With the publication of my son’s book less than two weeks away, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will be known that less than two weeks after his passing (in 2007), I was getting contact messages from him. Two years later, I started writing the book that he wanted to pen; therefore, I would say I have a rather unusual perspective on grief. And while I am a physician, I don’t claim to be anymore of an expert than anyone else. But it did provide for an experience that is worth sharing.

First and foremost, my grief was so intense I needed assistance to survive it and I have already written about several flower remedies and oxytocin, but I received a lot of love and light as well from multiple sources.

It is my hope that if Galen’s book becomes popular it will give me an opportunity to spread the word about how this benign hormone (not for use in pregnant women because it causes uterine contractions in a pregnant uterus) mitigates what I call pathological grief – grief so intense it takes on an uncontrollable obsessive quality. Many continue to suffer more than necessary because there really isn’t an effective way to get information out about an orphan therapy in our current medical paradigm. But that is for another discussion.

One would have thought that making contact with my son on the other-side would have been the most joyful, uplifting and life-reaffirming experience that was a personal affirmation that our consciousness continues on past the material body it once inhabited. Such an experience had the potential to change the extreme grief I was experiencing.

In fact, it did… it made it worse.  I had joy when I heard those first words in semi-slumber at 5 o’clock in the morning 28 days after the train accident that was the catalyst for his passing. The joy lasted for 15 minutes, and then I sank back to sleep only to experience the first round of a release of grief so humongous that it shook my psyche to its core.

Sure, I understood intellectually what was being asked of me… I was clear on that. I was being asked to release years of grief in short order or I would not be able to communicate with my son. No surprise, grief interferes with communication across the dimensional divide. At the very time one needs to be griefless, one is grieful, an ironic complication to interdimensional communication. So, began an unusual personal journey I documented in such detail that my son decided I could document his sojourn in his new dimension, because he had a few things he really wanted to share. And so he did and more information is available on the book’s website: www.my-life-after-life.com.

However, back on earth, I can tell you a parent is never griefless about the loss of a child and that does not matter if the parent is on earth or that parent preceded the child in passing. The loss of a child before that child has had an opportunity to fulfill their dreams is not something one gets over (period).

What is possible is that one can shift and expand one’s perspective, and that was what I had to do and continue to do, because it is an ongoing process that won’t be complete until that day comes when I pass over myself.

That might seem like a paradox coming from someone who has had more conversations and emotional contact with his son than he would have ever had if he remained on earth. But the fact is the paradox is there and I just have to be with it.

Kenneth Stoller 2011

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K. Paul Stoller

K. Paul Stoller, MD, started his medical career as a pediatrician and was a Diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics for over two decades. Previously, in the early 1970s, he was a University of California President’s Undergraduate Fellow in the Health Sciences, working in the UCLA Department of Anesthesiology and volunteering at the since disbanded Parapsychology Lab at the UCLA Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. He matriculated at Penn State, and then completed his post-graduate training at UCLA. His first published works, papers on psychopharmacology, came to print before he entered medical school. During medical school, he was hired to do research for the Humane Society of the United States, and became involved in an effort to prohibit the use of shelter dogs for medical experiments, which made him very unpopular in certain circles when he published an article entitled “Sewer Science and Pound Seizure” in the International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems. He was then invited and became a founding board member of the Humane Farming Association, and served science editor for the Animal’s Voice Magazine where he was nominated for a Maggie. In the mid 1990s, after a friend, head of Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group, lapsed into a coma, Dr. Stoller began investigating hyperbaric medicine. Soon after, he started administering hyperbaric oxygen to brain-injured children and adults, including Iraqi vets and retired NFL players with traumatic brain injuries, also pioneering the use of this therapy for treating children with fetal alcohol syndrome. He is a Fellow of the American College of Hyperbaric Medicine, and has served as president of the International Hyperbaric Medical Association for almost a decade. When his son was killed in a train accident in 2007, he discovered the effectiveness of the hormone oxytocin in treating pathological grief. Dr. Stoller has medical offices in Santa Fe, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

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