Faced with an incomprehensible loss, one mother’s experiences forced her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about life and death—and open her heart to a new reality.

When Wendy Jordan Saffel lost her twenty-year-old son, Hugh, she discovered that grief is a well without a bottom. But even as she felt herself sinking into despair, she was offered an unexpected lifeline—one that changed her perception of the world forever.

A rational thinker, Wendy focused on the facts—the tangible and the measurable. That is, until she began experiencing profound spiritual connections with her son shortly after his passing. These initial moments of contact propelled her on a yearslong journey to understand what happens when we die, what comprises the afterlife, and how a relationship with our lost loved ones can persist in ways that are real, true, beautiful, and sacred.

Drawing on traditional and nontraditional spiritual beliefs, the growing body of work on the survival of consciousness, and what quantum physics tells us about the nature of reality, Never Really Left shares a wealth of research, experience, and hope for all those who have lost the ones they love. For Wendy, walking the path through grief and toward understanding led her to tremendous healing and a new paradigm of living—where joy can coexist with grief.