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Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy: Can Your Relationship with a Loved One Continue After Death?

Everyone, I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey, and I could not be more delighted to once again have the pleasure of interviewing the remarkable Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy, who is an award-holding medium, a renowned spiritualist, and a bestselling author, as Karen generously shares her profound wisdom with us.

She will be bringing the mission of the show to life, educating, enlightening, and empowering us to make meaningful choices on the path to healing. Karen honed her high-level skills in mediumship, healing, and public speaking at the prestigious Arthur Findlay College in the UK. She also holds a diploma in bereavement counseling, which allows her to guide people through grief with care and deep understanding.

Through her private practice in Dublin and New York, she helps clients worldwide on their journeys toward healing and greater spiritual awareness. Her two thought-provoking books, titled The Other Irish and her deeply moving bestselling memoir, Till Death Don’t Us Part, resonate with readers across the globe.

Till Death Don’t Us Part speaks to Karen’s extraordinary journey from skepticism to the undeniable reality that her deceased fiance was communicating with her from the other side. In addition to her impressive mediumship and writing, Karen recently completed groundbreaking doctoral research on contemporary ghost literature, examining how ghost stories affect us emotionally and how they connect to the larger questions about life, death, and the mysteries beyond.

For this pioneering work, she earned a PhD from the University of Birmingham, one of the world’s top-ranked research institutions. As a dedicated educator, Karen has shared her wisdom through esteemed institutions such as the Shift Network, the Edgar Cayce Center, and the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre.

Soon she will be leading a fascinating new course on the American ghost story at New York University. I’m looking forward to speaking with Karen, who’s joining us from New York City to discuss spirituality, empathy, mediumship, and consciousness. Look into the cultural shift away from traditional religious teachings towards a deeply personal spirituality, and for a fascinating, enlightening, and unforgettable conversation you will not want to miss.

Karen, a heartfelt welcome back to the show. It’s so nice to see you.

It’s lovely to be here.

Truly a pleasure. Nice to be with you again. Let’s start by telling because a lot of people don’t know, you’re so amazing to me with all that you’ve accomplished and all that’s who you are, but you have a very unique journey from war correspondent to a spiritualist medium. Your fiance transitioned, and then you learned a lot even about the afterlife. Can you tell us your story about how you got to where you are?

It’s a bit of a long story, but I’ll shorten it. It was very much. I grew up in Ireland, raised Catholic. By the time I was seventeen, I’d had my fill of it and abandoned all forms. I ended up in university. I did my bachelor’s and my master’s. You become at that age not interested in any of this, just become more interested in music and art, and other things.

I became very much a skeptic. I really had no interest in anything spiritual, anything religious whatsoever, and lived pretty much like that. I did start practicing Zen at one point, but then Zen is non-theistic, so it was the only thing that I could focus was on, Dharma teaching and meditation. It was anything I could get my head around. I was a journalist, I was a writer. My first book that you mentioned, was part of the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

I was a war correspondent in Iraq. I used to cover politics and stuff. My fiance died very suddenly, very young, one afternoon in New York City. I was actually down south doing some research for my first book when I used to do politics. I talked about this in this book, the second book, which is, Till Death Don’t Us Part, which you and I’ve talked about before. I put the story together in that. I was really forced by him and the powers that be into being really knocked out of this smug skepticism that I had been living in to recognize that something else was happening.

It was really because electronics started turning on, and furniture started moving. All sorts of mad things that I talked about, Till Death Don’t Us Part started happening. Having said that, it used to happen when I was a child. I had things I hadn’t known by the time up until I was about 12, 13, which is common. It happens to quite a lot of children. Of course, you get into your teens.

Did your parents know that you were having these?

Yeah. As a very small child of a toddler, I would have conversations with thin air and scare the bejesus out of my mother. She would say, “Who are you talking to?” I would name some long-dead relatives that as a two-year-old, I had never met a three-year-old. My mother was Catholic. She put no stock in it. By the time I hit my teens, you’re not interested in boys and fashion, and music.

It’s that cool.

I just lost interest and just went away. Years later, once I hit 40 when my partner died, everything changed. I really got knocked out of, as I said, smug skepticism. I always find it very easy to be skeptic. I got knocked out of that. I used to, as a child, wake up and see turtle strangers standing at the end of the bed thing. My friend’s kid happens to him now as well, but this all came back and forth, and it just became an old, everyday thing.

It just resurfaced.

How can you not be in the light? You are already in the light. Share on X

All of these events just started relentlessly happening all the time. It was multiple times a day. My first thought, as any skeptic will tell you, was that I must be gone out of my mind with grief. I’m imagining all this stuff. I’d be lying on the bed in the afternoon, and I would see these little imprints like there was a little cat or something, an invisible cat walking from the end of the bed up to me, and I would see all these little imprints.

I would just sit there staring at them, “What the hell is going on?” Things, electronics that weren’t even plugged in would turn on and all sorts of mad things, and I was, like I said, shaken out of my complacency and in a search for answers because like I said the first thing is I must be having some breakdown but didn’t feel like a breakdown.

I was still writing, I was still interviewing, I was still whatever, but I thought, “This must be how grief is manifesting.” Because a lot of the stuff was physical, it wasn’t in my head. A lot of the stuff was physical in the world that I was like, “I didn’t turn on that GPS and I did not just turn on that lamp, and I did not just shake this bed and all things.” Because it was very much external, it couldn’t have been. I really had to come around to this, something else is going on here.

Funnily enough, the first person I bumped into, which I talk about in my book, so I won’t label it here, was a Catholic priest. He was the one who said, “No, this happens. It’s our loved ones leave with signs.” That was like, “What?” I happened to be in Virginia at the time. I didn’t want to come back to New York. I just couldn’t face coming back to New York after he died. I stayed in Virginia. I just led from place to place to the Arthur. The advocacy center was right there.

The Norfolk Spiritualist Church was right there. The Monroe Institute was right there. I’ve said often before, you’ve heard me say, it was like the Area 51 of the afterlife right there where I was at the time. It just became a journey of discovery of place. The University of Virginia’s School of Perceptual Studies is right there. There was an awful lot going on. A lot is going on there. I was just going from place to place, and I won’t give it away, but there was that epiphany, that one awakening moment where all of it just converged into that, “This is you.” I won’t give it away in case anyone wants to read the book. It’s the end of the second chapter.

Everyone, it’s called Till Death Don’t Us Part.

I don’t want to ruin it in case anybody wants to read it, but it just had this epiphany one day where it was just like, and then the penny dropped, and then there was no going back. No going back after that. I’m sure lots of people have had that. Once you have an epiphany, that ineffable sense of just knowing something on a very deep level that no amount of rationality or skepticism could explain. You just know it deep within you. There is no way to really describe the experience. There’s also no way to go back to the person you were before.

It’s what happened to me in the car accident.

It happens, yeah.

It changed my whole perception of everything, and I was also skeptical. I was like, “Boom.”

It really does fundamentally change you. It changes you on such a deep cellular, molecular level, such a neural level that there’s just no way to go back to the way you were. That just changes everything because then you become so different that all your friends just go, you’ve lost your marbles, and there’s a big falling away of it’s like this wave. There’s a big falling away of friends, and then there’s just this new wave of new people coming in.

It was absolutely life-changing. Never went back to politics again after that. I just became much more interested in. I think of it because what started happening there wasn’t just the furniture moving. What started happening was once I accepted that the people at the end of the bed I knew when I was a kid. I knew they weren’t people. I knew they were spirits.

It feels very normal to me as a child. It became very normal to me again at that point. Once that happened and all of the baggage of all of the rest of it, the skepticism went out the window. What started happening was I became very much aware of actual individuals and very detailed information about individuals belonging to somebody I was sitting with, or whatever, and was encouraged.

There are some early stories about what happened about in the book as well, just people who I would sit down with somebody and somebody would show up who had died by suicide the year before, and I was able to explain. “They’re wearing this, they’re doing this.” Here are all these details about them to prove that it was they who were okay. This started to happen a number of times.

Excuse me, just to interject, when did you start your mediumship training? All of this happened, and you were a skeptic after that. You were getting all these messages that the ability was there, and then you went to refine it.

No, all of this started happening, and I was coming up and people like the Edgar Cayce Center, for example, who had witnessed this, what was happening. People started encouraging me to go do something about it, to use something with it. I was not in the least bit interested because I was like, “I’m a work or a political course, but that’s not who I am.”

It was just too far from my own identity of who I was, but it kept happening. Eventually, a good friend of mine, Peter Goldbeck at the Edgar Cayce Center, saw this happen one night in a big healing circle, and he was just like, “That is some work you’re doing. You need to do something with it.” That took a lot of soul-searching because I didn’t want to step into people’s grief. I thought, “If I’m going to do it, then I need to know what I’m doing and I need to do this well and I need to have it vetted by people who really know what they’re doing.”

I found my way eventually into the SNU and the Arthur Findlay College in England and then actually went through the formal training, the formal education, and the formal assessments where other veteran mediums are linking in with you to be able to verify that you are actually saying and doing and getting what you claim to be getting.

That was very important for me was to have this vetted and validated and properly understood and properly trained because I had been on the receiving end. I’m sure many of your readers have experienced this. In those early days when I was just coming to terms with what was going on, I had actually seen some mediums and had been to some spiritualist churches. I can honestly say there are so many people, and as you know, I’m a huge proponent of education.

A lot of mediums who just had the ability but no actual education were perpetuating an awful lot of very harmful superstitions. It happens all the time. I had somebody whose son died by suicide who came to me, had been to a medium who told this poor mother that her son was earthbound. In other words, he couldn’t go into the light. That’s another medieval load of nonsense because he died by suicide. I was like, “Even if you believed that, why would you say it?”

It’s cruel to say that, you’re right.

Very ignorant. An awful lot of superstition. A lot of people cannot get out of their own way, which is why I’m a huge proponent of education, which is why I did the awards, which is why I did my training. I’m a huge proponent of education and mediumship, but also education. We’re going to talk about this later because I designed a course around this for people, which we’ll talk about later. It’s very important.

There’s no such thing as blocking a loved one in spirit—only ignorance does that. Share on X

A lot of the myths and its conceptions that are shared have been dragged through history from Dante, from Homer, from the Protestant Reformation, the 1500s. These are just ancient beliefs. A lot of them came from fiction. Homer and Dante’s fiction. A lot of them came from old orthodox religious views, and they get perpetuated.

They’re like the old, you throw a pillowcase of feathers out, and after a month, they’re all covered in dirt and they’re unrecognizable. All of these beliefs are like feathers that have been just thrown onto the planet everywhere, and people are perpetuating superstitions arising from fiction, from medieval or classical fiction that isn’t actually even true, or from certain belief systems. If there were one single correct belief system, we would all have a single religion.

Decoding Consciousness: The Antenna of the Brain

There would only be one religion. I felt at the time, and this is why I really needed to take this very seriously, that having the ability is not enough. You have to be educated so that you do no harm. I’d answer your question, why I decided if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it properly, and I’m going to do it well, and I’m going to know what I’m doing. Over and above the messages, everybody can get a message from the spirit world, but how you sit in front of people and meet them in their grief is a different thing altogether.

They get a big package when they talk with you because you have all this experience and healing grief, and you’re coaching away your medium. You’ve gotten your education. You’ve even written your dissertation, which I want to get to next because in your dissertation, you blended academic scholarship with personal spiritual practice as a medium and teacher.

How did these personal experiences shape your approach to the concepts of consciousness in the afterlife? If you don’t mind, could you give everybody a little encapsulated definition of what consciousness is? I know what it is, but a lot of people say, “They’re talking about consciousness. What are they talking about?”

I think the way I’m using it is just the single stream of consciousness. There are all sorts of ways different disciplines use the term consciousness. I’m using it in the way of consciousness studies. The new theories of consciousness, the new research into consciousness, that say David Chalmers or Rupert Sheldrake, or Dean Radin, a lot of these academics themselves, scientists, physicists, psychologists, are looking at it.

Do you understand what the Buddhists have always understood, which is that there is a single interconnected stream of consciousness, and we are all arising from it. There is one aspect of that that I actually do like, and that is that we are all still in. This is how mediumship works, this is how intuition works, this is how that good feeling people think they have, it’s intuition. How does that work? We do this on a daily basis, meet people, and pick things up from people without even knowing we’re doing it?

How is that happening? It’s because we are all connected within a stream of consciousness. The way I’ve heard it explained from some consciousness theorists is that the brain, as opposed to consciousness arising from the brain, the brain is an antenna that tunes in to an aspect of consciousness that we’re all part of. It’s almost like think of it like the knob on a radio. There is the wavelength of the station that’s broadcasting whatever is being broadcasted from the radio.

That’s there whether you’ve got a radio or not. You get yourself a little radio, a little brain, and then you turn the knob and you tune in a little bit of the frequency of all of the waves that are floating around. To me, that’s the easiest way to understand consciousness. What it also implies, then, is that we are all still in that stream.

We think, because we’re in these little bodies, that we are separate from the stream, which is where a lot of this nonsense about earthbound spirits and going into the light comes from, because it implies that there is some geography involved, that we’re here in our little bodies and they’re there in something else. We start to understand that there is only this stream. What arises out of this is perception.

What arises out is the little antenna that we are, that’s tuning in the part of us that is part of that stream of consciousness. I hope that’s not too heady, but I think it’s important to recognize that because I think just in that, in and of itself, eliminates a huge amount of superstition about getting lost, but the earthbound people and the lost people and the people not in the lies. It’s like, how can you not be in the lies? You are already in the lies.

I’m glad you’re doing this because you’re just spelling notions that people probably have. People who are listening to this podcast probably have some of these notions and are going, “That’s really not true.” We’re coming into a more enlightenment with these kinds of discussions and interviews and all and it’s a wonderful way to educate people because we are all part of the collective.

“The Reincarnated Ghost”: A New Look at Ghost Stories

We’re all part of that stream, but some people feel they’re more part of it than others, and it’s not true. It makes no sense. Tell me what inspired you to write this dissertation titled The Re-enchanted Ghosts: Spectral Literature in 21st Century America, which delves into modern American fiction’s transformative take on spirituality and consciousness. That’s a lot to say, Karen. What inspires you to write it?

As a doctor, it’s not an easy thing to do. No, you do know, I was thinking about, it’s been a long time since I did my master’s, and then so much stuff changed.

Your master’s was in what, in which model?

In literature, in Anglo-Irish literature, many years ago, in my twenties. I was thinking, when all of this started happening and I went to college and I got my three certificates of recognition from the college and I did all that study and assessment and all the rest of it, I was like, “What shall I do now?” I mulled this over for a while. I wrote the book before the PhD. I’d written The Other Irish, a peace process book, a long time ago, before my partner died. I was actually writing it when he died. The second book, Till Death Don’t Us Part, is after the epiphany.

After I’d written that, I was thinking, “Now what shall I do? I’ve done my awards, I’ve done my training, I’ve done my assessments, I’ve written this book.” I was thinking about it as I got interested in sacred texts and religion stuff, but the doctorate’s such a humongous undertaking that I thought I should stick to my field, which was literature, rather than try to develop a whole new discipline and have to start from scratch. I just wanted the obvious thing to do seemed to be to look at ghost stories.

Which was fun and had to do with a lot of literature for you.

I ended up, you the thing, with the PhD. Anyone doing a PhD, in the first year, you’re just reading stuff randomly all over the place. You’ve no idea what you’re doing, and these things naturally, the thesis starts to arise out of that. What I started to notice in American literature, in particular, was a number of novels that were approaching the ghost.

The genre of the ghost story has always arisen to mirror what’s going on in our society. Scrooge, like a Christmas Carol, for example, arose out of the Industrial Revolution. This is Scrooge, the disparity between poverty. That could not have emerged at any other time. This is what you can safely say that if you look at any ghost story from any era, it’s going to tell you what was going on in that era.

That’s so interesting.

People start writing ghost stories about it. The ghost has generally been treated to circle back around to our myths and superstition as some spirit at unrest, or some evil or haunting.

Used to evoke fear.

Yes, or is that there to avenge itself or get revenge or amends or all these sorts of things? The bottom line is the ghost is always lingering around somewhere it shouldn’t be, should have moved on into wherever this move on is. This myth of the move on. All of these ghost stories are set on the planet amongst humans. The ghost is this secondary character. That’s the typical ghost story, with the exception of, there was one book, his name’s gone out of my head, now he’s written in the ‘70s, gone out of my head, he’ll come back to me. Generally, at least in Western culture, set on the planet. Ghost is some weird thing that shouldn’t be here at all. It’s intrusive.

Telepathy is a merging of thought. Share on X

I’m thinking about, as you’re saying all this, I’m thinking of one exception that I can think of, which would be that, wasn’t in a cartoon, Casper, The Friendly Ghost?

I wouldn’t know. I don’t know if Casper is literature, but yes.

He’s not literature.

It’s a children’s thing. I’m talking about culture and literature. What I noticed was that there were certain strands of ghosts in the ghost genre in American literature. I won’t go into it, but there are some great literary innovations. For anybody who’s interested in literature, there’s some great experimentation going on in terms of literature and fiction in the ghost genre. What I started noticing was that there was a certain body of work that was starting to arise independently in American ghost literature, where it was all set in the afterlife, was set in some liminal space, and it was all just about the ghosts.

The ghosts with the narrators, which they never usually are, the ghosts of narrators, they’re the main characters, it’s all set in wherever this space is after they physically die, and it basically is continuing on. There is no religious narrative, there’s no God, there’s no judgment, there’s no rewards, no retributions, no nothing.

They’re just plunked somewhere else, dealing with this hyperreality where everything is pretty much a hyperreal version of themselves, and everything they experienced, and now they’re working through stuff in the afterlife. I thought, “This is interesting because this is not the normal thing.” I got very interested in like, “Why is that happening? Why have they done this?”

I think when I was researching, a lot of the scholarship I read was written by people who don’t believe in mediumship or the afterlife or the continuation of consciousness. A lot of the scholarship was reading it from the vantage point of the human. Whereas I was reading it from the vantage point of, “The ghost is real.” Now let’s just take the ghost seriously as real. Now what’s going on? Now what’s the discussion? Do you see, it’s an approach to it. People are like, “Why are you talking about that?” It’s because the ghost is real.

Spirituality Beyond Religion: The Rise of the “Spiritual But Not Religious”

Let’s just do this down and talk to us about mediumship and grief, then, because we’re taking this transformative take on spirituality and consciousness with what you’re talking about. How does that distill down into mediumship and grief? There’s a shift that’s going on from traditional religion towards non-traditional spirituality. Some of that’s all connected, would you say?

I definitely did look at the new religious movements, the spiritual but not religious movements, and these shifts in spirituality in our belief systems. When I was trying to answer this question, “Why is this now new approach happening?” I did do look into that quite a bit. It was interesting because there’s been this idea, “Religion is dead. The Enlightenment killed religion, materialism of the 20th century religion is dead. We’ve become scientifically minded. Everything has to be rational, whatever.”

The statistics don’t bear that out. There’s more fundamentalist religion now than there was. A big move towards fundamentalist religions, but there is also a distinct rise in what’s called the spiritual but not religious, which is people who have found that the secular paradigm we had, the materialist paradigm, wasn’t enough. That it didn’t answer the fundamental questions that religion answered, which are what is the purpose, what is the meaning, what is good, and what are the existential questions of like, “Why are we even here?”

The secular materialism paradigms can answer those, and that’s become quite apparent as we moved into the late 20th century and the 21st century. Even actually, honestly, from the ‘60s it started to arise. What we’ve seen in the statistics is that more and more, while there’s still an increase in people, religious adherence generally, there is actually a marked increase in people now saying that they are spiritual but not religious.

In other words, they don’t subscribe to any organized religion. It becomes this very curated religious thing where people take what works for them, which there’s an upside and a downside to that as well. Generally, what it is, is its people finding aspects of Buddhism that work, or aspects of this, or aspects of that, or the aspects of meditation that work.

Just taking that into a very personal form of spirituality, where it’s finding that sense of meaning and purpose and compassion and connection and all of these things that religion gave us with all of the doctrine. Now it’s regaining these things because we’ve realized secularism is missing something, and it’s the missing something that people have started searching for, which has led people into the spiritual but not religious.

I know a lot of people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, and many of them do lean towards studying Buddhism.

It’s not actually Buddhism as practiced in the East.

It’s the principle.

It’s an Americanization of Buddhism. It’s an element of Buddhism. The thing about the curator’s spirituality is just Jerry picking.

The Healing Power of Stories in Mediumship & Grief

Just exactly what you’re saying. I’m finding that with a lot of people who I know, and they define themselves that way. Karen, how would you say exploring this more contemporary research into consciousness helps to illuminate the vital role of healing in grief and trauma recovery? I have a second part to that question. How does embracing the spiritual and mysterious dimensions of life that you’ve researched help us find meaning in our lives?

Grief is grief. It's going to take you as long as it takes you. Share on X

As we’ve mentioned already, when we talk about consciousness, it’s important to understand that we’re all connected. People have this notion that if somebody has died, they’ve gone on. You need somebody with the power greater than yourself to go communicate with them. The only difference between the average person who’s bereaved and the medium is that the medium can do that on demand to complete strangers, but everybody is capable of maintaining that relationship if they just learn the language of the spirit. What happens is that there’s a lot of misnomer. You see this on Facebook pages. A lot of people are passing around superstitions and opinions. Opinions are just opinions, they’re not facts.

There is a way of developing that language, and I always say to people, “That language is going to be unique to you and your loved one. The same way as your interaction here was unique to the two of you, it’s going to have its own unique nuances in the spirit world as well.” As I said in the book, my partner came and was trying to get my attention in ways that had him written all over them. I talk about this in the book. People say, “If you’ve got a Robin, it’s your dad. If you’ve got this, it’s this.”

People get very confused. They’re going, “Was that a sign? Was not a sign?” There is a way of working with that because you will see the mark of your loved one on them. This is something that I always ask people, it’s a language you have to learn. Enjoy it. You people approach like, “It’s some destination I’ve got to get to.” It’s like, “No, it’s your loved one is now in a different form within the stream of consciousness. Now you just have to learn a different way of communicating.” There are ways to do that.

You teach that to people.

Maintaining Your Connection: The Language of Spirit

Yeah, I do. We’ll talk about that later. For me, it’s like you need to trust them. You need to trust your connection. That’s the more important thing. That’s more important than anything any medium says. I ask people just to enjoy that. It’s a new, exciting phase of your relationship. It’s like, in all of the grief, which can be very debilitating, there is this potential for this whole new phase of your relationship. It becomes not seeing it as a loss. There’s the physical loss, but it’s not seeing it as a loss. It becomes how can this now be just this whole new chapter in our relationship? How can I enjoy talking to my loved one, noticing when they’re talking back? It can be a very exciting time. I’m not belittling people’s grief. As you know, I’ve been here myself.

Of course, and so have I. You and I, have both experienced it, but we each have our own unique relationship with our partners who have transitioned.

I think it’s important to find some joy and find some excitement in that. My partner’s now in spirit form. Let’s start finding ways to communicate with each other and experiment with that and explore that and enjoy that and know that you’re in it together because there’s nothing better. I remember one time, for example, waking up in the morning, the number 337 was in my head. I was like, “What on is that for?”

No idea. I’m thinking, “That doesn’t make sense for him because he wouldn’t be into numerals or anything like that.” Later that day, I was in my car with a friend of mine, and we were driving down, I think we’re on the Upper West Side somewhere, and we were near where he had died, actually, and an ambulance went by, and a bunch of cars were not stopping. I remember saying, “For God’s sake, why won’t these cars pull over? There’s somebody in this ambulance that’s dying.”

All I could think of was that day when he was in the ambulance. I got very upset. We had pulled over, and when the ambulance went by, I shifted to move, and I noticed that there was a yellow cab in front of me, and the number on the cab was 337. These are the things I say to people, like, be open to this because that is meaningful.

The number 337 in itself means nothing, but what was really meaningful was the knowledge that I was upset. This is amazing to me how this, he knew that morning, I’m not going to go into premonitions, he somehow could see that the afternoon I would be parked, pulled over behind the cab with 337 on it. At the same moment, I was very upset about just being brought back into that moment. He showed me this number to show me, “I’m here.”

“I’m here with you.”

Till Death Don’t Us Part

There’s so much of this amazing stuff that goes on that I really do try to say to people, “Get off Facebook, get away from all of that. Spend time with your loved one. Learn this language between you. It’s going to be different from somebody else’s language.” You cannot just go buy a book and see a list of here’s a check. First, obviously, it’s your loved one, which loved one?

Unconventional Signs from the Other Side

It’s because that may not be there with how they would communicate. I’ll tell you a very funny one of my favorite stories, Karen. I want to ask you, because I know you have a wonderful promo for our readers. My husband was a funny guy, and he loved to laugh, and he loved to bust me in different ways. The first guy I was dating after he transitioned, 3 or 4 years later, was from England, and the guy was coming to New Jersey, and as he came through my door, he was calling me Reny.

He said, “Reny, I don’t know what took me over, but when I got to the duty-free shop, I had never seen it before, but I was attracted to this one particular cologne, and something said to me, I had to buy it to wear with you.” Of course, it was my husband’s cologne. I said to him, “Buster, you,” but that would be exactly the way for Saul to tell me, “Honey, I know what you’re doing. It’s okay. I’m here.” He would have gotten a big kick out of it because he knew that I would have known that was a small signal.

You can see how exciting it can be when you just turn your focus to you and your loved one and away from the lists and Googling and Facebook and everything, all the other nonsense that’s out there, and really just turn. I always say, “Trust your loved one more than any medium.” Also, everybody’s got multiple loved ones in the afterlife. Who sent the robin? Who sent the penny?

There is a way of working with this. I think that I always encourage people because grief is just grinding. I mean, it’s just so hard. One thing I want to say about grief is that a lot of people have come to me with this, and they say, “Somebody told me because I’m grieving, I’m blocking my loved one.” What that does is that people think, and then they start feeling bad and get on that.

They’re not feeling bad enough already. Now somebody’s making them feel worse because they’re blaming them for not being able to see signs they recognize their loved one because they’re grieving. It’s such nonsense. Grief is love. The only thing that blocks your loved one from you is ignorance. It’s a lack of education. Absolutely nothing else. My mother died, and then there’s the other thing. “You’ve got to leave them alone for X amount of months.”

That’s not true either.

Why would that be? Don’t you think that immediately is the time that you want to connect with you to say, “I’m okay?”

“I’m here.”

Of course, immediately. In Ireland, we have these big three-day wakes, and we laid the body out in the front room of the house so that it doesn’t go to mortuaries. When my mother died, my dad and I picked out a wardrobe. They brought her back to the house in the coffin in the front room. This is the way he did it in Ireland. You have everybody around the house. Everybody comes to the house.

Our house was bursting at the seams with all the people who came from my mother and the priest. Did five decades of the rosaries and everybody up and down the stairs, and now bursting out into the gardens, and everything stayed for five decades of the rosaries. I knew that something like this would happen.

When they brought my mother back in the coffin to put her in the front room, she had just died the day before. Here she is, they brought her in, and they took the lid off. I thought, “She’s going to go mad because her hair was tousled. Her skin looked terrible.” I thought, “She was going to go absolutely mad when all these people came around.” I went up and I got her curling iron and I plugged in, I got her makeup bag and I was there curling her hair in the coffin and doing her makeup in the coffin and everything.

Grief is grief. It's going to take you as long as it takes you. Share on X

She looked lovely by the time I was finished. She looked like herself. Of course, Ireland people coming around the neighborhoods like, “Isn’t she a lovely corpse?” This is them. After the hundred and something people all left the house and it was quiet again that night, I went up to bed, and my room is above where my mother was. I got into bed and I said to my mother, “Mom, how do you feel?” She showed me a crown. Like a queen.

That’s beautiful.

She was in her coffin downstairs, and people say, “Leave them alone?” Do you think that was the most important thing for my mother to say was like, “Thank you for doing all of that.” That’s nonsense. I think that we really need to, as you were talking earlier about consciousness. It’s really time to take all of this into the 21st century.

Into an understanding of what’s going on within the non-religious but spiritual context, within the context of contemporary consciousness studies, and what we’re discovering about that, to understand that all of this other medieval, classical, early Christian church stuff, and even earlier, doesn’t make any sense. We interpret what we know at a given period of time through the frame of reference that we have. 500 years from now, we’ll think about this differently, but we shouldn’t be thinking about it the way they thought about it 500 years ago.

I could not agree more. I agree. That’s part of why you and I are talking. That’s part of the reason for this conversation. I know that you have a wonderful promo in mind for our show. I think it sounds fantastic. I know we’re going to provide a link for it. Could you tell everyone a little bit about it?

I designed a course called Love After Life. It’s basically like from the title of this, Awakening to Love After Life. What it is it’s for people who want to maintain their own relationships with their loved ones, themselves directly. I actually designed it from all of these things that people were coming to me with, all of the superstitions, the heartbreak, all of this other stuff, the confusion, everything that was going on.

There were also these people coming along, and their husband had just died, and some medium had told them they had to move on and find somebody else. They were in the depths, the throes of grief. I fear for people, to be honest. What I did was I created this on demand, it’s a self-paced course, you can buy it out, go back to it, do it over and over again.

What it’s designed to do is to talk about these things that we’re talking about, to talk about and identify myths and superstitions and dispel them, to talk about how this communication works and have all these practices in it to help people develop the sensitivity to shift out of what they think should be going on to what is going on.

It’s really going on.

Identifying Subtle Communications from Loved Ones

All of the time, people are missing the signs or they’re missing the presence because they think it’s supposed to be this. I’m saying, “Forget that. Talk to your partner, talk to your child, talk to your mother, talk to whoever, work it out with them.” I created this little course that helps people with practices and with teachings and tips to really understand and find ways themselves to both work with their loved ones, to maintain that connection with their loved ones, to increase their own sensitivity, because sometimes people think they’re out there looking for burning bushes.

Sometimes it’s as simple as you’re sitting there, you’re feeling distressed, and then all of a sudden a calmness comes over you. You think, “I feel calmer for no particular reason.” You feel calmer because somebody has just come and given you a hug to calm you down. When you didn’t realize what they’re present, that’s them. We’re looking in the wrong places. Another really common thing is people are just washing the dishes or brushing their teeth, and out of the blue, a memory of a loved one pops into their head, and they think, “How interesting is that?”

A song, right?

No. Not even the song. This is the memory because it could be just like, “Now I’ve just got this completely undisconnected memory about the time we took the dog to the beach.” You’ve just, for no reason, this memory has popped into your head. You think, “Strangely enough, I just had a completely unconnected memory of walking the dog on the beach.” We think we’ve just thought about them. What’s happened is they’ve thought about us and we felt their thoughts touch our minds. These are the ways our loved ones are communicating with us. We don’t need to be in the wild looking for signs out there. It’s all happening here. These are things I wanted to teach people. This is where to look for the language.

That is particular for you, for your particular loved one.

Absolutely, yeah.

That’s how it would work. It doesn’t have to be a partner. It could be a child. It could be a friend. It could be anyone.

Everybody’s communicating. My mother used to interrupt me. I wouldn’t even be thinking about it. I would just be like washing the dishes or something. I would just see. The thing is that when you and the other thing is the other thing I think it is important to learn the meditation practice, just helps to still the mind to become aware of how our own mind moves.

When we do that, we become more sensitive to when somebody else is actually, because this is all telepathic communication, like it’s no burning bushes here. This is telepathy. Telepathy is an emerging thought. When we understand where our thoughts are and how we think and how our mind moves, it becomes more apparent when, “That thought couldn’t have been mine.” A real easy giveaway is that the way the mind works, it works by rumination and association.

Our mind only thinks in half-baked thoughts. If you pay attention, if you observe the mind, that’s why it’s an important part of the course as well. If observe the mind, you realize the mind thinks, unless you’re actually talking, the mind doesn’t think in full sentences. It thinks in half-baked, half ideas, half images, like dreamlike, half-baked, and ruminates just on roles from thought to thought by association. When something interrupts that, you know it’s not you. It has to be somebody else.

Pay attention.

You’ve got to learn that.

Finding Joy Amidst Grief: Self-Care and Compassion

That’s a wonderful course. That sounds marvelous to me. What is the special Karen Frances McCarthy tip for finding joy in life?

For finding joy. I know that’s going to sound a bit cliched, but I do think that the joy is in the present moment. That doesn’t mean that you cannot be remembering joyful things in the present moment. Always say regret is in the past, and anxiety is in the future, and the only joy is in the moment.

I think the other thing too that we have to remember, and this especially goes when you’re bereaved, when you’re grieving, when you’re in that pain, because there’s a real hollowing out in those early days of grief, is that it’s okay to find that moment of joy when you’re grieving. Your loved one is going to be happy for you that you’ve done that.

It’s important to know that they also have the compassion and empathy to know that you’re grieving. They’re not saying, “Cheer up, buck up.” They have that compassion and empathy. If you find a moment of joy, they’re going to be joyful for you too. It’s important to remember that. I think one other thing about that is I think we have to work at that.

I think we have to work at being happy. It can get very easy, and not just for the bereaved for anybody, you just turn on the news. You wake up full of the joys of life, and by noon, you just want to crawl back into bed. I would say that happiness and joy take effort. We have to choose it, or we don’t have to choose to be going out filled with exuberance, but we can choose in this moment to find a little tiny kernel of joy in something.

Suffering can lead us to an understanding and a way of finding meaning in service. Share on X

It can be the tiniest thing. It can be that “This coffee I just made is really good,” or “Those flowers are beautiful colors. I love how the colors are making me feel.” It can be, “I have a house to live in.” It can be the tiniest thing. I think that we have to just choose to find it too, because the world is overwhelming, and it’s easy to get beaten down by it. It’s easy to get beaten down by trauma. It’s easy to get beaten down by suffering. I just want to clarify that I am not talking about spiritual bypassing.

Trauma and grief are real things that are stored within you, within the nervous system, within the spirit. They need real help. They either need time and self-compassion, and hopefully a supportive community, or some supportive people in your life, but you have to allow yourself to grieve. This is part of the reason why, as we were saying earlier, which is why I sometimes fear for people who are grieving, because people are very uncomfortable with grief. They’re very uncomfortable with the bereft. They’re very uncomfortable with death.

How many names do we have for death? Passing, passed on, moved on, gone to the spirit. We will say anything rather than say someone died. That’s just built into us. We have an aversion to death and dying. Grieving people mirror that. After a while, people will get very uncomfortable about that, and people say, “You’ve got to go through these phases, which we know is not the way it is,” or “It’s been a year, you should be back on the horse.” Grief is grief. It’s going to take you as long as it takes you.

“That distills down when you get over it because you’re making me uncomfortable with your pain.”

“You’re miserable. I cannot.”

“We should move on already because I’m tired of hearing about it.”

“I’m tired of you dragging yourself around in your slippers and your rollers and no makeup on,” or whatever the case may be. It’s important with that to understand that your loved ones love you. Grief is love. If you hadn’t loved, you wouldn’t be grieving. Your loved ones understand that you need to understand that. I think it’s very important to have self-compassion and patience with yourself.

Now, we don’t want to be two years from now still in our rollers and our slippers. There comes a point in time where we have to find those little incremental moments of joy. Grief is grief, and we need to be allowed to grieve, not try to swallow that or bypass that for other people’s comfort. I would say anybody who’s really struggling with grief.

I have to say this, Irene, mediumship is not a substitute for grief counseling. It’s just no way. If you’re struggling, you need to find a grief group or support group, or a counselor, or somebody to help you. A medium is not trained, and if you go to a medium for mediumship, they should not be counseling you. That is not the hat you booked them for.

Knowing your loved ones survived, when the penny drops on that, sometimes you get a session where something just comes up and it can be the most inconsequential thing, where the penny just dropped for the client, “That’s them, that’s marvelous.” They are still going to be grieving. It certainly takes the edge off it, and certainly, continuing to develop the relationship and finding joy and excitement in that is marvelous, but you still have to grieve the physical loss.

Not only that but like if you have other issues that have been unhealed earlier on in your life and now you’re grieving, for instance, if you were abandoned or something, and now your loved one has transitioned, that’s going to raise your grief level way past ten. I tell people all the time, “If your grief is that intense and deep for a long, quite a while, that’s your indication. Go get some healing. Go get professional help.”

Like you say, everybody’s different. Everybody’s traumas are different. Everyone’s triggers are different. Everyone’s relationship was different. Everybody’s support that they have around them is still different. It’s all different, but it’s also non-comparable. You cannot compare one person. I remember somebody saying to me that their grief was deeper than my grief over the loss of my partner because they had been married twenty years and we hadn’t, so their grief was greater. I’m like, that makes no sense. It’s non-comparable because I have the added grief of the loss of those twenty years. Everybody’s grief is apples and oranges.

Self-care and self-compassion are the most important things. I think we touched on this earlier when we were talking about these ideas of suffering and consciousness and stuff, is that sometimes grief brings with us such intense suffering that can have a profound positive, ultimately, effect because when we understand suffering, not for everybody. People find that the deeper their sense of suffering, the more compassionate they are to other people’s suffering, and the more they feel in need to contribute to the well-being of others. I think that sometimes suffering can lead us to an understanding and a way of finding meaning in service.

That’s beautiful. That resonates with me. Karen, your ability to harness this transformative power of mediumship to bring healing, comfort, and inspiration during life’s most challenging moments from all that you’re doing it’s truly extraordinary. I think you’re amazing.

It’s a challenging world. To go back to what we were talking about earlier about the skepticism and stuff, it’s finding it very challenging to navigate at the moment between beliefs around mediumship, beliefs around extra-sensory perception, and beliefs around all of that, which certainly are not given much credence by academia. On the other hand, to go to academia where they find all of that so grossly inferior.

Also, to be trying to take an element of education into this, to try to find this middle way. Which is why I love the work, you were asking me about consciousness earlier. I love the work, and I love listening to people like Rupert Sheldrake and David Chalmers and Dean Radin, and so many of these people who are really taking the time to give us some serious study and serious consideration. Just dismissing it. It’s a very challenging road to walk. I’m finding it myself.

It seems like it’s a new frontier in a way. It’s an old front. It’s something that we found throughout history reference to and all, but we have a new, more conscious frontier, I think, going on now.

I guess, has changed, and change is just you, you’re buttressed between one institution here and another institution there, and you’re trying to do something different that’s far more contemporary, just trying to evolve and elevate. I think that mediumship is only as small as us. The spirit world has infinite capacity.

I feel that if we can open our minds, educate ourselves, inform ourselves to the possibilities, and to being open to experimentation and to be opening to the work that’s being done in these other fields that become a critical mass of evolution and elevation to hopefully, ultimately, bring mediumship into something that is much bigger than it currently is because the capacity is certainly there in the spirit world but the capacity is within us but we have to recognise them.

I cannot think of a better closing for this interview than just to leave it at what you just said. Is there anything else you want to add before we bid each other adieu?

No.

That is beautiful. It’s just a perfect ending. I just want to tell you what a pleasure it is to once again have you on the show. This has been a profoundly enlightening conversation for anyone who is here reading. I think it’s beautiful. Thank you again, Karen. May light continue to shine on your path, truly from my heart.

Guest Links:

• Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy’s Website
• Connect with Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy on YouTube
• Connect with Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy on Facebook
• Connect with Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy on Instagram
• Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy’s books:
  • The Other Irish
  • Till Death Don’t Us Part on Amazon
  • Till Death Don’t Us Part on Bookshop

• Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy’s course: Love After Life

About Karen Frances McCarthy

Karen Frances McCarthy, PhD, CSNU, is an award-holding medium Spiritualist medium and best-selling author whose work bridges the realms of spirituality, literature, and culture. She is a passionate advocate for spiritual exploration, wisdom, and growth, she combines in-depth research and study with the evidence-based style of Spiritualism and the mindfulness of her Zen practice. Her mediumship is further enriched by the lyrical storytelling tradition of her Irish heritage to offer powerful, heart-centered communication.

Dr McCarthy’s books have touched hearts and minds across the world. Her best-selling memoir, Till Death Don’t Us Part (White Crow Books, 2020), delves into existential questions and the profound journey of awakening to continued consciousness following her fiancé’s passing.

Her new book The Re-enchanted Ghost in Contemporary American Spectral is to be published by Routledge Publishing in 2026. It examines the cultural and emotional dimensions of consciousness and spirituality. This innovative research complements her academic teaching and writing, blending intellectual rigor with spiritual depth, and enhancing her contributions to contemporary spiritual thought.

As a medium, Dr McCarthy’s underwent intensive training at the world-renowned Arthur Findlay College in England, earning three Certificates of Recognition from the Spiritualist National Union in mediumship, healing, and public speaking. She also holds a diploma in grief and bereavement counseling from the Institute of Counselling in Scotland, reflecting her compassionate and evidence-based approach to her practice.

In addition to her private practice in Dublin and New York, she shares her insights as an educator. She teaches courses at The Shift Network, the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, the Edgar Cayce Center, and the One Spirit Learning Alliance, Humanity’s Team, and she is set to lead a course on the American ghost story at New York University this year.

Karen’s holistic approach to spirituality, literature, and culture continues to inspire those seeking to expand their understanding of consciousness and find deeper meaning in life’s emotional and spiritual dimensions.

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