Here I am on December 26, 2025 looking back 5 years ago to the Christmas of December, 2020. This was a time in my life, when I was so lost and disconnected from everyone and everything except my own grief journey.
December 2020 was the world’s first COVID Christmas; an era of physical separation and disconnection for the world. But I didn’t notice the rest of the world because, this was the first Christmas after my beloved spouse John Scull and my incredible Mom, Diana Hill had died within six weeks of each other (John on July 24 and Mom on September 10). My usually well-integrated self had separated (aka dissociated) into two very different parts.
The visible part of me was what grief poet, Donna Ashworth, refers to as “…really as though you’re the ghost.” . This visible part of me that did not feel much like me at all was my physical self. Inside this shell of my physical human body, I was “…doing all the right things, putting one foot in front of the other, living…” But inside, I was more like a ghost. I was in a part of my grief journey that Donna Ashworth describes as,“where your soul kind of leaves your body too. As though it’s off searching for the one you lost, somewhere in the ether.”
Although I was very aware of my visible physical self and my invisible spiritual self, I had become so disoriented by John and Mom’s deaths that my spirit and my body had somehow separated from each other. Most of my grief memoir, “Together Still: Love Beyond Death” is an account of what I now look back on as a hero’s journey of my physical self and my spiritual self eventually finding each other and reuniting back into my healthy, whole self.
I hope you will read my memoir of how I managed to return to living a full-on spiritual/physical/emotional/mindful lovingly integrated life. Readers tell me it is a really good read that is hard to put down once you pick it up. Click here for more information.
One of the themes that runs through my book is that (even when we are lost and disconnected), humans are not isolated physical beings in a material world. We are one family of interconnected spiritual beings in a magical world.
During the Chrismas of 2020, when I was so lost – with my physical self and my spiritual self so separated from each other – my daughter Glaucia (who is a gifted, award winning singer) helped keep me connected to our family by making this music video.
If you are reading this in an email, you may need to click here to go to my blog to watch the video
As the winter of 2020 has been transforming into all the magical seasons of 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and now, 2025 this video has been one of my life-lines that I could watch whenever I wanted, as a way of reorienting myself to the realities that I am not lost and alone. Whether or not we are still in our temporary human bodies, we are a forever family of magical, interconnected spiritual beings learning to love each other and all sentient beings unconditionally.
I am an ordinary person who became extraordinarily special and magical by receiving the greatest gift there ever was which is simply to love and be loved in return. Most people in the world have also become extraordinary by fulfilling the main purpose of life: Cultivating unconditionally loving relationships with one or more family members, friends, pets, and the more-than-human wild beings in nature. Some of us have even found intimate love with a soulmate.
When someone we love dies, the outcome of our deep love is deep grief. We can gradually transform our grief back into the love it has always been through a well researched set of tangible and spiritual practices called Continuing Loving Bonds. If you haven’t already done so, I hope you will subscribe to my blog by leaving your email below.
CONTINUING LOVING BONDS 