Over the past decade, Nancy Duval has experienced a great deal of personal loss.
First, her father passed away in 2013, then her husband died unexpectedly in 2015 and finally her sister Rachel died in a head-on collision in 2019.
So the Penetanguishene woman combined her personal experiences dealing with heavy loss with her communications with the spirit world as a medium to write a book called Whispers from Beyond.
“I’ve lost a number of important people in my life,” says Duval, who adds her sister Rachel’s spirit “strongly came through” after her sudden death.
At first, Duval says she wasn’t overly keen to write a book, having written a couple of pages during COVID and eventually setting it aside. But she says a chance meeting with New York Times bestselling author Peggy McColl changed her mind.
“She said I should pursue it,” says Duval, whose warm and friendly personality easily makes one feel at ease.
From there, Duval says she was completely committed to the project, often writing for three or four hours a day.
“It took me about a month and a half to write,” says Duval, who grew up in Penetanguishene and attended St. Anne’s Catholic School and St. Theresa’s Catholic High School.
Described as a not “just a book,” Duval’s publishing company Hasmark Publishing International says Whispers from Beyond is “an invitation to explore the uncharted territories of the heart, mind and destinations that spirit connections can take us.”
While reading the soft-cover book what sticks out most is how easily and understandable Duval’s words are as she takes one on an insightful journey through the grief she’s faced. There’s also a sense of hope and how one can be resilient even while coming out of the most difficult times.
Duval, who had an up-and-down relationship with her father over the years, says they were in a good place when he died in 2013 of liver cancer.
“I started getting signs from him,” says Duval, who describes one such incident in the book when his voice from beyond helped her avoid a major car accident.
From there, her first husband and “love of my life” Bob passed away in 2015 after initially coming down with food poisoning. They had met when Duval, now 53, was 22 and living in Toronto.
“We pinky swore that we would never leave each other,” Duval writes in her book. They were together for 24 years and Duval notes that she eventually “started getting signs from him.”
When Rachel died and she continued to hear the voices of those who had passed, Duval says she felt like she was having a mental breakdown.
That’s when she was eventually put in touch with a medium in Burlington who helped her on her journey.
“It’s ever-evolving. The spirit communicates differently as you evolve,” Duval explains. "My spirit family is in the book. I feel like they've been guiding me and helping me."
She says there are a great deal of misconceptions about mediums, thanks in large part to the often theatrical performances created by Hollywood and those who might watch someone like Theresa Caputo do a reading.
“I’m not discrediting them, but it’s like a show,” Duval says. “I’ve never gone up to people on the street and said, ‘you know, I’m sensing something from you.’”
Since its release, the book has garnered positive reviews on Amazon and placed as the number one bestseller in the ‘sociology and death’ along with the ‘angels’ category and even surpassed The Secret in the ‘mental and spiritual healing’ category.
Duval, who with Bob had a son named Roman, eventually remarried, this time to her “high-school sweetheart” Claude Duval.
Duval says her husband has been extremely supportive of her work and her decision to write the book as a way to help others experiencing grief.
“If one person reads this book and they understand that there’s more to this (life) after and it brings them comfort, that’s my greatest achievement," says Duval.
"I look at death so much differently. It's still very much around you. Where there is great grief, there was great love."
