Skip to Main Content

My Son and the Afterlife

Conversations from the Other Side

LIST PRICE $13.99

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

Digital products purchased on SimonandSchuster.com must be read on the Simon & Schuster Books app. Learn more.

Get 25% off plus free shipping on orders of $40 or more with code GIFT25. (Terms apply)

Buy from Other Retailers

About The Book

Love knows no boundaries—not even death. An emotional journey through a mother’s grief to healing and a doctor’s skepticism to belief—discover the answers that changed one woman’s life forever, and may just change yours, too.

Are you not sure of what awaits you after death? Dr. Elisa Medhus wasn’t either, having never believed in life after death. As an accomplished physician, she placed her faith in science. All of those beliefs changed after her son Erik took his own life and then reached out to her from the other side.

Intimate, heartbreaking, and illuminating, this is an incredible journey from grief and skepticism to healing and belief in the afterlife. Based on Medhus’s wildly popular blog, Channeling Erik, My Son and the Afterlife is a story that is as painful as it is uplifting—depicting a mother’s healing journey as she discovers that Erik is still with her.

Erik speaks from the other side with candor, wisdom, and depth as he describes his own experiences and provides new answers about the nature of souls, death, and the afterlife—answers that have the potential to change our lives forever.

*Content warning: Please note that there is some explicit language present in this book

About The Author

Photograph by AlvinGee.com

Elisa Medhus, MD, is a physician and mother of five who has practiced internal medicine for more than thirty years. She is the author of three award-winning parenting books, including Raising Children Who Think for Themselves and Hearing Is Believing, and has lectured on parenting for schools, parent groups, and corporations. After the death of her twenty-year-old son Erik, Dr. Medhus began journaling her grief in her blog ChannelingErik.com and wrote the successful book My Son and the Afterlife, helping her son in telling his story directly from the afterlife in his memoir from beyond, My Life after Death. She lives in Houston, Texas.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words (October 1, 2013)
  • Length: 304 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781476744711

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

"Dr. Elisa Medhus offers a heartfelt, deeply moving story that invites readers to question their own beliefs of love, loss, and the afterlife."

– Eben Alexander, MD, author of the NY Times bestseller Proof of Heaven

“Elisa’s journey has been amazing and she is well-qualified to share her knowledge with both the medical community and the grief community. She has the credentials to bridge the gap that often exists between these two groups, and by doing so, she is breaking new ground and leading the way for many of us working in the field of bereavement, hospice care, and consciousness.”

– Terri Daniel, author, educator, end-of-life advisor, interfaith chaplaincy, and founder/director of the Afterlife Education Foundation and the Annual Afterlife Awareness Conference

My Son and the Afterlife contains the clearest, most informative answers to questions about what happens after a person passes into the afterlife that I have read in one book. The topics explored a range from very human, personal issues such as who greets the person after their passing to insightful descriptions of the nature of consciousness and reality.”

– R. Craig Hogan, PhD, author of Your Eternal Self

“Erik's messages are poignant, profound, informative, and entertaining, and above all give us that assurance that we all long for—that there is life beyond death, and that all is well there. Erik’s words help our minds to understand, but most of all he helps our hearts to heal and our joy to soar. Thank you, Erik."

– Christine Elder, author of Broken Blessings

My Son and the Afterlife by Elisa Medhus, MD is a book that will tug at your heart strings, make you laugh, cry, and more importantly, consider possibilities that you had probably never thought about before. This book, a record of the author’s conversations with her recently deceased son, Erik, is as real, authentic, and straightforward as it gets. Dr. Medhus and her son Erik, are both in a state of flux struggling to make sense of new perspectives that were thrust upon them as a result of Erik’s suicide. Both are determined to fully explore and share their newfound awareness as they provide much needed healing for each other, find new meaning and significance in the love that binds them, and invite you to come along on their poignant journey to the other side of death.”

– Thomas Campbell, physicist and author of My Big TOE (Theory of Everything)

“Raised by atheist parents, Elisa Medhus, MD. believed only in a material reality—until her mind was jarred open by the excruciating loss of her son, Erik. Following his death she began to receive anomalous communications matching with Erik’s distinctive personality. Always direct and sometimes crude, the insightful messages forever changed Elisa’s worldview. I was touched by the continuing dialog between mother and son, finding it both comforting and enlightening. Don’t be surprised if Elisa’s story alters your ideas about the nature of reality too.”

– Mark Ireland, author of Soul Shift

“The hide-bound reductionist materialism of 19th and early 20th century science is crumbling under new discoveries and their relevance to what sensitive people through the ages have known all along. Dr. Medhus meticulously guides us through her own epiphany as she, a medical doctor, an exploring mind, and suddenly a re-focused mother finds the intensely personal strength to understand her son's suicide and its larger meaning in the nature of which we are all part, and the courageous professional strength to bring her realizations to us. While this book is obviously an invaluable resource for theologians and physicists, and ethicists and counselors, it is truly a touchstone for all of us who feel and who seek to understand the transcendental nature of the human condition.”

– Marco M. Pardi, MA, DPS, anthropologist and thanatologist

“Dr. Elisa Medhus has approached her conversations with her son Erik in a courageous and systematic way, using all the analytical skills of a trained scientist. She asks Erik the hard questions that any parent who has lost a child would want answers to, and more. Erik answers all these questions with his own characteristic laid-back directness in a no-nonsense way that brings our understanding of the afterlife into the twenty-first century. This is a remarkable book written by remarkable people, which will bring hope and comfort to the bereaved and change many lives for the better.”

– Dr. Victor Zammit, author of A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: Elisa Medhus M.D.