What I Mean When I Say We Are All Connected

In Heaven Time, I wrote about coming back from my near-death experience in September 2010 with a belief I could barely explain. I felt connected to other people in a way that went beyond the familiar boundaries of my own life. I called that ONENESS.

But the part of my story I keep thinking about took place back at home. My husband told me that although we were in the same house, he missed me. He wanted his wife back. I cried. In the book, I said I missed him and missed myself.

I had returned with an extraordinary experience. The people closest to me were living with what my return meant for them. I wanted to explain what had happened to me, but their experience of my return mattered too.

That contradiction is where I want to begin. I can believe we are connected and still have difficulty reaching the person beside me.

What I Brought Home, and What I Couldn't Explain

I remember being aware without the usual sense of having a body. I remember peace and familiarity, and I remember my father, who had died in 2008. Those are my memories. Their meaning is something I have spent years trying to understand.

I had questions about my own experience. In Heaven Time, I acknowledged that I was part skeptic, despite having a deeply spiritual point of view. I wasn’t asking readers to believe something I had struggled to believe myself.

I also wrote about the less comfortable part of surviving: I was not happy to be back. That is not the tidy ending people might expect from someone who describes peace during a near-death experience. I could feel grateful for people I loved and still feel lost in the life I had returned to.

A hospital corridor, representing the medical setting of Lorri’s near-death experience rather than an image of the actual event. Photo by Mitrey on Pixabay.

I have also written about the longer aftermath of coming home, which began after the medical emergency was over.

The ordinary world hadn’t stopped. Work and family responsibilities remained. Explaining the experience was difficult enough; explaining how it had changed me was harder.

ONENESS is my spiritual interpretation of what I remember, not proof of what happens after death. I cannot demand that another person share it. And I cannot assume that believing it makes me easy to live with.

The Hardest Distance Was Sometimes at Home

In the chapter of Heaven Time where I questioned whether I was losing my mind, I described how unfamiliar ordinary life had begun to feel. I used an example most people would recognize: a television playing too loudly when the remote control is out of reach. Imagine being unable to turn the noise down. That was closer to the discomfort I was trying to describe than a grand spiritual explanation.

My husband was trying to reach me, too. When he said he missed his wife, I knew what he meant. I missed myself. My private experience had become a shared problem, but neither of us had the same view of it.

I had long been accustomed to working hard. At sixteen, I was going to school full time while working evening shifts at a department store. Later, years in real estate and business taught me to deal with decisions and practical problems. There is often a task you can complete or a question you can answer.

I couldn’t manage this relationship difficulty that way. The point was not to provide a solution before the other person finished speaking. I needed to hear what he was telling me, even when I didn’t know what to do with it.

That episode is specific to my life, but the difficulty isn’t. A person can go through something that changes how they see the world. The people who love them may be confused, frightened or simply unsure how to relate to them afterward. Being physically together doesn’t guarantee that they feel close.

Being Around People and Feeling Connected Are Different Things

The practical side of connection can be examined without having to agree with my spiritual beliefs.

The World Health Organization describes social connection in terms of relationships, the support they provide and the quality of those relationships. These are different questions. A person can have company and still feel lonely.

In its 2025 report, the WHO estimated that about one in six people worldwide had experienced loneliness, based on data covering 2014 through 2023. The statistic tells us loneliness is common, but it cannot tell us what one particular person is going through.

A review of 148 studies involving more than 300,000 participants also associated stronger social relationships with better survival outcomes during the studies’ follow-up periods. It does not prove that a particular friendship causes better health, or that staying in a harmful relationship is beneficial.

I think of that research as a useful distinction about ordinary life. It does not validate ONENESS as a spiritual belief. It does help explain why being known, heard and supported matters in its own right.

Connection Does Not Settle Every Relationship Decision

I do not believe that every relationship needs to last forever. Another person’s humanity matters even when the relationship has become difficult. It doesn’t follow that any behavior must be accepted or that trust can always be restored.

I am careful about making another person’s private story into a public example. The point I can make without doing that is straightforward: knowing that someone has worth does not mean I must keep them close. Understanding why someone did something isn’t the same as agreeing that it was acceptable.

Help also has limits. I can share what I’ve learned, offer information or listen to a difficult decision. I can’t live another person’s life on their behalf. The same is true when I need support: another person’s advice may be valuable without becoming the final authority over my choices.

Writing Heaven Time was itself an attempt to offer something without controlling what a reader thought. I told readers I wasn’t asking them to believe me. I could give an honest account and leave them free to understand it differently.

Sixteen years after my experience, the belief in connection remains personal and important to me. The limits of my knowledge remain real too. I still cannot explain everything I remember, or make every difficult human situation come out neatly. I want to be just as honest about those limits as I was about the experience that changed my life.