Woman Of Science Embraces Super Natural Connection To Her Husband

This season of 2 Lives is sponsored by the Women’s Foundation for the State of Arizona. Learn more at womengiving.org.

Michelle Grua is a woman of science. As a pediatric anesthesiologist, for many years she believed only what she could see, hear, and touch. She trusted data and research. 

So when she met the love of her life and felt what she could only describe as a zing in her belly, it threw her off.

Like when the teacher calls on you and your stomach lurches and you get that... And I was like, ‘What was that?’ That was weird. 

Michelle met Kenton on a river trip in the Grand Canyon. He was the trip leader. She was so enamored with the experience she came back and did another trip. And as fate would have it Kenton was the leader on that trip as well.

It just felt like when you when you bring two magnets together, when the polarities are right and you get them so close together and then there's like they just snap together like you can't do anything about. It kind of felt like that.

Michelle says Kenton felt familiar.

When you really know someone and they make a statement to you, you don't just understand the words they say. You understand all the layers of the statement. And a lot of that is based on history and familiarity. But with Kenton, it was just it was immediate. Like I just I got him and he got me. And it just felt like a returning to, a familiar place that I had been before.

Years later she figured out a scientific explanation for it.

Part of it, I do think, is is actual resonance, like actual vibrational frequency. I really would love to see if there's a way to figure out like what humans baseline, what what your frequency is. Right. Because when you say somebody resonates with you, it means that that, that their frequency. Or if you talk about music or if you have a resonant note, then those notes occur naturally occurring intervals that are harmonically related to each other. And so I think the same thing happens with humans.

This is a story about how Michelle and Kenton have been deeply tuned in to one another in ways that she hasn’t always known – or been able to explain.  

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Michelle was raised in Atlanta in the 1960s. She describes herself as a tomboy.  If her mom wanted Michelle to wear a dress… 

I’d stomp my foot and say, ‘I’m not wearing nothin pretty.’ 

She loved climbing trees, riding her bike, and playing in the creek by her house. 

At a young age Michelle’s older brother became her tormentor. 

I had this little vanity set when I was like, I don't know, four or five, six, something like that and I used to come in for my bath every night and sit down, like, play and sit in that chair and play in front of a mirror or whatever… my mom was a seamstress and he took all of the, all of her sewing needles out of her pincushion and stuck them through the seat of my chair and sat in my closet with the door cracked so that he could wait and watch the moment that I came and sat down on all of those pins.

The abuse that went beyond typical sibling rivalry – lasted well into high school. So later in life when it came time to choose a career path, Michelle knew she wanted to work in medicine and she knew she wanted to work with kids. 

I'm drawn to children for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it's their whimsy and their playfulness and their magical thinking…But the other aspect of it is that you're the protector, right? You're the yes, the parents are also the advocates, but you, as the medical person, are the advocate for that child and wanting to keep them safe and and take care of them. And that that's a huge draw for me. I think a lot of that kind of subconsciously stems from my childhood…A lot of times as adults, we wind up seeking out situations where we can heal ourselves through through our actions, where we're basically tending to our inner child.

In 1998 Michelle was living in Atlanta with her husband and three kids they had adopted. In November of that year Michelle and her husband decided to go on a Grand Canyon river trip. That’s where she met Kenton Grua who went by Factor.

He was the trip leader, and I didn't really notice him. I was there with my husband and I wasn't looking for anybody. He was married. He wasn't looking for anybody. 

At first she thought him a bit odd.

He was bald and beardless at the time… he was very friendly and he was very kind and very solicitous of all the passengers. But I just remember thinking like, ‘who names their kid Factor?’ 

Turns out Factor was a nickname. Most people in the Grand Canyon community have heard of Kenton ‘Factor’ Grua. At 26 he became the first non-native person on record to hike the length of the Grand Canyon. He walked 600 miles in a little over a month. Then a few years later Factor and two other men completed the fastest river expedition to date. 

He got that name from his partners that work down on the river. The other river guides. Mostly out of exasperation, I think, because he was always in his own little world. And, you know If he was the leader and he said, okay, we're pushing off at 9 a.m. to start rowing our boats everybody would scurry around to get ready. And at 9:00 in the morning you'd look over and he'd have everything from all of his hatches out on the deck of his boat, and he'd be repacking his boat because it wasn't quite trim. He was this person who was just always really focused on improving the world around him, like whether it was… organizing all the river guides into an organization called Grand Canyon River Guides, so that they could be advocates and stewards of the Grand Canyon and of the Colorado River, or looking at, you know, operational things that they did at the company he worked at to see about, you know, try to invent better ways for flipping a boat in midstream.  

Michelle describes him as elf-like at five foot seven – extremely wiry and athletic …and at times silly.

When he was on river trips. He had these red curly toed shoes and these pointy ears like Mr. Spock, and he would smear his face with green face paint and put on a little, you know, like like the Peter Pan Archer's kind of hat, you know, little green felt hat like an elf. And he would hide in the rocks at Elves Chasm. And it wasn't like, ‘hey, look at me, everybody pay attention to me.’ He would just perch up on the rocks and you wouldn't say anything to anybody, and he would just wait for people to notice him. And and when. They would notice him…It was like, wouldn't it be cool if there really were elves? Like, How do you know there's not? And in fact, on his business card, his business card says Factor: Boatman, Minister, Elf. 

Kenton would play a game on the river where he’d sneak up and pin a wooden clothespin on someone’s shirt without getting caught to see how long it would take before the person realized it.

By the end of day two nobody would let you walk behind them because they knew that you were going to hit them. And they're constantly like checking their clothes and feeling and they're, you know, just trying to make sure they don't have a pin on them. 

Michelle became enchanted with boating in the Grand Canyon so almost as soon as she got home to Atlanta, she signed up to do another river trip in October of 1998, this time by herself. When she hiked in to meet the group, there was Kenton.

And again, wasn't looking for anybody but was really unhappy at home. And by about day three or day four of that trip. I we both kind of had this sense of, ‘Oh. There you are. I've been looking for you. I didn't. I didn't know I was, but I had been.’ 

They felt drawn to each other … literally.

Finding opportunities to, you know, like sit down on the same bucket lines or. Be in line when you're hiking, be in front or behind the other person so you can get to know them, like kind of just positioning yourself that way. So it was pretty clear by the end of that trip, whatever seven days later, that that we had to make some major changes in our lives.

After a few more visits to Flagstaff, Arizona, where Kenton lived, both he and Michelle decided to divorce their spouses and be together. Michelle moved across the country, enrolled her kids in new schools, and took an anesthesiologist position at a Flagstaff practice. She wouldn’t get to work with kids, but this was a sacrifice she was willing to make to be with Kenton. 

And on March 25, 2000 Michelle and Kenton were married inside Desert View Watchtower overlooking the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. (Plenty of people get married at the park but you can’t just book the watchtower.)

I don't know how he did it. He can. He can sweet talk to anybody. 

Kenton immediately embraced the role of second father to Michelle’s kids. Michelle recalled one time when she brought the kids to meet him at the end of a river trip. They were trying to get them to go to sleep in the footwell of the boat…

It's hot outside, it's buggy, and the kids are not going to sleep. And it would be an easy opportunity to be frustrated. Instead of, you know, just going like lay down and be quiet, he just pulled out his guitar and started singing songs to them and, you know, took about ten or 15 minutes and they settled down and went to sleep. And it was just such a kind way to get them to go to sleep. And it was so intuitive.

A little over two years later Kenton and Michelle had fallen into their blissful routine together – between rivertrips and long hours at the hospital they were hiking and biking and raising three kids in the mountains of Flagstaff. And the newlywed stage wasn’t wearing off. 

Every morning he would I would kiss him goodbye in the kitchen and then he would follow me down to the garage and kiss me goodbye again before I got in the car. And then he would tell me to unroll my window and kiss me goodbye again. Like I'm like, ‘Okay, look, I really have to go. I'm going to be late.’ Every single morning it was like this. 

On the morning of August 25, 2002, before Kenton went for a mountain bike ride, Michelle was making pancakes for the kids.

Right in the middle of the chaos, he just he stepped in front of me and he set his coffee cup down on the counter and he spread his arms and he’s like, ‘can I just have a hug from my beautiful wife?’ And I was like, ‘yeah,’ And I'm so glad that he did, because that's my last memory of him alive. PAUSE

And and he kind of disappeared from the room and I finished doing whatever I was doing, and I realized a few minutes had passed, man, I want to go kiss him goodbye. And I went downstairs and his Grand Canyon River Guide's hat was on the counter and I was like, ‘oh he left. Shoot.’ 

Kenton was supposed to be back by one so Michelle could go for a ride with a friend. But one o’clock came and Kenton hadn’t arrived. Michelle’s friend had shown up ready to go biking.

But I wasn't really worried that he wasn't back by one because he was always on his own time. He was on Factor time. He was always late. And at 1:30, I'm like, ‘okay, well, now you're kind of late, you know, like what's going on?’ And still apologizing to her. And I was thinking, he probably ran into somebody that he knew. And they're probably standing on the trail talking and he's lost track of time. By 2:00 I was like, ‘yeah, maybe he had a flat tire.’ And we're kind of worrying about, well, I wonder where he is. I hope he has an extra tube. And by 2:30 I was like, ‘this is this is ridiculous.’

By then Michelle was concerned so she got in touch with the emergency room at the Flagstaff hospital where she worked.

And just said, ‘you know, hey, it's Dr. Grua. And do you guys, by any chance have a mountain biker there?’ Like, I was just thinking like maybe he crashed his bike, Maybe he is in the E.R. and he hasn't had a chance to call me and he's got a broken arm or whatever. And they put me on hold. And then they came back on the phone and they said, ‘yeah, we do have a mountain biker here but we haven't been able to identify him.’ And I was like, ‘okay, crap, I'm coming up there.’ 

Michelle immediately drove to the hospital, parked her car, and ran into the emergency department. She asked where they had taken the biker and someone pointed her to the trauma bay.

A nurse walked out as I was walking towards it and he just gave me that look that we all give each other where we kind of we make really brief eye contact, you give that kind of grimace, like tight lipped smile. And then you look down immediately. And I was like, well, whoever is in that room is dead. And so please let it be a big body on that stretcher. You know, just let it be a big body, because then I'll know that it's not Kenton when I walk in and just let it be a big body. And I walked in and it was a tiny body ... And I was like, Oh crap, this is not good. And they had the sheet over his face and and so lifted the sheet to look at his riding glove to look at the hand, because his hands were like one of my favorite things about him. And we had the same kind of riding gloves, and I knew if he had that riding glove on, I knew who it was. And I lifted the sheet and that's what I saw  was the riding glove. PAUSE

Later Michelle learned that while riding his bike, Kenton had a spontaneous aortic dissection …  essentially he’d torn the inner layer of his main artery, which stopped the blood flow to the rest of his body. And he died.

Friends from the O.R. were there, and they were like, Come on, let's. Let's take you some place quiet. Let's take you some place quiet. And I thought, my life is going to be fucking quiet from now on. I don't want to go some place quiet. I want to stay right here.

The days that followed were a blur of grief and attempting to comfort her kids. Michelle felt lost, angry, and distraught. She placed a picture of Kenton on her bedside table.

And it's just kind of the quintessential Kenton expression. It was just like his really sweet little smile that he always gave that was just, like, exudes love from his eyes. 

Kenton’s memorial service was held in an aspen grove at the foothills of Mount Humphries just outside Flagstaff.

I just had to like, get away from everybody and just go yell and scream. And so I just was like, I had a big, huge stick and I was just beating the shit out of this aspen tree, just like, raging, yelling, screaming as loud as I could. And then when I was kind of spent physically I just sat down and was crying. I raised my head up there is a fallen tree, didn't have any bark on any more. Just was like the gnarl of the wood. It was like an Escher drawing. Like his face just emerged from the markings in the tree. It was him in that wood. And it was exactly the same expression, but with just a little bit of sadness in his eyes. I very clearly could feel him saying like, ‘I love you so much. I, I know that you're hurting.’ But it was just like I had such benevolence and kindness in it, like. Almost like he was saying, like, ‘you don't have to be sad. Like, there's no reason to be sad.’ And and now, having moved so much further along from that initial moment, I'm like, ‘Oh, yeah, I get what you're trying to say to me.’ But at the moment I was like, ‘Well, of course I'm sad. Like, you're gone and, you know. And why? Why do you look so happy and so at peace?’ 

Michelle didn’t understand it then, but that became the first of many signs that Kenton wasn’t going anywhere. 

She took some time off but kept busy with her kids and major landscaping projects around her house.

… having never driven a backhoe my entire life, but just, like, convinced that I could do it. Every time I got into the backhoe, I literally felt like I was slipping into Kenton skin. Almost like, if I just slip into your skin, you're going to guide me, and I'll just. I'll know how to do this. You just got to go slow and pay attention. You got this. And I could just feel him with me. And and I was out of work for several months. And during that time, I spent. A Lot of time questioning, like, do I even go back to anesthesia? Do I want to go back to anesthesia? 

In the months that followed Michelle dealt with her grief in a variety of ways. She even sought out the insight of a psychic.

…as a scientist would do, I talked to mediums a lot … He says, ‘Oh, your beloved is here today. And he's he's showing me something really curious. He's showing me a big yellow bulldozer,’ and I’m like, ‘yeah, okay.’ And he said, ‘and the bulldozer is moving very quickly. It's it's clearing a path. It's clearing a very definite path for you. You're not driving the bulldozer. Your job is just to follow behind the bulldozer and trust that that it knows where it's taking you. You just need to follow along behind it because it's clearing a path for you.’ He could have said, you're in an airplane with no pilot. You're in a car with no steering wheel? No. You're following behind a big yellow bulldozer. It's clearing a path for you. Just trust it's going to take you where you need to go. 

So Michelle gave up on conventional ways of dealing with her grief and embraced another way of coping…

Finding meaning in the loss is what helped me the most. 

Years later on an especially rough day she called her favorite medium and he started talking before Michelle could even ask a question.

He says, ‘Oh, your beloved is here. And he's he's wearing a really curious outfit.’ And I’ve never met this man in person and he's never met Kenton. And he said he's wearing a really curious outfit. He's wearing an outfit that red on top and green on bottom. Does that mean anything to you? And I was like, ‘well, it reminds me of his elf costume.’ 

Not long after the session she was driving to the home of a woman who was helping Michelle finish a quilt for her daughter who was away at a wilderness therapy program as she was struggling with a serious mental illness.

I was really missing Kenton and I was coming up on my 52nd birthday and I was kind of having a pity party… And I was listening to him sing. I had a bunch of recordings of him singing. And and thinking. Like, you know, this life sucks… And I wish that I was there with you. And you know what? It probably doesn't even matter because I'm going to turn 52 in a couple of months and I'll probably die when I'm 52. And because that's just perfect. My mom did. You did. I'm going to die when I'm 52, blah, blah, blah. And as I'm driving and I'm listening to him sing, I'm not really paying attention to the cars that are going past me on the expressway, but I just happened to look up as this one car goes past and the tag says ELF 252. I'm like ELF 252 Like two people are going to die at 52. You're not dying when you're 52… 

Michelle came home and logged onto her computer to read a letter from her daughter who was away at wilderness therapy. Her daughter wrote the only good thing about the program is they got to sleep outside under the stars and that reminded her of going on river trips with Kenton. 

And she looks up at the stars and she she remembers him singing to her and that he always sang us this song. And then she wrote the selection from The Rising of the Moon. That was just exactly the selection that I had put on her quilt. I embroidered a few of the squares with some of her favorite poems or her favorite lyrics. And one of the squares has the last half of the verse and the first half of the chorus. So it's a weird thing to choose. It's not the whole verse or the whole chorus of the song that used to sing to them. By Kate Wolfe called ‘The Rising of the Moon.’ And the lines are: ‘I’ll keep you in my heart. Like the like they're crying of the loon. And I'll wonder how you are. The rising of the moon. And I watched you sail away. Somewhere where the river goes. Some love lasts forever. Just like the river flows.’ 

Years passed and Michelle continued to struggle with whether to stay in Flagstaff in a job where she wasn’t working with kids. With her own children now grown, she was open to exploring new places.

I was writing in my journal one night really excited about all these possibilities, but really not sure what I wanted to do. Like, do I want to try to stay in Flag or do I want to move? And and I that picture that's on my bedside table, I could just feel this current of energy, just like it was pulsing, you know, like he was trying to tell me something. So I finished writing, I put my journal away. I get up the next morning and I go to my closet to get my work shoes. And these are the shoes that I wear every day at work. I had them on all day, the day before. They live underneath a shelf that has nothing above it. I picked up my shoes and as I picked them up, I felt something fall out of one of the shoes and I heard it clatter to the floor. And I looked on my bathroom floor and there was this old weathered, very weathered wooden clothespin lying on my bathroom floor. And I’m like, ‘ok, you’re telling me, go to the fun thing because this is all a game to you. Go have fun.’

So Michelle made a few phone calls and got a job offer in Fresno working with kids as a pediatric anesthesiologist. So she packed up and moved to California…

And I brought the clothespin with me. 

It’s been difficult for Michelle to reconcile her science background with these supernatural experiences. So she turned to the thing she does trust – research and books. She read everything from science textbooks to “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” which explains how death turns out to be less of a crisis and more of an opportunity.

And it was the culmination of reading books that helped me find meaning in my loss. And reading scientific stuff that helped me wrap my head around how it is that we can die and further help me make sense of all these amazing interactions that I've had with him since he's died that are unequivocally Kenton putting his hand in. As somebody who makes her living in the world of data and science I think I have an explanation for it. I think I understand how it works. I have no proof of that. But just working with my own limited knowledge. I think I understand how that works, But. But at its very core, the first law of thermodynamics says you can neither make nor destroy energy. And that's all we are, is energy.

She’s spent a lot of time trying to figure out how mediums are able to tap into this energy… to pick up messages from those who have died.

I kind of look at them as radios, radio receivers and just like I can pick up the dog whistle and blow whistle and my dog's ears perk up. But nothing came out that I could hear. I feel like mediums have a different antenna than I do …You know when I look back at messages that I got 20 years ago that are just now coming to fruition…How did you know that at that time? How did you have that perspective from from where you are? And I, I think about it in terms of like I don't know if it's Einstein's general relativity or special relativity, but where he's talking about how if you take two clocks and you have one clock on earth, they're both at the same time, one is on Earth, one goes in a spaceship that travels at the speed of light for a year. And you bring that clock back to Earth. That clock will be at a slower time it will have measured less time gone by because of the speed at which it traveled... 

One thing that perplexed her was why wasn’t she able to connect with her mom after death, like she had been able to do with Kenton? Michelle says she feels like her mom doesn’t visit because she had learned all she needed from her. Whereas Kenton remains Michelle’s trusted guide. 

My experience with my mom when she died was that she just died and she was gone. And my experience with Kenton has not been that way. My experience with him, I mean, I've had these experiences with him over 20 years now, and he always shows up when I need him. Persistently and in very specific ways that are unique to him, like the clothespins. 

Put another way…Michelle can relate to the idea that she’ll see Kenton again in the afterlife …

I mean, I don't subscribe to any particular religion, but at its core, I think it's true because when my body dies, my energy is not going to cease to exist either. And just as I recognized him and his resonant frequency when we first met, when I meet him again, however that happens, I'll recognize him. I think that we do. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.