Episode 197: A Dad Connects with his Son who is in the Afterlife

On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. A recent study says that couples are eight times more likely to get a divorce when a child dies. I don't like hearing that, and today I want to introduce you to a dad that I think might help change this statistic.

Chris Ryan has worked professionally in marketing, communications, with radio, and advertising for over thirty five years, and currently he owns his own video production company. But he's also compiled a book of twenty five stories called Helping Fathers Heal, Grief, Hope and Search for Our Connection, Yes, a Connection with children in the Afterlife. Chris is part of a group called Helpingparentsheel dot Org. Let's meet Chris Ryan.

so we had that in common. Later in his life, you know, radio led me into different avenues marketing agencies, communications, and ultimately videography, which I've shot many, well hundreds of videos here and around the world in different countries, mainly for corporate types of business, instructional videos and those types

of things. But I love storytelling and I love doing videos that have a story, and I have a passion for helping people tell their stories, So that part of my professional career kind of dovetailed into the spark that led to the book, which is giving a platform for other fathers to tell their story, which for more most of them, was the first time they'd really ever tried to put that in writing. So that was a whole

process in and of itself. But Sean was born in nineteen ninety seven, so he would be turning twenty six this year. In his teenage years, he struggled a lot with self image, anxiety, depression, you know, as one of those gen Z kids that he didn't isolate necessarily, but he was an only child, so he did have a lot of alone time. So like I was on the radio for twenty years, he never once turned on the radio. All of his music came from YouTube and Napster and

file sharing and different types of online resources. It's a great kid, though. We had a good relationship, very funny, very very headstrong. I can't wait to learn more about his soul plan one of these days when I get a chance to be in heaven with him and we get a chance to do a life review, because yeah, he's a perfect child for us. But it was a challenge.

Everything has been a challenge. He was independent, sometimes defiant, and when he turned into his teenage years, he kind of went dark, as some kids do, closed the bedroom door, don't want to talk to mom and dad, they don't know anything, not as coachable. We tried to give him the space to mature and learn on his own and develop his friendships. But some of the kids he tended to kind of lean toward were the other kids like him that were maybe a little They felt like outsiders

a little bit. I think he reveled in that he was not the kid that wanted to be the center of the main social group. He was kind of one of the kids on the outside looking in and making fun or cracking jokes at some of the other kids. So he had a good sense of humor. I don't think he was necessarily a lonely child. He had a lot of friends, but he did have lot of alone time.

He did hang with some kids that influenced him a bit, and when he was probably twelve or thirteen, he tried marijuana then started drinking a little bit, things that probably we all did when we were kids. So, you know, we didn't try to tell him that that's wrong. I mean, we really wanted to have him learn the consequences of life and guide him as much as we could. But

at the same time, they talk about walls. You know, you have brick walls for kids, which are hard barriers, hard rules, and then you have softer barriers where you kind of let them learn and do what they do. We just kept expecting him to grow out of certain things like most of us have, but he kept getting darker and deeper into experimenting with different things. Ultimately it led to rehab and well in intervention first of all, and then rehab and sober living. So he did develop

a taste for alcohol. At one point, when he was seventeen, we took the extreme measure because we had now started to erect brick walls. We were really wanting to try to stop the slide of his grades, his attitude, his lack of respect around the house. That was just not working. So we made the difficult decision to send him to

Utah for a summer. It wasn't a boot camp like you've seen maybe some of the movies where they deprive kids, they abuse kids, they scream in their face, they scare the life out of them this was a therapeutic camp, and we did a lot of research on that. Were I to do it over again, I don't know, because it didn't have the effect on him that it has on a lot of other kids, which is to kind of scare them straight. For Sean, it made him really mad because he missed out on the summer before his

senior year. And you can imagine how important summer is for kids when they're in high school and you want to get out of high school and you want to have summer with all your friends. And he had a bunch of concerts lined up he wanted to go to. So he came back pretty mad at Mom and dad. He was going to show us even though we drug tested him. He decided alcohol would be the easiest way to skip out on drug testing, so that accelerated. Ultimately, what did him in was fetanol. He thought he was

buying something else. He was trying to self medicate, and he bought what he thought was ketamine online because he'd done a lot of research and heard that that was effective in treating depression. So he didn't know what he was getting, but he did know that he was getting into kind of treacherous territory with how much he was using, how much it was changing his life, how it was affecting his work life, and whatnot. At this point, he

wasn't living at home. We couldn't handle the disruption. He had moved out and was living with some other roommates. He chose his roommates, and he was twenty one when he moved out. He made that decision. He was an adult. Yeah, fentanyl. He passed on September. You know, it's funny because they

called us on the fourth of September. We think his spirit passed at that point, but he spent three days in the ICU, and on the seventh we had to make the horrific decision to discontinue life support because he just didn't have any brain activities. So we are between the fourth and the seventh. One of those days his spirit left and the other day his body shut down.

My wife Sin she's a researcher, she's really good at it, and she went online and started looking at different one groups of grieving compassion. She started ordering lots of books. So she started educating herself on signs and on the afterlife,

and she started suggesting certain books to me. We had seen some signs, we had gotten a few signs from Sean that we felt like we could attribute to him, but we were also kind of questioning whether or not we were maybe making things up or Okay, you know, these things have always been there were just now noticing them. There were some that were for me like they were physical. I had an experience a couple of weeks after Sean passed where I got up in the morning too. I

couldn't sleep very well the early days of grief. I just sleeping and waking is all kind of mixed up. And so it was dark, it was early, it was cool outside. I went to jump in the hot tub and just soak and watch the sun come up. But as I turned the corner to the hot it's like it's cool morning. And I walk around the corner and I felt myself walking through almost like if you pass a dryer vent, or you go to a laundromat, you pass a wall of dryer vents. It was warm, and

I didn't know what that was. It was so strange that I turned around and I kind of thought about it for a minute, and I walked back and I tried to retrace my steps, but I couldn't recreate it. I just said, thank you, thank you, Sean, I attribute that to him, and it's not the only time that I've felt a physical touch. So I do believe that our children want to help. They are closer than we think. In fact, one medium that we met with several times, Farah Gibson, she says that the veil is really all

around us. It's not like in the sky or some other place geographically. It's like they are right here. It's just that we can't sense that. Our senses don't pick that up. Yeah, it's been a journey to learn about the afterlife, to read books. Joe McQuillan wrote a great book about his search for his son Christopher, who passed tragically from a hypothermia. He fell off a boat in a very cold lake. He started to be able to connect with his son, and it was through more of

a meditative process. But we're just normal guys. You know. We're not trained mediums, we're not psychics, we're not special in any way other than you know, our heart is just broken open and we're trying to figure out what life means and what our life, our life means. How do we fit into this puzzle of a shattered kind of vision of what life would become.

all these dreams of what your life will be. You know you will have grandchildren, and your child will help you in your old age, and you save up your money because you want to pass your retirement onto your kid or kids, whatever the case may be. So we grieve so many things that are gone, and being an only now it almost felt like we weren't able to

be parents again, not in an active way. So our identity kind of shifted, and so educating ourselves was probably the best first step, reading books and knowing that we're

not alone. And here's what other people went through. And in the research, my wife found Helping Parents hel It was an online organization both with a website but then also with a Facebook group, and they at that time, this was almost three years ago, they had maybe twenty eight two thousand followers, and now it's up over that, I think it's twenty six thousand or something. So a lot of moms mainly, but there were a lot of dads too. She went to a few of the meetings.

There are affiliate groups geographically located, so there's one here in the southern California area. But at the time that she learned about Helping Parents hel that was just about the time that they were going to do their twenty twenty conference, and it's just an eight hour drive from US to Phoenix. So she asked me if i'd go, and I said, sure, I'll go. We could do it. We made the time for it, and I thought I'd be supporting her, and I was willing to learn as well.

I'm not closed minded at all. It's just that going to a conference of hundreds of people that all had had their same tragedy, it wasn't probably the first thing that I would have picked to do, and I thought, boy, that's going to be a downer. Well, boy, I was wrong. I was really an uplifting experience and it was great to meet so many other parents who are healing and connecting with each other and with their kids, which is a part of the healing process for many of us.

It was really a very interesting experience. And at that conference we had a reading. It was one of these gallery readings where a medium is on stage and it's in the main assembly. So there's eight hundred parents, so you've got to figure there's eight hundred or more kids, you know, that are all wanting to talk to their parents. And again, Farah Gibson is the medium that kind of just totally revolutionized our worldview on where Sean is because

she connected with Sean. It was so thrilling and maybe a little I don't know if embarrassing is the right word, but when you're in a group of people that big and then your kids starts talking to you, and you stand up and you realize that this is just absolutely incontrovertible evidence, and the video is available online. I created a YouTube video that is side by side of her reading and then of the evidence. Because I have a video background, I could put it together and actually show

the evidence, which was kind of fun. That really changed things for us. That whole conference was a game changer. And since then, I've learned about the Father's Group Helping Father's Heal as one of the affiliate groups, and that's where I came to know some of the other men that helped write this book.

to other mediums we've seen there at the conference. She was able to kind of know the child was helping to guide her to a side of the room, so she kind of walked over to our side of the room, and then she started talking about pulling up funny socks, crazy socks, really stupid colors, and that was something that our son loved to wear, you know, chili pepper socks or flamencos or pelicans. In fact, he and I both

had the same pair of socks. My wife had gotten us each repair, so that was kind of one of our things was pelicans, which we got pelican tattoos at

one point, Sean and I did. So she'd started talking about these socks, and nobody else really understood it, but we were kind of ribbing each other, like yeash Sean loved those, and so we put our hand up and she came over and she said a little bit more about the socks and how I would wear them as well, and so that became a piece of evidence and so she knew she'd locked on to us, and so we stood up and she talked about his love of music.

She said, he's carving his name in something. Is somebody carving would And we didn't know right off the bat, and we were like unsure about that, and she said the guitar. Did he do something with the guitar? And then it clicked, because yes, his acoustic guitar he wrote all over the back. He carved in it. He wrote little messages. He even wrote I'm so sorry mom and dad. And there's another message in the back of the guitar that says this is my finale. Which we didn't see

any of this until after we'd recovered his belongings. So she got the guitar part. Then she said, but Dad, you're trying to play, and that was true. And then she said, but you can't get the bar chords, and she said it in a teasing way, just like Sean would say it, and that is exactly true. I I'm not good at that. And then she brought up a piece of evidence about a deck that we were building

in the backyard. And this was the most mind blowing because it was just two or three weeks earlier that I had finished building a deck and I finished a piece of wood with resin, and I didn't mix enough resins, so I had to do another batch, which you never want to do. Resin needs to cure all at the same time. So Sean brought through this evidence about the deck and then he said through Farah, but you didn't do it right. You screwed it up. It doesn't even match.

Those were the words that he used. She used, and so in the video that I created, you can see the division of where the first pore of resin was and the second pore. And by that time, my wife and I we were just tingling, you know, we were so blown away, and the people in the audience were clapping because it was such a crazy, detailed kind of reading, full of personality. So those were some of the biggest

things that come to mind immediately. I think we counted there as maybe twenty pieces of evidence that she gave us all in a seven minute period. But it was life changing for us. At that point. We knew that Sean was watching what we were doing, and that he's still there and we are still having a relationship to some extent, that we love each other and care for each other, but we just can't touch each other the same way that we used to be able to.

know each other on a week to week basis. In this grieving space, things change so quickly week to week that every week there's going to be a dad that either's celebrating something like a sign or a dream, or a dad that's having a hard week because of an anniversary or something that may have triggered a certain emotional response. You know, isn't a linear thing. You go up, you go down, you think you're better, then you go back,

you regress, you progress. So weekly meetings are really good, and even though it's on Zoom, i'd say that we are a very tight knit group. There's over six hundred dads that have joined Helping Fathers Heal as a Facebook group, but the Zoom call each week is thirty to forty dads. We're usually a core group of dads, but we always, unfortunately we have new dads coming on because we still have kids that are passing and the dads need to

go somewhere. So hopefully we're becoming more visible as an alternative or as a resource for fathers.

do enjoy the video part of storytelling. But to sit and put the story down on paper, I'd never occurred to me. I brought it up to some of the dads in one of our affiliate group meetings, our Zoom call, and I just asked, you know, does this appeal to anybody? Does anybody think this is an idea that you'd want

to write a chapter? Would we have enough guys that might want to write one chapter, you know, just four or five six pages and tell us the story about your child and what kind of a child was this, and what was your relationship like? And so about eight hands went up the first night that I brought it up, and so I thought, well, I don't know how we'll do this. I got to figure this out.

signs have you had? Have you had any Is there anything that you would have as advice to another dad who may be reading this. Every dad was given ten questions that they could simply answer in a paragraph or two and then they've got a story if you got a chapter. Tom Madson helped me edit the book. Some of the dads. We did a lot of phone interviews to try to really pull out the story and help

them write it. So the editing process was quite extensive, but the fact that we were able to spread the writing out to twenty five other guys because ultimately after asking this question. Over a two month period, I had twenty five volunteers, and then the editing process took about seven or eight months, and then we were able to get the book out in April. So it surprised me that we had so many guys willing to do it,

and it was so heartening for me. It was very rewarding to hear the dads say that this was cathartic for them, just the process of going back through not just the transition and the pain of that moment, but go back even further and start writing about the life that they had with that child and some of those memories. Some of the kids had physical illness, you know, had suffered with cancer for years, and so there's a variety of ways that these children had decided to transition and

that was their sole plan. So hearing how those children lived and how their lives were celebrated, and the relationships with their dads, and then learning the subsequent fallout from

that and how they found help. You know, that's really the purpose of the book is just to give somebody that's reading it a bit of a kind of charting a course of you know, this is how it can look and there's twenty five different stories, so they're not all the same, but many of us had the same in initial reaction of paralysis and fog and just inability to think coherently or you know, right after a child dies, you have to do all this crazy decision making of

making arrangements and then communicating with family and communicating with that kid's friends' families, and it's just a really weird time. But by connecting both with our children and then also as dads in this group, we've connected with each other. That's really where we've found a sense of hope that our children are still with us and that we're going to be okay, and that they didn't die. You know, their life goes on, they're just their body isn't here.

So being able to kind of discover that as a father in the midst of your grief, to be able to feel that is just so relieving, as such a wonderful feeling, a healing feeling, knowing that you're not alone, really that there is a path to healing and you don't have to feel isolated. That's probably the worst thing many people choose to do when they lose someone that they love is that they just lock the door and

go to bed and they never come out. Certainly there's a time and a place for that, but you have to reach out. That's what we're here to do, is to love each other and to learn how to love. And our children are still out there available to help us learn that lesson. That's my son Sean on the cover.

don't have the right words. What if I say something and they start crying? You know, people are very uncomfortable with us grievers, but if they can find a safe spot, I think this book is a very healthy way for people to understand what grieving looks like, what we're going through, and what we need. And what we need is for people to stay with us, to hang with us, to have the courage to just ask us how we're doing, and just sit there and listen and not try to

fix anything. And as dads, that's what naturally, you know, we try to fix stuff. We try to protect our loved ones. We may feel a certain special sense of guilt because our child didn't have the full life that everybody would expect. And so I do think that fathers have an extra element of complexity with their grief because of that societal expectation of the man being strong, not showing much emotion, being able to carry on. You know, your boss wants you to get back to work. It's

been four weeks. Are you over it yet? You know you're having a bad day. Oh, I don't want to talk to him. I'm going to leave him alone. No, we'd love to be able to be human. And if we look like we're having a bad day, just ask us. You know, hey, can I do anything for you? Can I buy you a cup of coffee? You want to take a walk?

She knew I was from Helping Fathers Heal, because that's kind of how we found hers through the Helping Parents Heal list of approved mediums. And then she said, there's more boys the girls. And she even said it looks like there's only about seven girls in going back then first time. Late in the process, I go back, I count all the chapters, sure enough, with seven girls that were featured in the stories, and the rest were boys.

Some of the dads that are the quietest in the group meetings the Zoom meetings had the most heartfelt stories, and some shared my experience with fentanyl because that is such a killer of our children right now, and there's lovely stories of kids. I believe our kids continue to work with us through us, inspire us, nudge us, and there's fathers that are doing great advocacy work on drug

awareness on mental health issues. The very first chapter in the book is just a beautiful chapter, tragic, heartbreaking story of a suicide. But the author, Harry Brule, has taken it upon himself to quit his other job and is now working in the mental health area helping other children, especially with a disorder that is not typically diagnosed before you're eighteen. It's borderline personality disorder BPD. It is what happens when you have kind of a bipolar or two polls.

You go from anxiety, depression, isolation, nobody loves me, I'm worthless to the other extreme. And so now this father is doing advocacy work for that to help other young people. Other dads are doing assemblies where they talk to kids at schools. So many of these stories are really special to me, and the kids just are so tender and

many of them very sensitive. Many of the dads describe their children as seemingly having old souls, and that makes total sense when you talk to medium or people who are tuned into that that these would have probably been perhaps advanced souls that decided they are going to make that hard choice to leave early and make room for

a spiritual experience for the parents. So, without a doubt, it's made all of the dads more spiritually sensitive and more in tune with their child in a way that they may not have been in physical form.

sensory perception of Sean being close by. But I would say that we still maintain that personality and relationship even though it's not as easy as picking up the phone and calling them. That's what we miss the most, is just being able to dial up a number or see him in person. But yeah, we do still have a relationship with him, and it's brought us closer together as a couple, which I know grief can oftentimes be a

real difficult thing for a couple to survive. So I do think reading this book or reading other books about this so that the parents can kind of both be understanding where each other is, give each other space when necessary, but then help each other when the opportunity arises. A lot of the dads have experience into a closer relationship with their family and with their spouse because of the passing of that child.

we did have to put it to sleep. I knew it was going to happen. The day before, we had already made the arrangements for the vet to come to the house and euthanize the dog. So the night before I did have a very vivid dream with Sean and I was on a couch. He was sitting next to me. I had my arm around him, and he was kind of squirming around a little bit. He was probably about

eight or nine. He was younger about the age he would have been when he got the dog, and the dog was curled up on the floor next to the couch. Most of the times in these dreams there's not like verbal communication, but I just knew what he was telling me was it's okay, and you're doing the right thing. It was a difficult decision for us if the dog was ready or not, and he was basically reaffirming and

assuring me that it was okay. And now I know they're together in heaven playing, so I just passed that doggy spirit on to him to take care of.

going to be there as well. Yes, say little somebody could have a horse, Chris, What else would you like to share with our time together as any questions I haven't asked you, or any thoughts you'd like to share with those who are listening.

we laugh, and we drop f bombs. We close each meeting with stupid dad jokes, just so that we try to end on a lighter note for anybody who may be reluctant to reach out and try to find help in a group, because for me, be sitting in a group, you know, because we went to alan On for years because Sean was in an addictive cycle. I got help from it, but I didn't look forward to it, you know. And sometimes for guys, being in a group setting just

doesn't as comfortable. But our group really is healing and fun, and whether it's our group or another group, I just encourage anybody that's listening to this and feeling that you want some help during your grief journey to find a group of people that you can feel safe with. I think that's the most important thing. And it doesn't have to be a bunch of people. It can be one or two people. But sometimes your wife can't do everything. That's too much pressure on a relationship to have that

other person be the person that saves you. So finding your tribe, so to speak, and finding people who understand you and that you can talk to and you can reminisce and tell stories and not feel like that's a closet door that you can't open. I like to be able to share my memories with Sean with some of my friends. For them, it doesn't have to be this red flag of oh no, he's talking about his kid again. We're going to go down that road, going to start crying,

and it's going to be uncomfortable. I got to get out of here because I don't cry every time. Sometimes I just hear a song and it's like I remember going to this concert with Sean. This is great. I would just encourage anybody in a grief state to reach out and find people who that you can feel safe being yourself with.

or other types of physical work kinetic work. But not everything is going to be the same for every person. So I definitely believe in connecting with other people. But I also think that there are therapies, whether it's meditating or just getting out for a walk or binaural beats which is kind of a type of meditation with an auditory influence. There are ways that you can help yourself, and there are tools in the book where you might find different ways that you haven't thought of before. Again,

it's all about storytelling. This book is about the stories of twenty five dads and how they've made it through that initial valley. That we're not all healed. We never will be, you know, it never ends, but at least we're not where we were that first week, that first few days. We're able to find a way to stary, wretch and grow and reach out and connect with each other and with our child and spirit.

So sometimes an objective, professional, compassionate person can give you that sense of reality that you did everything you could, and that is one of the messages that we tend to get from our children on the other side. And I'm not talking about just Sean, many many of the other dads and parents. That seems to be a theme that is very consistent as our parents want us to know that you did everything you could and they want

us to feel at peace. But if you've got a really strong response, the guilt response, that can be very toxic. So I would encourage talking to somebody. And medium readings for me have also been very helpful. I've heard other people say it's like a worth a year of therapy. Just having a good medium reading can be so healing. When you feel like you've connected with that child and that child has reassured you that this is the plan, this was the way it was supposed to happen, and I'm alive.

Helping Parents Heal. It's free. It's the one organization that I know that not only gives grief support, but they believe in the afterlife. They are my favorite organization, and as Chris said, they're well over twenty thousand members. So a shout out to all of our friends at Helping Parents Heal dot org. I was discussing with Frenzy yesterday how important it is to feel that connection with our

loved one. And even though you may not want to be a medium, I always suggest taking a course in mediumship. You learn just what those subtle feelings are and how our soul communicates and perceives information. We practice on each other in these zoom medium classes, and for less than one medium reading you get six two hour sessions and who comes through from the other side. It's your loved ones. And what a marvelous feeling it is as a human to deliver a message and evidence for someone else. You

think it's your imagination, but it's not. These classes are so special. We always have classes coming up, but we don't die dot com. They're recorded. If you can't join live there's a money back guarantee. But your loved ones come through in such subtle manners. When you hear a favorite song out of the blue or memory comes in, that is them and for you to get involved with them, just take a walk down memory lane and they will start to give other feelings and memories and that's a

sign to connect. So with that, my friend, our time today has come to an end. But I thank you really from the bottom of my heart for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.