Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death everybody and this special bonus episode with Brooke Grove.
We're going to pick it up from where we were on the last episode, which was an awesome,
awesome story of her NDE.
But we mentioned that there's a whole topic that we can go into about shared death experiences
or SDEs.
And we're going to jump into that now.
From the time that they pronounced me death was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace.
There wasn't anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
All right, Brooke, welcome back.
Thank you for having me again, Eric.
It's amazing you look just the same as five minutes ago.
Anyway, I rudely cut you off at the end of our last episode.
We were talking, you were talking about the shared death experience with your grandmother.
And so I'm sorry I had to do that, but I wanted you to be able to really give it the time
and the quality of discussion that I'm sure it deserves.
So tell me, how old were you when this happened and what happened?
I must have been, it's shortly after coma.
It's when I'm struggling with my after effects.
My son's born a year later.
So yeah, it had to be very few years after coma.
I'm not sure exactly my age, but that would put me in my very early 30s.
And at that point, I did not find my after effects to be very fun.
I was finding ways to turn them off because I learned very quickly the medication and
certain things just turned it off and it goes away and I don't have to deal with it.
And so I was kind of living in that bouncing back and forth between wanting to understand
it and play with it and then not wanting anything to do with it.
Okay.
So it was like a lot of all or nothing response to the after effect.
Well, and they really can be too overwhelming, can't they?
You call them after effects.
I like to call them spiritual gifts that people come back with.
But yeah, especially if they are intuitive things where you know a little bit about what
people are thinking and feeling, you just can't deal with that in the grocery store.
Exactly.
And if there's a thousand people, so I get the fact that it can be too much and you need
to turn it off sometimes.
Anyway, keep going.
Thank you.
So my grandmother had had Alzheimer's since I actually the paper that I described in the
last episode started so many of my autoimmune symptoms.
I had been writing that when she became ill and then she has it for this really long time
through all of my degrees and my coma and all of it and then she suddenly takes a turn
for the worst.
She had Parkinson's adjacent to it.
So she was suffering for a very long time.
I don't remember her knowing who I was for the better part of the five years prior to
when she's ready to transition.
That said, my grandfather was constantly at her side and constantly engaged in taking
care of her.
And I get a phone call from my father, very upset that it's time and she's ready to transition
and hospice has been called in.
And I blessedly was able to get a flight immediately and I get over there at seven in the morning.
And I remember because it's seven a.m. when I get there and it's seven p.m. where she
passes.
When I got there, immediately my after effects come on even though I tried to turn them off.
It was just like too much energy in the room and my dad's there, my mom's there, my uncle's
there, my brother, all these people are there.
Okay.
And it's a lot of energy, a lot of grief.
And I don't want to focus on it.
So I say to spirit the same thing I've said in the hospital, show me the beauty.
Let me follow the light.
I don't want to see the pain.
Intuitively I was starting to learn how to set energetic boundaries with them.
I wouldn't have called it that back then, but that was what was beginning to organically
unfold.
And so they begin instead of allowing me to kind of be an empath and absorb all the energy
in that room and the grief, they show me this beautiful tunnel of light beginning to form
around her.
Almost like a vortex.
There was a multitude of lights and multi-dimensional light beings and they're surrounding her.
And I see her soul star chakra open, which is the chakra that's depicted around Christ
or the Buddha where you see that golden halo around them.
Most people aren't so aware of that particular chakra, but that's where that divine light
connects us to our higher ethnic chakras.
And so her soul star organically begins to open up in front of me.
And I see this illumination of citrine gold around her head.
At the same time, all these light beings are holding her and I can feel the joy beginning
to emanate from her higher auric field and her subtle bodies.
And it's nothing like what's happening in the room.
So at that point, I begin to hyper focus on it because it's grounding me and it's bringing
me peace.
And suddenly I'm elated and it is a weird thing to be elated in a room full of grieving
people.
Yet you talk to any end the year when we're around death, we get this like buzzy higher
vibration of going home, that remembrance of what's to come.
And as I said before, most of us are not scared of death.
Therefore, there's an electricity to it that is enticing and invigorating and welcoming,
not scary in the least.
And so I'm feeling this energetic resonance with her, this exchange.
I'm witnessing these beautiful light beings and her own auric, entire auric field changing.
And as I previously described in the last episode, when you're learning to interpret
the energy field, it's a bit overwhelming as we were just saying.
And so to be able to see her aura, which had been so stagnant, so gray, so blotchy for
the last 12 years, suddenly shift into this beautiful gold held up by all of these violence
and indigos and pinks, which are the angels of compassion.
And it was so nice to feel their radiance and their holding.
She was a devout Catholic woman.
And what brought me so much peace was that Mother Mary was there.
I felt the ascended master and her energy, who had also been the guide associated most
with religion, who had communicated to me my entire childhood.
So there was a deep trust and safety in her arms and the knowing that she was being held.
Despite what was happening on the ground.
And so after I sit through this process for almost 12 hours, my grandfather began to be
the only thing I could observe with my eyes and my intuition that was changing her vibration
when he would come over.
Now, of course, he's coming from unconditional love and grief and doesn't want to let her
go.
But when that vibration would come to her directly atop of her, that golden stuff would
dissolve a bit.
She would come back down from her celestial and auric bodies into the physical.
And I knew it needed to happen.
He needed to say goodbye.
That whole process had to occur for the hours prior.
But right before seven o'clock, intuitively, I asked my teams, is it okay to ask him to
walk?
She's ready.
And I got a resounding yes.
I got a feeling of yes from her again, inner knowing and telepathy.
And so, and this was hard for my human.
But I also at that point trusted it.
There's something about when you're in the residence with that light, you just trust
it.
And I surrendered and I said, Papa, would you mind taking a walk?
And he is a stubborn, wonderful man.
And he did not want to do that.
And he did not want to leave his Jenny.
And so, you know, I got an earful about telling him to go take a walk.
Did he know what that meant?
Maybe.
I think on some level, but he was also very old and very tired and getting very weak.
And I feel that's part of why my team said now is okay.
And so my uncle, who I share so many odd similarities with, we even have the same birthday that
said he saw what I was attempting to do.
And he took his dad out.
And at that point, my dad followed and everybody left the room.
And it was just me and my grandmother.
And at that part, I walked up to her and I said, I know you can hear me.
And I know you're ready.
And you are surrounded by everyone you have ever loved.
Our deep ancestors are here.
Your beloveds in, bodied in blood are here.
We have waited to see you at peace for a very long time.
There will be no pain.
There will be no more hard times.
And you will always be available to us.
You can let go now, grandma.
And she looked at me in a way, Eric, that she hadn't looked at me for 15 years.
She was cognizant.
She was there for a brief moment.
And she smiled and one tear came down her eye.
And then as gentle as soul poetry, she began to fly out of the body very, very, very gently
and be reconnected with the other light beings and they took her up through this beautiful
golden tunnel to the great beyond.
And that was that.
And then I sat there, blissed out, smiling ear to ear, realizing I needed to ground myself
and that I was about to encounter a deep wave of grief and I needed to be able to hold my
joy for her homecoming and her release.
At the same time, I tenderly held their pain and our loss of her physical expression.
Yet I knew she was in deep peace.
And that was the first day, Eric, after many years of suffering with my after effects that
I realized these can be fun.
These can heal.
These can transform death ceremonies.
They can be of service.
And that began to be the beginning of my grandmother's dance and sharing with me from the other
side that really guided me to the work I'm doing now.
That is so awesome and so beautiful and so difficult because of the fact that you now
had to go back out to your family and put on a little bit of a grief face.
I don't know how you do both.
But I guess death dole has to deal with that all the time.
That was the beginning of the training in that.
Yeah.
Is that something that you do as well?
I do.
That is invitation only.
It's not something I like advertise.
I will always do it when I'm called for it.
Yet it's always based on spirit's lead.
If someone contacts me and it's the right circumstance and I'm available, I'm there.
I think there is no, I know.
If one of my guides is correct me, I know there is no greater honor than to be fully
present with someone transitioning.
Death has such a negative connotation in comparison to life in this culture.
But really it is a transition and a return and ought to be treated with reverence.
Yeah.
Okay.
Take a breath.
Are there any other of these shared death experiences that you'd like to share with us?
I've done a lot of work with the VA and with veterans.
My early training was with PTSD and as a survivor of PTSD myself, it's very near and dear to
my heart.
Some of the death dole work has come to me as a byproduct of having connections with
that community.
There was a particular soldier who my kids and I had made them cards and visited them
at the VA, but I hadn't worked with him in, I don't know, probably 12 years or so.
And yet somehow the family found me through my YouTube videos and they reached out knowing
I had formerly been his therapist and he was really scared of death.
And so I was able to go into the VA while he was on hospice and sit with him and his
family and it was very interesting because they were devoutly religious and I always
mirror the environment I'm in out of reverence.
So I don't want to come in there like with all my crystals and tuning forks and scare
them.
Okay.
At the same token, there's certain things that really help the situation.
So I used my knowledge of the Bible and Catholicism to discuss it very openly with them what
I was going to do and how we could integrate Catholic ritual into it should they choose
and they did choose this.
And their son had been in Vietnam, had really suffered PTSD since he'd come back the entirety
of his life and medication had not made it better.
And this was, they called him a son, but it's like an adopted son, like younger people
that were caring for him, but in a parental kind of way.
He'd had a lot of mental illness and his capacities weren't always there in the past
15 years or so of his life.
Yeah.
When we began doing the rituals and he kind of recognized me on an energetic level, the
entire vibration in the room began to shift.
And what I love about this particular story is this family who was so initially hesitant
about my tools and all of those things, they just fell into this synergy with me.
And so I was just, could you say this prayer for me and can you do this?
And we're speaking Latin together and it's getting quite intense, but there's just this
like union again that's happening organically.
And at that point, his oversold began to communicate with me.
And it was such a beautiful expression of gratitude.
I feel he never had the clarity and the mental baseline to really express so much of what
he had been through.
And it was beyond words, but in this portal of light that we were creating around his
bed through this communion that our fields were bringing up with prayer and with connection
and with love, he just released so much.
It was like watching like a rainbow, like a double rainbow shoot out from every organ.
I mean, he had so much stored in the liver, so much anger.
And it came out as this like blood red and thick and tarry and then all of a sudden just
into this rainbow light as it shot out.
And so as I held his hand and felt that release, that peace, that contentment that arrived
before he transitioned just like it had with my grandmother.
And so I held his hands and at those moments because his family had become so open, I said,
I can count you down to win his last breath if you want me to because I'm watching the
field and it's very obvious that his organs are about to expire.
He's about to go.
And they said, please do.
And so we sang some shamanic songs together and I just allowed the soul to release.
And it was just so beautiful to be in a space for me as a practitioner and a trauma survivor
and a former Catholic.
That was very healing just for me to be in that communion with them and to co-create
in connection without an agenda from both of our knowings, from both of our traditions
and knowing that it's all held by the eternal.
It's all held by love.
And so that family became part of how I became doing death dola work because they started
telling everybody about their son and he's smiling.
And that is something I've seen with many shared death experiences while the person
suffered so much in the incarnation.
There's this moment where there's just like this very mild but very deep smile that comes
upon many of them right before they release.
And so to see him like that, I mean, there are certain clients you work with over your
trajectory as a therapist that you never see in an elated state.
You never see them not suffering.
The E was one of those persons.
I had seen and witnessed him for so long, but he was always in such profound pain.
So to just see that moment and to see those rainbows, those magical healing bomb rainbows
was a great, great gift.
And that's when I was like, wow, you can blend all these religions and all these traditions
and all these ceremonies and you can offer something that might not otherwise be available
and it's a great support to the grieving.
And that's the beautiful thing is when I do death work with persons, they have the capacity
to reach out with me and then we can do integrative sessions after to process what came up in
that room to talk about some of what might be arising and that holding space afterward
is really supportive for persons who don't have my gifts, but who felt something change
in that room.
So, and there are different kinds of shared death experiences.
Some people have told me about ones that they've had where they weren't with the person.
They were even maybe a thousand miles away.
I can speak to that briefly.
The things that scared my parents, like the most horrific one, I believe in my mom's
eyes was a shared death communication that happened when I was nine years old.
And I'll never forget it because the angelics love to communicate through images and numbers
and song.
And the song yesterday by the Beatles came on and I was singing along to it and all of
a sudden I just started weeping and my mom's looked at me and I go, the phone's gonna ring,
he's gone.
That's all I said.
And then she looked at me and I go, it's your Aunt Betty, PAPAP just died.
And it just came out of me like, boom, my mom looks at me scared.
She then picks up the phone, sure enough, it's her Aunt Betty and my grandfather just
died.
And she just went to her room and sobbed, but I got the message as a nine year old
child that I had done something really wrong.
I felt like I compounded her grief at that particular instant.
Caught to many years later in 2003 when I was graduating my undergrad, my grandmother
on my maternal side, we are incredibly close.
I still work with her all the time in the ancestral realms, but she had had a stroke
the day I went to college and she died the day I graduated.
And she had fallen ill as I'm in my graduation ceremony and we're trying to get tickets and
fly east and all of this stuff is happening.
I wasn't able to get on the plane, they only had two tickets and my mom and dad went.
And so I'm in my apartment and my brother and a bunch of people are visiting and at
six in the morning I wake up and I just start sobbing.
Again, same presentation.
I start sobbing.
And my brother comes out and I go, grandma just died.
And he's like, you're just having a bad dream.
Go back to sleep.
Two seconds later, the phone rang and sure enough, she had just transitioned.
So those two stories both happened before my NDE, but there was an awareness of a beloved
transitioning moments before it actually happened.
So somewhere in the auric or spiritual realms, I felt it before it physically happened.
Let me make sure I'm clear.
This was a different grandma than the one that you were with when she transitioned.
Yeah, my paternal grandmother is the shared death experience that I'm physically with.
It's my maternal where this one happened.
Okay, last thing for anybody that may be in a situation where they have someone who is
going to use your term and I like it, transition maybe sometime kind of soon.
What advice do you have for them?
Really sitting with the emotions.
When we know it's inevitable that someone's about to go, there are two tendencies and most
are oriented towards all or nothing behavior.
It's to ruminate on it and just make yourself miserable by death, impending, ah, what do
I do?
I'm so scared.
I'm terrified.
That fear of the void, that fear of being gobbled up by the pain is so present for some that
they get engulfed by it.
Okay.
And then there's others who just push it away and pretty much bypass the reality of what's
happening.
Grief is meant to be a wave.
It is meant to be an ocean.
And there are many, many, many drops within that emotion.
And none of those drops are wrong.
But the best thing you can do is move with the water.
If you resist it, it will persist, it will be like you are stuck in a riptide and you
cannot get out.
However, if you allow the tide to carry you, you will ultimately reach the shore.
You have to allow.
There is grace in surrender, particularly when it comes to grief and death.
And like you say, there's a wave of emotions.
And we can be happy and thrilled even for that person that is moving on while we're
being sad for ourselves that we're going to miss them.
Absolutely.
Even with my grandmother and the shared death experience, the paternal grandmother, I was
deeply happy for her, but I was also pregnant with my first born son and I wanted her to
meet him.
You know, there's that like very human, don't leave me at the same token.
There's this part of like, please go, please be with bliss and peace and God.
I think she met him.
Yes, I know she did.
I know she did.
And he's the blessing of being an intuitive as well, which, you know, I felt so alone
when I was a child as a highly sensitive, intuitive, an empath, an artist in a family
that was not anything like that.
And I used to pray when I was in church, I would genuflect and show my respect and,
dear God, please give me an intuitive sibling and, you know, someone that understands me
because no one in my family gets me.
And I used to think God didn't answer my prayers, but piggying back to what we shared
in the last episode, those two lights I made on the way out were my sons.
And it wasn't until the birth of my eldest who was in utero then, when they took him
out and they handed him to me, I saw that indigo aura from the other side.
And when he was three, I knew he was an intuitive and I kept telling people that are, you know,
are open to it.
I know he's an intuitive, but I don't want to indoctrinate him.
I don't want to turn it into what happened to me with religion.
So if he comes to me, we'll speak about it organically as it unfolds.
When he was three years old, we're reading a nighttime story about stars and he interrupts
me very softly and he goes, thank you, mama.
I go, for what?
And he goes, for choosing me in the stars.
I'm the blue one.
And at that point I was like mind blown.
And it just continued, Eric, when the pandemic began, I'm weeping, trying to tell a six year
old what's going on.
At the same time, I'm leaving dad and it's very emotional.
And he looks at me and he goes, mom, mom, mom, you know, we have some of the same teams.
He goes, they're calling it the great undoing.
It's what we came here for.
It's all going to fall apart.
And that's when we get to rebuild it.
Don't worry.
I'm all like, where did you come from?
But it's been such a blessing to have an intuitive child after my history.
And it's the gift from the other side quite literally, but it's also been so amazing to
see my grandparents live through him as he lives in resonance to his gifts and expresses
them and does not live in shame and does not cower and steps into his power as a now young
man as he's becoming one.
It's just such a gift and you really see that circle of life and how all of these stories
and ties come forward through each new generation.
Thank you so much for sharing all this with me today.
Appreciate it, Brooke.
You're so welcome, Eric.
Thank you.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
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If you want to share your near death experience or if you have questions or comments about
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Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.