physical presence based? But I would just love to hear a little bit more about that kind of bargaining dynamic that you talked about.

Oh, well, how do they get back? Right. Well, some people say, I have no idea. I was in this light and suddenly I was back in my body with no sense of transition. Others say that they were told that they had to go back. Either this being of light or one of their deceased relatives said, you got to go back. It's not your time yet. A third group are given a choice and they say, you can either stay here or you can go back to the life you've been leading. And it's not too surprising that all the ones I've talk to, given that choice, chose to come back. But almost invariably the reason is the same. They say that for myself, I would rather have stayed in the light that I had young children left to raise. It almost always is. So they choose to come back for that. And then a fourth group of people who had to sort of bargain, as you say, to say, like, I need to go back. And the plan was that they were to stay, but they sort of finagled to go back.

Yeah.

I remember the first person I ever heard who told me that was this young man who had the most. The most horrific injury I've ever seen, heard anybody have survived. But he said that he, when it was came obvious he was to stay, he specifically asked to go back to make amends with his friends that he occurred. So people have different versions of how they.

Yeah, no, it's so interesting. And I was just curious about that because, you know, Layden spent. My daughter spent 99 nights at the hospital and her case was termed a catastrophe. So she went from. I'm actually going to show you. Let me tell me if you can see this. Can you see her hair?

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So that's Layden. And she had such wise eyes. And I remember you pointed that out when you looked at pictures of her. But then as you can see here, she got really sick. And she was really sick.

Oh my.

Yeah. And they said she wasn't even gonna live through at this point. And she did. She came off of life support and she lived. And then she was actually doing better. But she died after about another month because she had too Much damage to her body, essentially. Her heart was functioning, her spirit was functioning, her brain was fully functioning, but her body actually just completely shut down on her. But I. I always wonder if that last month. Because that last month was when they said she's not gonna live. It was really three weeks. She's not gonna live. We're taking off life support. And then they came back and they were like, she lived. I always wondered if, like, she did any of that bargaining, bought a little bit more time.

I don't know.

But, you know, I don't know. It's so hard. There's so many questions.

It's hard to tell. But I. One thing I really do feel very confident about is that from the point of view of that other world.

Yeah.

All of this stuff that we're going through is far less serious than we make it.

Yeah.

Than it seems to us from this.

Perspective that's so important. I'm so glad you said that, because I try and remind myself of that, and I try to remind myself this is like a little blip. Like, this is a tiny little blip, I think, and this whole big picture and, you know, you really. You open my, like, mind to being able to think that way and to learn more and to study and, you know, when I first met you, I was so raw. I couldn't even. I didn't even know how I was going to get forward. And now I feel so purposeful. And so I'm just so appreciative because your work, you know, changed my life. It really did. And wondering if you just have any last bit of advice that you would share with anyone, you know, listening. And I love that idea of on the other side. It's this reminder of not taking everything so seriously. But if there are any other, you know, kind of last thoughts or reminders you want to share.

Yeah, I do. You know, I obviously get asked quite a bit by people, what is the best way for coming to terms with death or whatever. I put a lot of thought in that. And my answer is this. When I was 18 years old, I had the most wonderful experience of reading Plato. And first I read Plato's Republic. That was in September. And then in October, I read, among others, Plato's dialogue, the Phaedo. P H A E D O. To this day, in my opinion, that is the best work that has ever been written on the afterlife from a genuinely rational point of view to show its influence. The phaedo is the basis of the Christian theology of the afterlife. Was Plato's Phaedo That's a very counterintuitive claim. But I remember I read that in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy when I was an undergraduate and subsequently many times I've asked professors of religious studies whether that's true because it seems so counterintuitive that they say, yeah, it is true. Now I can bring in my mind I was 18 years old, but I remember where I was and what I was doing when I read that book, just like it was shestave, because it totally changed my life. And one of the statements that Plato makes in that book, and I remember it hit me. So it's obviously true. He said, philosophy is a rehearsal for dying. And it is. And I immediately realized it is. Now at age 75, I look back at that and I'm rather astonished that 18 year old would pick up that so quickly. I did. And throughout then I have seen many times people have asked me, how can you come to terms to death with death? And if they are a young person, I can be helpful to them because I say, well, if you really want to do that, you have to spend your life with it and you have to study philosophy. That's the fact. Once you get to a certain age, and it's usually with many people about the age of 50 or 60 or 70, then it's attended with a sense of urgency that I don't know how to overcome. I just. If somebody's had a near death experience, they can make their peace that way. I don't know that I've ever met anybody who I feel like I could fix. Once they're 50 or 60 or 70, I think it has to be a lifelong thing. So to the young people listening to this, I would say study philosophy. To the older people, such as myself, I don't know. I don't know. It's such a complicated subject. You have to be with it from very early in life.

Yeah. And maybe no matter what age, just the idea of putting out more kindness, knowing that there's a good chance you're gonna have to feel it again at the end of your life and bringing a little bit more lightness and play into your life. Because, you know, we all tend to take things so serious, seriously. I think those can be universal, no matter what age. Hopefully. Hopefully. Dr. Moody, thank you so very much. I'm so appreciative of your time and just sending so much. Thank you to you and your family.

Thank you so much. It's so good to see you again.

Thank you all so much for being here at Grief and guts as Layden's mom. Being able to spread the stories, the strategies, the lessons I have learned through Laden and from Layden is the thing that means the most to me in this world and allowing my daughter's short life to have long and lasting impact by shining her light. Truly, nothing means more if you align with and believe in the work that we're doing here in these messages. The best way to give back and to spread this out into the world is to rate and review on Spotify and on itunes. Thank you for taking just a moment to do that. Feel free to shoot me a message. Let me know what you want to hear more of, what you want to see more of. I am here to serve. I'm grateful to do so, and I'm cheering you on in your journey.

As always.