About – Amicus Mortis

Welcome to my blog, Amicus Mortis.

This blogsite had its birth in my doctoral research Ways of Being: The alchemy of bereavement and communique (University of Sydney, 2013), and draws heavily from my personal and professional interest in death and the afterlife. I utilise a social constructionist approach to research, qualitative transpersonal research methods and narrative analysis for meaning and theory construction.

As an adult I was bereaved several times, which also included becoming a relatively young widow. During this time I experienced the presence of those close to me who died ‘returning’ on numerous occasions, without provocation from myself. These unexpected and random other-worldly encounters led to my decision to undertake after-death contact research. Death had never been this personal and I wanted to demystify it as I did the after-death contact encounters I was experiencing.

My relationship with the afterlife began in my childhood and was precipitated by diverse experiences of what I term non-ordinary or other-worldly phenomena. These experiences taught me that death was simply a doorway which led to another kind of existence, to another ‘place’. These experiences, which have continued into my adult life, inform how I live in the world as an embodied being and how I understand ‘life’.

My prevailing philosophy is that the subjective experiences and understandings of the meaning of death, the dead and the afterlife evidence a changing and shifting theoretical and intellectual discourse. This discourse is helping to revision how we conceptualise what we are as human beings, what the purpose for our existence is, and why the dead, by their cross-cultural presence in our lives, offer all of us an invitation to consider life from a transpersonal or spiritual perspective.

I hope you enjoy rambling through the following pages, and please reach out to me if you feel the need.