ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at different ways of making sense of continuing bonds and seeks to address what role religious beliefs and particularly afterlife beliefs may play in ongoing relationships with deceased loved ones and specifically in how anomalous or extraordinary experiences of the deceased are perceived and made sense of. Here a perspective on grief was taken that marked a shift from viewing relating to the dead as prohibited or evil to a view that relating to the dead is pathological. E. R. Benore and C. L. Park have suggested that experiences such as sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased may have a facilitative function in post-loss meaning-making. Sense of presence experiences seem to involve an awareness of or a relationship with a transcendent reality, i.e. a reality beyond ordinary experience.
