Season 2 Episode 1: Cycling Through Miracles: Kathy Loveless' Inspirational Path (Part 1)
Haley Hatch Freeman and Misty Smith launch season two of Latter-day Miracles by welcoming speaker and author Kathy Loveless, who shares experiences she describes as communications from the other side and urges listeners to record their stories and listen for divine guidance. Kathy recounts silently wishing to thank the surgeon who removed her left lung and then unexpectedly meeting the surgeon’s wife two days later. She describes joining the LDS Church as a child despite her parents’ opposition, building a speaking career, and receiving a prompting to start bicycling that quickly relieved severe plantar fasciitis. Kathy then details her stage four terminal lung cancer diagnosis, the removal of her entire left lung, and her recovery through incremental training that led to cycling from Austria to Germany. She also shares how she was led to meet Kim Reeves and how, after her husband Scott died of colon cancer, Kim reported Scott appeared to her with a message of love—beginning further messages through 13 people, to be continued in part two.
Kathy Loveless
Kathy’s remarkable feat of cycling from Germany to Austria one year after having a lung removed because of stage 4 lung cancer.
Kathy and her husband Scott Loveless, who passed away from colon cancer.
Contact Our Guest
Kathy Loveless email: kathy@lovelessenterprises.com
Transcript
Welcome to Latter-day Miracles, where we share true stories of angels and marvels. I'm Haley Hatch Freeman. And I'm Misty Smith. Sit back, open your heart, and prepare to be inspired
[00:00:14] Haley Feeman: Welcome to Latter-day Miracles. We're so excited that we're starting our second season with you guys, and thank you for hanging in there with us to our second season. Um, today I'm really excited to bring Kathy Loveless. She's not only an awesome speaker and storyteller, but she's also my relative.
And so I'm just really excited to let you guys hear her and fall in love with her like I have, and everyone that m- meets her she's, like I said, not only my relative, but she's also been a mentor to me, and helped me with the whole, public speaking world, and she just means the world to me.
So I'll go ahead and let Misty read her bio, and then we'll turn the time over to Kathy.
[00:00:59] Misty Smith: Okay. All right. Kathy Loveless. After experiencing a lifetime of communications from the other side, Kathy Loveless captured many of these stories in her book, Cycling to Heaven. Whether hearing a voice of comfort following a head-on car crash in which her head went through the windshield, or having 13 different people share messages from her deceased husband, she has a wide range of stories to share that will encourage everyone to understand these encounters are real.
Kathy is an international professional speaker, author, and 36-year member of the National Speakers Association, including serving twice as president of the Mountain West Chapter, and for whom the Loveless Award is named. She has spoken throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, New Zealand, and the US to such clients as the CIA, US Departments of Defense and Justice, IBM, AT&T, and DuPont.
Her first paid speaking engagements came at age 19, when she was Miss Utah for Miss America. Later, she began her career in Washington, D.C. for the US Department of the Interior as editor of the National Magazine on Water and Power Resources, Reclamation Era. Later, she managed a 17-state program on citizen participation in government decision-making in Denver for the Bureau of Reclamation, and later became the regional public affairs officer for a seven-state region headquartered in Salt Lake City.
She has been vice president of an investment banking firm and marketing director for a national independent en- energy corporation. She created Loveless Enterprises, Inc. in 1990, and continues to serve as its CEO. An avid international cyclist and skier, Kathy is a mother of two daughters, grandmother to nine grandchildren, and great-grandmother to a baby girl.
You have quite the resume here and a background. I'm excited to get to know you some more and to be able to speak to you.
[00:03:21] Kathy Loveless: Well, thank you. It's my honor to be here. I have had a life of amazing experiences, and only when you start writing them down and then talking about them, and then document them in a script for a book, do you really appreciate just how massive and extensive they can be.
So, one of the things I'm going to share with your listeners is how important it is to record your stories. Um, start writing these things down because none of us has a perfect memory, and there are powerful, powerful stories in our lives. And I want to stress to your listeners that everyone has some stories, and everyone has something special about him or her.
And I'm just gonna share with you a few of these and kinda give you an idea of how I got started in all of this, and also how ongoing it is. And I'm gonna start with a story that happened just a little over a year ago. It was a Wednesday. I had the thought, I did not write it down, and I did not speak it to anyone.
The thought was, "I wish I could find the surgeon who cut out my left lung. Because of his expertise and Heavenly Father's will, I'm now still alive 17 years after being diagnosed with stage four terminal lung cancer." Wow. Like I said, I did not say that to anyone, and I didn't write it down. That was on a Wednesday.
On a Friday, I'm at a meeting, and it's in the evening, downtown Salt Lake. Afterwards, somebody I knew, not too well, but sorta knew, came up to me after the meeting and said, "Kathy, we're all going to the Dodo restaurant just to get a little snack. Do you wanna join us?" Kathy thinks, "10 o'clock news or go meet new people at the Dodo restaurant?"
"I'll go meet new people." Yeah. So, I drove to the Dodo restaurant. The friend who had asked me to come was sitting to my left. There was a couple in front of me and another couple to my side. I looked at the woman in front of me and I said, "Tell me your name." "Shirley Anne Collins." "Is this your husband?" "No, this is my brother.
My husband is a surgeon."
[00:05:54] Misty Smith: Oh. "
[00:05:57] Kathy Loveless: What did you say your name was?" "Shirley Anne Collins." What is your husband's name? Michael Collins, the very man I had been wishing I could see two days prior.
[00:06:12] Misty Smith: Wow.
[00:06:12] Kathy Loveless: She la- she later told me she didn't know what she said, 'cause I looked so stunned. I said, "Shirley Ann, is Michael still alive?"
"Yes, but he's retired now, and he wasn't feeling good enough to come tonight." I said, "Shirley Ann, will you please tell your darling husband how grateful I am to him? Because of his expertise and Heavenly Father's will, I'm still alive, 17 years out of stage four terminal lung cancer."
[00:06:43] Haley Feeman: Wow.
[00:06:44] Kathy Loveless: What happened next was equally as jaw-dropping, but I'm gonna save that story for part two of this episode.
Okay. What I'm gonna tell you is a little background of how I came to be somebody with lung cancer. Let me just tell you a little bit about my background. I was raised in the Avenues, born into the area in the Avenues, and raised there for a while and then moved south. Went to the H- the Hillcrest, the first graduating four-year class of Hillcrest High School.
And, um, people automatically assume, well, Kathy must have been born into a great LDS family. Well, my parents were members of the church at some point, but they had become disillusioned for reasons I never was certain, and they really held it in great disdain. I was never allowed to go to church as a little girl and, um, it wasn't just, "You can't go to church," it was, "Blankety blank that church."
It was a lot of very, um, anti-LDS l- language in my home. But for some reason, as a little tiny girl, I happened to see a picture of the Savior, and I remember vividly still, He was sitting in Gethsemane and, and the picture was in blues and greens and it was beautiful, and I knew Him. I knew Him. And then I saw a picture of Him as a resurrected being, and I knew Him, and I loved Him, and I pleaded with my mom and dad to please let me join the church.
"You're not joining that blankety blank church," was the response. But by the time I was eight, I'd learned how to flirt with my daddy. "Please, Daddy." "I'm not letting you join that church." Now, I don't know how I actually was able to get to a baptismal font, but after I had charmed him enough, he allowed me to get baptized.
Now, in those days, you got confirmed with the gift of the Holy Ghost at a church on Sunday, and that church was way far away and I needed a ride. "Daddy- ...
[00:09:10] Misty Smith: please,
[00:09:11] Kathy Loveless: can I have a ride?" "I'm not going to that blankety blank church." "But Daddy, I need to go there." Finally, he said, "All right, but I'm not going into the church."
So this little girl, dressed, and I still remember it vividly, dressed in a, um, yellow dotted Swiss dress, went into the back of the chapel. When they called my name, I went up to the front, got blessed with the gift of the Holy Ghost, turned around and looked and smiled at everybody, and I know they were thinking, "Oh, that little girl's gonna go sit with her family."
And instead, I just walked all the way back out the back of the church because my dad was waiting for me. But that wasn't the end of it. I had lots of rules. Now, who does this? My parents had a rule. I could not go to church on Sunday unless my homework was done.
[00:10:06] Misty Smith: That's interesting.
[00:10:07] Kathy Loveless: Well, I'm no dummy. I know how I'm gonna get to go to church.
I got my homework done. And as you could imagine what happens to the little girl who's always got her homework done, she starts getting straight As, and then she gets awards and trophies and everything, and scholarships, and recommended for this and that. And they're both going, "Yeah, but she goes to that church."
When I was in high school, they would not let me go to seminary because that would be a wasted class period. And I couldn't go to the morning seminary because then they would have to take their turn driving, and they were not gonna do that. So I never went to seminary. But I also listened to the Savior, His teachings and the teachings of the LDS church, which were to love thy father and mother, and I did.
I loved them. And I put their attitude toward my love for this gospel in a box, and I just put the box over there and then I dealt with them without stewing about that. And as a result, we never fought. I got along with them beautifully, and I loved my parents deeply. So fast-forward now, I had nine scholarships at the University of Utah and, um, one of the things that the LDS church started its little children doing, and that is, back then they called them two-and-a-half minute talks.
And they'd come in to try and get somebody to be a speaker at sacrament meeting and everybody else is going like this and- ... I'm going, "That sounds fun," 'cause I'm the crazy one. And so I realized this is so fun. And then one thing led to another and I ended up a- at Hillcrest, um, debating and the lead in the school play and all kinds of that.
And then I go to the University of Utah and I'm on the debate team and, and just one thing after a l- another led me down the path towards speaking, but I certainly didn't know one could make a, a career of it. But what I'd like to share with you is that ultimately that merged into an international speaking career.
And I started my own business in 1990, and right away because I had at that point contacts all over the country, I started speaking literally all over the world.
Now, not only was I speaking internationally, but I had started bicycling and I'd started skiing internationally. And here's something that happened. As I've indicated in one of the messages I want your listeners to understand, the Lord, Spirit, Heavenly Father are talking to us. They are there all the time.
The key is, are you listening?
[00:13:08] Haley Freeman (2): Absolutely
[00:13:09] Kathy Loveless: So I have been now speaking all over the world, and then I got plantar fasciitis. Plantar fasciitis is a messed up foot on the bottom of your foot. And for me, it became so painful that I couldn't stand. I went to three different podiatrists. I had all kinds of procedures, injections, and procedures that were very expensive, not covered by insurance, and did not work I came to the conclusion I'm gonna have to give up my speaking.
I can't stand on stage. I went to bed one night and I got a piece of inspiration, and that inspiration said, "Start bicycling."
[00:13:59] Misty Smith: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:59] Kathy Loveless: I had never, I hadn't been on a bicycle since I was a little girl. But one thing I've learned is when I get that prompting, I act on it. I don't ever question, I just act on it.
The very next day, a friend of mine who was also a speaker, she'd been on the Today Show and Johnny Carson, and she was very, very successful, was knocking at my front door. And she said, "Kathy, I think I need to start bicycling."
[00:14:32] Misty Smith: No way.
[00:14:33] Kathy Loveless: That's so- I said, "Me too." I didn't even own a bicycle. So I went down to Costco and I got me $150 bicycle.
Good for you. That tells you, that tells you the kind of bicycle I started on. But what I've learned is it's not the kind of bicycle, it's the kind of alarm clock you've got.
[00:14:56] Misty Smith: Yes.
[00:14:57] Kathy Loveless: And she and I were committed enough that we said to each other, 'cause she was running her own speaking business, I was running mine, she said, "Let's meet every morning at 6:00 somewhere along I-15, and we'll cycle for three hours, and then we'll go back and run our businesses."
And we of course met at McDonald's, 'cause you gotta have a little bit of- Oh. ... juicy stuff, something yummy. And we started what I called the summer of 57 vacations. I came to learn that there are things you can see on a bicycle that walking is too slow to notice and driving in a car is too fast. It was fabulous.
But here's the amazing thing. One week of bicycling, my plantar fasciitis was gone. Wow. I could not believe it.
[00:15:49] Haley Feeman: One week.
[00:15:50] Kathy Loveless: One week. And what was so amazing is that it truly opened up a whole new world for me and, and I've never been a jock. I grew up in the era where my mother, for example, did not want me even to ski.
She said, "Oh honey, just go sit in the lodge and look pretty." 'Cause sh- 'cause girls don't ski. Girls don't, there was no sports for women at all. The Title IX had never been passed. In gym we went like this, that's about all we did in gym. Yeah. And because that's what girls do.
[00:16:25] Misty Smith: Oh.
[00:16:26] Kathy Loveless: So, um, I'm now just ex- l- exploring this thing called bicycling, and I'm falling in love with it.
What I didn't realize then, and it took many years later, I believe Heavenly Father was getting me ready for one of the next challenges of my life, and that was to get lung cancer. Now, because I was also always a faithful member of our gospel, I had never smoked, I'd never drank, I never did any naughty things.
So I'd never smoked. I'm now cycling, speaking worldwide, and I had been all over Europe. I'm cycling the most beautiful Loire Valley of France. And my girlfriend and I are at the head of the pack, and we're the only two grandmas on the trip. That tells you how well we're doing.
[00:17:24] Misty Smith: Hey.
[00:17:24] Kathy Loveless: We're having a great time.
And I come home and I have this pain in my chest. Well, we modern women, this is what we do. I called my husband, who was an attorney at the law firm of Parr Brown Gee and Loveless. And I said, "Sweetie, I think I'm having a heart attack. I'm going to drive myself to the emergency room." Oh. "I will see you for dinner later today."
[00:17:47] Misty Smith: Oh my gosh.
[00:17:49] Kathy Loveless: I hung up the phone, drove myself to the emergency room, and they were awesome. They were all over me for the next five hours of tests. At the conclusion of those tests, they came in and they said, "Kathy, there's nothing wrong with your heart, but you have a mass in your lung." I knew that was nothing serious because I'd never smoked, and I thought, "Oh, it's probably scar tissue from when I had pneumonia many, many years ago."
It was not a big deal. I knew that Within a matter of days, I'm being wheeled in, and the surgeon is standing next to me, and he says, "We're gonna probably have to take part of your lung out." And I said to him , "Excuse me, sir. Um, can I still bicycle with one lung?"
[00:18:40] Misty Smith: Yeah.
[00:18:42] Kathy Loveless: My, my interpretation jokingly is he got a little annoyed with me.
He said, "You'll be alive." In other words, bicycling, who cares? You're gonna be alive. Right. Uh-huh. So he went in, and after the surgery, he came out and said, "It was far worse than we expected. We had to take out the entire left lung." They took out a rib and lymph nodes. And what's remarkable about losing a lung is it's not like losing one half of your energy.
It's like losing 90%. Because if you think about, you need one lung just to oxygenate, your organs, then you need the other lung just to put one foot slowly in front of the other, let alone bicycle or run or anything. It took me months of literally being in bed on oxygen, just barely trying to survive and stay alive.
But, uh, Kathy's kinda determined that we're not gonna let things hold us back. And so I said, "All right, I've gotta get up." So I would get out of bed, I would go shower, and I'd put clothes on 'cause I'm going back to my office to work. And then as I would walk toward the door, I'd realize, "I am so weak. I can't do a thing."
And I'd go back to bed, and that was my life for many, many months. Then I got the idea, "This is not going to defeat me." So I went down to the gym, little gym in my basement, and there was a stationary bicycle, and I said, "Okay. Can I do one rotation on that bike?"
Can I do two rotations?
So I challenged myself day after day to do just a little bit more, taking deep breaths a little bit more. And within one year, I bicycled from Austria to Germany along the Danube River.
[00:20:54] Haley Feeman: wow
[00:20:54] Misty Smith: Good job. That's a big thing.
[00:20:57] Kathy Loveless: I'm telling you, losing a lung has some other very strange aspects to it. So if you take out a whole lung, the rest of your organs go, "Yay, there's more room in here for us to stretch and move around."
My heart literally moved over to this side. I jokingly say I have to pledge allegiance like this- ... 'cause it moved over. 'Cause now there's so much room. And I, for a long time, I couldn't sleep on this side because my heart would pound into the mattress and keep me awake all night long. Wow.
[00:21:31] Misty Smith: That
[00:21:32] Kathy Loveless: is amazing.
Um, there are other f- strange things. I remember going to... I have a son-in-law who's become a radiologist, and he looked at my X-ray, and he was just stunned because I kept pushing the remaining lung with bicycling and everything, and it, guess what it does? It expands. So my remaining lung expanded past where it was into the other side.
So I've got this one bulging, one lung inside, and it was fascinating to a radiologist to see how weird all of this is.
[00:22:10] Misty Smith: I love this, Kathy. I, I just have to mention, I don't know if you know my story at all, but I had, I had lung problems with, uh, COVID, and after I came out of it, I, I was determined to run.
That was my thing is I wanted to run. And I, I ran a lot before, but I wanted to run a half-marathon at that point. That was my goal, half-marathon. And it was the same kind of thing, just I couldn't even climb up the stairs. My husband had to carry me up. It was so difficult to even walk. And I mean, I didn't lose a lung, but my lungs were so gone.
They were completely scarred up. They looked like chewed-up pieces of meat. And I remember looking at that X-ray and being so shocked at how, crazy it was just to see them all just used up that way. But it was the continuous building and the movement and every day putting a foot forward. And for me, it didn't take a year.
It did, it did take less. Um, but yeah, it was the first little bit, it was just how long will it take me to get a stair down, uh, and then get all the way downstairs, and that was a huge achievement. Then the, the first day I stepped outside, and then it was across the parking lot, and then it was one block.
And then before you know it, I was running two blocks. But it was, it was literally shuffling. And so when I hear you say that, I'm just so excited to hear that someone else has overcome such a hard thing. Lungs are incredible. Our bodies are so incredible. So good job.
[00:23:46] Kathy Loveless: That's beautiful. Same to you. Great job to you.
What, what I've learned is this is why we're here in this life, is to build the strength to overcome crappy things, things that you never in a million years would see coming. We didn't see COVID coming, and yet look how many people it affected in so many bizarre ways. It's unbelievable. And, and here's the, here's the bad news.
Hmm. It doesn't, it doesn't stop, kids. Once we've had a bad ex- you can't say, "Oh, yay, I've had my challenge. I'm done."
[00:24:28] Misty Smith: Sadly.
[00:24:28] Kathy Loveless: I've lear- I've learned we ain't done until we're done. Oh. And it's not yet. And, um, but what, what I know and what I believe is these challenges have been given to us so that we can get stronger, wiser, and greater champions on the behalf of our Father in Heaven's mission.
And, um, let's just keep encouraging each other. It wasn't intended to be easy. We weren't intended to coast. What we were intended to do was to stretch our challenging, ch- our minds, stretch, figure out new solutions to things we didn't even know we were gonna deal with. And, um, that's what it's all about.
Mm-hmm. So I will continue, if I may.
[00:25:26] Misty Smith: Yes, please do.
[00:25:28] Kathy Loveless: I'm now figuring out how to live with one lung, and, um, somebody recently... Now, I'm now 17 years out of lung cancer. Somebody said, "How often are you aware that you have one lung?" And I said, "Oh, about every nanosecond." I have to make sure I've taken a big enough breath to get the sentence out.
I have to make sure I'm sitting correctly so that I can breathe. It's, it's never gone away. But here's what happened next. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my darling husband of then almost 40 years said to two dear friends of ours... Oh, let me add. In a follow-up, mm, examination with my oncologist, he said, "Kathy, we think there is another spot in your lung, and if that's the case, you're done."
And he said it just like that in front of my daughter. Mm. And she is in meltdown, sobbing. We go home. I now have to tell my husband the bad news. They think there's a spot in my remaining lung. My other daughter is in veterinary medical school in the Midwest. She calls at this time, and I tell her what's going on.
She said, "I'm quitting med school. I'm coming home. My mother's dying." I then kinda decide I need to go f- to a new location where everybody isn't crying and unhappy, so I come down to my office. Once again, I have the thought in my mind, "Wow, I might be done. Has my life meant anything to anybody?" I come down to my office, I open my computer, and up pops an email from somebody I don't recognize.
Mm. It reads, "Dear Kathy, I just wanted to tell you I heard you speak 17 years ago at a Junior Miss Pageant, and I wanted to tell you that the words you spoke then changed my life."
[00:27:49] Misty Smith: Wow.
[00:27:50] Kathy Loveless: She d- she didn't have an, an, a phone number, so I emailed her back. I said, her name was Linda Perks, "Linda-
[00:27:58] Haley Feeman: Oh, no way. Just a side note.
We have had Linda twice on our podcast. Yes, we have. So
if the viewers want to go back to season one, they'll find two of her episodes.
[00:28:10] Kathy Loveless: I called, uh, she emailed me back. I s- and I emailed her, "Linda, please call me." She called me, and she said, "Kathy, you were s- the speaker at the Junior Miss Pageant. I was a 17-year-old contestant. The words you spoke were so profound, I decided I wanted to be like you and I wanted to be a speaker."
And I said, "Oh, Linda, how wonderful." Then she said, "In fact, I'm going to be speaking at a health and wellness conference in Logan, Utah in two weeks." I hung up the phone. Once again, I had just had the thought, "Did my life mean anything to anybody?" And here she had answered that very question. Don't tell me the Lord doesn't know what's in your head.
All right, warning everybody, keep your thoughts good. They're not private. Scary, isn't it?
So for the next two weeks, I kept having the strongest feeling, 'cause where she was gonna be speaking was a health and wellness conference in Logan, Utah.
And I kept thinking, "I think I need to be at that health and wellness conference." My thought was, it's because I'm going to learn about magic cancer curing spinach, so I gotta go to this conference and learn that Now, at this point in my recovery, I'm still not, I don't have very much energy. I'm still, it's before I started back cycling all the time, and it's early in the recovery process.
Getting up at 5:00 in the morning to be in Logan at 8:00 was just so hard for me, but I knew I needed to be up there. So the morning of the confer- well, a, a few days before, I have a, a dear girlfriend in, in Ogden, and I called her and I said, "Julie, um, would you wanna go to a health and wellness conference with me?
It's only $35, and that includes lunch." And she said, "Yeah." So I'm thinking, "Oh, at least I got a buddy," 'cause you guys know anything with a buddy is way better. So that morning, I woke up at 5:00 in the morning, and I opened my drapes, and it was a blizzard outside, but I knew I was supposed to be up there. So I got in my car, and I drove up to Ogden, and this bubble of clear driving preceded me all the way up to Ogden.
I get there, and her darling husband comes out, and he says, "You're not driving through Sardine Canyon in that car. I'm gonna drive you." And he had this big man truck with wheels like this. And I'm going, "Yes, that'll save me energy if he drives us up to Logan." So that darling husband drove us all the way up to Logan, and we got there, and it's, the event is in this big auditorium.
We're on time. We get seated in the back of the auditorium. The first person to come out on stage is this Linda Perks. Now, I haven't seen her in 17 years, so I didn't recognize her. She comes out, and she says, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first health and wellness conference." And I'm thinking, "Yes, magic spinach.
I'm gonna learn about it." But the first thing she said next was, "And I would like to introduce to all of you somebody who changed my life. Kathy Loveless, would you please stand up?" I, I stood up, and everybody's clapping. And I'm thinking, "Oh, this is too weird. This is way too weird."
[00:31:47] Misty Smith: Yeah
[00:31:47] Kathy Loveless: So she proceeds with the program, and I'm ready to hear about magic spinach.
Speaker number one comes on. No magic spinach. Okay. Speaker number two. Still no magic spinach. Now I'm getting ti- more and more tired 'cause I don't have a lot of energy. Speaker number three. No magic spinach, but it's lunch break, and I always like eating food. So Julie, my dear friend Julie and I go and get the food, come back.
All right. Last speaker. Yes, magic spinach. And the last speaker came on stage and all of a sudden I realized I was not there. I had not gone through a blizzard to be in Logan when I had no energy for Kathy. I was there for the woman who was on stage. Now, there's an important lesson. What I've learned is that that's how life is.
So often what we think is about us is not. It's about who we can serve. It's so important that we learn that. Here briefly is her story. She's a member of the church with a husband in Spokane. They have three lovely children. Everything seems wonderful until she's going through some drawers and runs across love letters between her husband and his girlfriend She confronts him when he comes home, and he beats her so substantially she's put in the emergency room.
When she's healed enough, I guess some local, probably Relief Society sisters, gather her three children and her and bring them to Logan, Utah, where her mother is living. She's now living with her mother, and she's pretty sad. But she gets even sadder when she goes, "Ouch, ouch," and she realizes there's something wrong.
She goes to the doctor, and it turns out she's got breast cancer. She now has to have probably one or two mastectomies, and she, um, is on chemo and radiation. Her name is Kim Reeves, and she's written the book, My Walk Through Heaven. Do you know Kim?
[00:34:10] Haley Feeman: Yeah, she was on our podcast as well.
[00:34:12] Kathy Loveless: Of course she is.
She's a- Yeah ... wonderful, dear friend of mine.
[00:34:15] Haley Feeman: Yes. Her episode is actually our highest viewing podcast.
[00:34:19] Kathy Loveless: She's wonderful. Mm-hmm. So, um, I realized that I wasn't there for me, I was there for Kim. So afterwards, I went up to her and I said, "Kim, my name's Kathy Loveless. I'm the past president of the Mountain West Chapter of the National Speakers Association.
If there's anything I can do to help you tell your story more broadly, please give me a call," and I gave her my business card. Now it's time for us to return to, to Salt Lake. M- big man truck guy comes and picks us up and- ... drives us back to Ogden. But now I gotta get from Ogden to Salt Lake. I call my husband and I say, "Honey, what's the weather like?"
He said, "It's a blizzard." Well, I gotta get home. And that bubble of clear driving followed me all the way back to Salt Lake. Well, I had told her about my mentoring program of helping people be better speakers. The next day she called me and said, "Two of my friends and I would like to come down and meet with you."
So they did. And she came down the next day and she said, "I have to tell you something, Kathy. For your listeners who don't know this, but people who've had near-death experiences, the veil does not close once they're h- back. It stays open." And so she came to me and she said Kathy, when you were talking to me about this speaker thing, my great-great-grandfather, who was a wagon train master, appeared right next to you and he said, "Kimmy, if you don't work with this woman, I'm gonna spank you."
So she
[00:35:58] Misty Smith: and
[00:36:01] Kathy Loveless: her two friends signed up for my mentoring program, and we were dear, dear friends. So now, I have in my house, which is where I hold my mentoring programs, a woman whose story is that after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she's lost her marriage, her mother now comes to her and says, "I can't handle raising three little children.
My health is not good. We've gotta give your children to foster care." She's lost her marriage, she's lost her children, and she's lost her health. She lays in bed and says, "Lord, please take me," and He does. And she then goes to the other side, and you've heard her story
[00:36:50] Haley Feeman (2): Her story has been told and in her book, so I said, "Can you tell us something different that no one's heard?" And she did not tell this story on her podcast. She said it, it was new, different stuff that's never been released. Yeah.
[00:37:05] Kathy Loveless: So the first person that comes to her is the Savior, and she knows Him immediately. She then, um, He then takes her to the other side. She sees Joseph Smith teaching a class in Heaven. She sees a friend of hers, who I think passed away when they were in school, and they wave, they recognize each other, and it is beautiful.
And the Savior says, "This is not your time. You need to go back. You have more work to do." And people who've experienced the other side do not wanna come back. It is beautiful. But the Lord was persuasive and, um, she then said, "I went back and laid in that cold, rigid, old body," and she said, "I knew I had to do that."
So that's Kim's story. Now, I have a mentee in my house who has the story of meeting Jesus. Okay? I have a husband who's been a faithful member of the LDS church his whole life. He went on a mission, and he, um, oh, wow, he had parents who were very faithful and active. He's been in bishoprics and stake presidencies.
We were married in the Salt Lake Temple. He's a believer. I didn't learn this until a f- short while ago. When I wasn't looking one day, my husband came up to Kim Reeves and said, "I don't believe a word of your story." No way.
[00:38:34] Misty Smith: Oh my gosh.
[00:38:38] Kathy Loveless: But I've since learned that that is not uncommon. Even faithful, believing people find some of this stuff just too woo-woo and too hard to believe.
But I didn't know he'd said that to my mentee. I didn't know that.
[00:38:55] Misty Smith: Oh.
[00:38:55] Kathy Loveless: But here's the irony of life. When we learned that I might have a, a spot in my other lung, my husband then said to two friends of ours, Bill and Kathy Grover, dear friends, we'd, we'd known each other, lived together here behind the Capitol since before we had children.
He called them and said, "Kathy's gonna die. Let's go one last time to Hawaii," which we all love doing. Oh. So we went to Hawaii, and we rented the helicopter and the plane ride, and we did all the wonderful things you do for a grand trip to Hawaii. And we came back, and shortly thereafter, instead of Kathy dying, Scott Loveless died of colon cancer.
I knew he was getting worse and worse. It was a Monday, and he's a n- a name partner of the law firm Parr Brown, Gee and Loveless. He brings five besuited attorneys into our house, and this is Monday. And he says, "So and so, we're gonna have to get this project done, and then we need to do this, and then we need to do that."
I sat there and watched him give out more direction to these five attorneys. But he was getting sicker and sicker and tireder and tireder, and they graciously could see they needed to leave. So these gentlemen stood up, and I walked them to the front door and I said, "Gentlemen, if you need something from Scott, get it today."
Tears were coming down their cheeks, and they walked out the front door. That was Monday. He was dead at 8:20 the next day. So now my daughter Lindsay, who is not, was not the student in medical school, my daughter and I were there literally at the moment of his death, and it was not a lovely death like they would portray in Hollywood.
It was very sad, and I was sorry my daughter had to see it. My other daughter had just landed. She called from the airport, "How's Dad?" I said, "Sweetheart, Daddy has gone." So I went and got her, brought her back, and she looked at his body and said, "That's not my dad." She could tell that the spirit was what made her dad himself.
So now we had to deal with hospice and getting Lar- Larkin Mortuary to come and, and get Daddy ready. So it's now 1:00 in the morning. We watch Larkin Mortuary so professionally handle his body, put him in a bag, and then we watch them whee- zip up Daddy's bag and wheel him out the front door. It's 1:00.
We're exhausted. We fall asleep. I tell nobody that he has died. It's now 11:00 the next morning. I get a call from Logan, Utah, Kim Reeves. "Kathy, Scott has died, hasn't he?"
[00:41:59] Misty Smith: Oh, my goodness. "
[00:42:00] Kathy Loveless: How did you know?" Wow. She said, "I was walking toward the Logan Temple, and he came to me in spirit, and he was so big and strong and powerful I had to step back so as not to crash into him, and he has a message for you.
He said, 'Tell Kathy I'm all right and that I love her.'" That then began Scott's coming back to, as of today, 13 different people with messages for me.
[00:42:36] Haley Feeman: He, he believes now.
[00:42:41] Kathy Loveless: So I'm going to stop my story at that point. I have so many more stories to share with you. And this is what's amazing. If things were happening like this
Now they're starting to happen like this.
[00:43:00] Misty Smith: Hmm.
[00:43:01] Kathy Loveless: I cannot believe what is happening today, and I will share some more of these stories when I talk with you in part two.
[00:43:12] Haley Feeman: Wonderful. We're so excited to hear the rest. Uh, uh, you have been such a delight, and it's been an edifying time with you, and we felt the spirit.
Before we let you go, you said that you have the book Cycling to Heaven, and so that will be launched, the beginning of- 2027
[00:43:31] Kathy Loveless: whenever this is happening. Yes.
[00:43:32] Haley Feeman: Um.
[00:43:33] Kathy Loveless: Yes.
[00:43:33] Haley Feeman: So watch out for that, and watch out for notifications on that. If anybody wants to reach out to you, what is the best way?
[00:43:40] Kathy Loveless: Um, send me an email, Kathy, K-A-T-H-Y
[00:43:49] Haley Feeman: Awesome. And I know you'll have more advice on part two, but is there one last final thought you wanna leave for part one?
[00:43:56] Kathy Loveless: Absolutely. Fine-tune your ability to listen. I promise you, messages are being sent to you in the most unexpected ways. I'm gonna tell some more stories. And sometimes they are big, significant ones, and sometimes they're just little, tiny ones.
But Heavenly Father loves us all. Every one of you He loves, and He wants you to have a productive, learning, growing experience here in mortality. And He's there to nudge you, hint to you, guide you, but you gotta be listening. He's real. He is absolutely real.
[00:44:35] Haley Feeman: Absolutely. Amen. I agree.
[00:44:38] Misty Smith: Amen.
[00:44:38] Kathy Loveless: Thank you.
[00:44:39] Haley Feeman: All right.
Until part two.
Thank you for joining us on Latter-day Miracles. If you have a miracle story that you feel inspired to share, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us on our website at latterdaymiracles.net or message us on social media. Until next time, keep your heart open to the miraculous, and may you feel the presence of angels in your everyday life
