The Sound of Silence

When a death occurs, to me, there is a distinct silence that becomes detectable.  It’s similar to when you are sleeping with a fan on and someone turns it off.  The silence awakens you.  When someone leaves this world it leaves a "vibrational" deficit that is temporarily audible.  Yes, death has a distinct non- sound to it.   Each person has a different sound or vibration they contribute to this world.  Just as we have all have voices that are unique and recognizable, we have some sort of unique vibrational sound also. That's some deep stuff right there, huh?

The closest scientific explanation I have is that we know atoms vibrate.  We are made up of atoms. That’s the limit of my physics knowledge, so I will stop there.

I knew my friend Sandy's father had passed a few weeks ago.  I knew by the sound-not-sound and the rest of it, well, there is no viable explanation.  I just knew it was him.  I felt his presence and got the phone call an hour later.

Obviously, I don’t do this with every single death, or I wouldn’t be able to function. I do it with people I know or loved ones of people I know.  And when it comes to me, it feels very neutral; it just feels like information.  No, I am not calloused to it, I have just learned to accept it as part of the circle of life and I do get heartbroken when people pass, just like anyone else.

This gets even harder to explain.  As a matter of fact, I have been working on this post for several months, trying to find the right words.

How do the deceased communicate?  For me, it's through both images and knowing.  It sounds so arrogant, doesn't it?  I know. Yet, I can forget where I put my reading glasses ten times a day.

Here is the closest I can get to explaining "knowing".  First of all, knowing means it's clear with no room for doubt.  It's a conviction, just like I know the keyboard right now is at my fingertips or you know you are reading this at this very moment.

 The only way to describe it is this: It's very similar to how we dream.  We have all had dreams in which we may be unaware of our surroundings visually, yet by associating the feelings and emotions attached to a particular time frame or moment in our lives, we are fully aware the dream is taking place in, for example a house from childhood or a classroom in high school.  How many times have you shared a dream and said "I know you were there, but I couldn't see you"?  or  "I know you were there, but you looked like someone else". Often, in our dreams, we may simply sense or have an awareness that an individual is in a dream just by how we feel; yet never see their face.  We just know by our feelings or emotional reactions where the dream is taking place or who is in it.  The images I see are about the same.  Like in a dream. That about sums it up.

It's also important to differentiate  between thinking, imagination, memory, and knowing.  Thought precedes imagination; therefore it is a cognitive process.  When we imagine something, we are actively involved in following that particular train of thought.  For example, you are thinking of ways to decorate for a birthday party.  You imagine what color balloons you may need.  You then start picturing different colors and trying them out for size.  Yellow.  No.  Green. No.  Blue.  Yes! You now have a mental picture of blue balloons and begin processing any other decorations that will fit with that color scheme.

 A memory is evoked by thought, so it’s part of a cognitive process also. We could have a discussion about your grandmother and her wonderful baking.  If you go deep enough into that memory, you can hear her voice, smell the cookies in the oven or even feel what the room temperature was.  Momentarily, she becomes alive and you are there with her, experiencing the event again.  Memory occurs with retrospection.

When I get a “message”, I always play devils advocate with myself.   Is this memory or imagination? Was I thinking about that person before something came to me?  Was I reminded of some event that evoked a memory?  Had someone given me clues about this person and I am imagining what they were like?  It’s part of being a responsible, honest medium.

It’s not that difficult to differentiate between memory and imagination, once you are aware of how it works.  I know we are all smart enough to know this, but it isn’t really something we ponder on.

One thing that I have never been able to explain or understand is how a deceased loved one can still hold on to a personality.  We know personality clearly defines someone, its part of identifying someone.  “Jessica is so easy going.  She rolls with the punches” or  “Kenneth is always so passionate about injustice”.  You know how that works.  Yet, when a loved one comes through, their personality still seems intact.  Before my ex husband even spoke of his father (who was passed), I felt his presence many times.  I could undoubtedly say he was ornery, liked to play practical jokes and expressed affection through teasing.  He was uncomfortable being outright with his emotions, so playful banter was his way of saying “I care about you.”  I was right (of course, tee-hee). 

How it works is beyond me and any woo-woo explanation seems ridiculous.  I think at this point, it’s clear that I can’t stand these umbrella explanations that everyone buys into as if it’s a fact.

Here is my sort-of-theory on this.  When I am face to face with someone and detecting a passed loved one, I often wonder if I am not able to tap into the living persons memory, instead of the other way around.  Our memories have a life of their own, anyone knows how diving deeply into a memory can take us back to the moment it occurred.  Perhaps those memories are so powerful they create a specific energy that can be tapped into?  Maybe no one is really a medium; the gift may lie in literally reading someone else’s memories.  Sometimes, that makes more sense than anything.

I have no answers, but this has been my attempt at trying to explain it.

Love and the Horrible Boss

My ex husband once had the Fidel Castro of bosses.  There is no sitcom, cartoon or movie that could even come close to how despicable this man was.  He was so concerned with his mounds of money that he had no idea that there was a big beautiful world outside his vault.

He sincerely believed he was a "good" business man, but he was so mean and hateful that he had run off business to the point that the phone no longer rang and refused to recognize it was he who had caused the problem.

His employees had to bring their own toilet paper to work.  The Boss Man thought it was not “cost effective” to provide assistance with natural body functions.  And in the extreme summer heat, he refused to provide water for these folks, water was another unnecessary cost. His method of "leadership" was to yell and scream at his employees to humiliate them.  It was clear he was not only a cheap skate, but a control freak with a lint trap for a heart.

My ex was being paid quite well at the time. With no warning, he cut my husbands salary more than half.  Imagine finding that out the hard way when there are bills to pay.

I was so full of rage it was unbearable.  If you have ever experienced this, you know what I mean.  It tears at you.  It wears you down.  It consumes you. 

I had to let this go in a way that was so excruciating; I didn’t want to do it.  As a matter of fact, it took me weeks to get to this point.

The back story here; I had one of those injuries where you have no explanation as to how it happened; perhaps I fell off a cliff and didn’t remember.  My knee had been bothering me for a week to the point I was barely getting around. I was going to call the doctor, but inspiration hit me where I had a moment of tenderness and I knew full well that I had to cease the moment, before I did anything else.  It had to be genuine, authentic and with the proper intention behind it and I was there.

I hobbled in to my office.  I sat down on the floor screaming in agony.

It was time to to ponder on the nature of Bosses existence.  I believe that in order to let go of anger at another individual, you must try and understand the other person.  In Buddhism, it’s called “heart centered compassion” and it can be a real bitch to get there. It’s a vital part of letting go and possibly one of the most difficult things to achieve. And letting go of hurt and resentment is a process, sometimes a painfully slow process at that.

I think it’s also foolish and unrealistic to think that it’s not okay to feel anger.  It's simply a feeling.  Nothing more.  Anger, when embraced, can become a jumping off point and perhaps more imperative to healing than we give credit.  This emotion exists to teach us to work at letting go of something. Harboring anger and resentment does nothing but affect the individual feeling it in a negative way.  It has literally no effect on the other person.  Being angry with someone doesn’t change them, but it does change you…and not in a good way…unless you chose to turn it into something positive.

I imagined Boss in his office.   What would make someone so shallow and money hungry that it becomes their entire existence?  Was he abused as a child and never let it go?  Had he experienced something so horrible that he felt as if he needed to control everything around him?  Did he feel as if the world “owed him something” because of something he could never make peace with? Did he know what gratitude, love and compassion felt like?  What would it feel like to have created such an awful reputation for yourself that people recoil at the mere mention of your name?  Does any of this bother him?

Surely, you have to be empty when your only goal in life is to make money and treat the people who help you make that money like crap.  I felt compassion and sorrow for him.

I lit a bundle of sage and blew the smoke his way.

 May peace and love soften your heart. May you find love and compassion.  My prayer is that you experience a shift, a shift so powerful that you know and understand gratitude for what you have, instead of greed for more.  I hope that you are feeling this now; that someone cares about your wellbeing and evolution as a human being.

I sat in silence for a while, just to stay grounded in compassion.  After a while, I braced myself to crawl back up, knowing it would hurt. 

My knee didn’t hurt at all.  I was shocked, thinking that maybe I had just popped it back into place when I was sitting.  To confirm, I did several deep knee bends.  I stood on my bad knee and jumped up and down.  It was fine.  Three weeks later it was still fine.  Three months later--four months later-- it never bothered me again.  

This confused me.  Isn’t the point of trying to send love and compassion to someone else to help heal them?

It became the A-ha moment when I learned that love can heal.  Not in the woo-woo way, but in a deep profound way. Was this a reward for actually caring about someone who needs cosmic attention?  Had my own anger settled in my knee as a metaphor? Do we heal ourselves when our intentions for another are genuine and authentic?  Yes, yes and yes.  Could it have been a fluke?  Of course.  Maybe I just sat in a way that somehow placed my knee back where it should have.

Boss is still an asshole.  It didn’t work on him, but I can still run and skip down the street without buckling in pain.

Amen.

A Murder In Shawnee

It was 1986, my (then) husband had graduated from college and we were off to Shawnee, Kansas to begin our new life.  I had found the perfect apartment in the perfect location, we settled in quickly and comfortably. 

                                                  My daughter at our new home

After a few months in our new dig, my two year old daughter had started waking me up in the middle of the night, telling me there was someone in her room by her bed. Kids do this all the time; the early years are wrought with multitudes of imaginary monsters that lurk in the shadows of the night.  It wasn’t long before she began waking up abruptly, screaming inconsolably for extended amounts of time. Over the next few months, it was becoming more frequent and more specific-- “Mommy, the girl needs help, she’s crying”, “That girl needs my doll, she misses her mommy” or “That girl told me she was hurt”.  I would comfort her until she fell back asleep, with no idea on exactly how to handle it or where it was coming from.  Her father and I were becoming exasperated about what to do.

Strange things were happening in my room at night also. I was experiencing frequent nightmares in which I would witness a violent rape and murder that petrified me so intensely I began to dread bedtime. Numerous times, I was awakened with a strange sensation that someone was sitting or laying on me. I would sit up and ask “What?  What do you need me to know?” accompanied by a dreadful feeling that I really didn’t want to know or an answer was going to be forced upon me. I had also begun feeling someone over my bed also, leaning over as if they were trying to wake me up.  Ironically, there was a sort of vitality attached to the person, as if this wasn’t the only part of them.  Occasionally, I would hear a distant weeping as if I was hearing it from far away, with a kind of “tinny” tone to it.  I always got up, thinking it was my daughter, it never was.  The entire experience was exceptionally strange-- sometimes the “someone” felt as if it was a male and other times a female. I never would have called it a “haunting” by any means, it merely felt as if my attention was being drawn to something.

There was a distinct urgency that felt sickening, funeralistic and cold.  It was as if someone was trying to tell me a story or make me understand an experience, but I wasn’t sure what was happening. I thought I was going crazy.  Literally. How do you tell anyone this without being thrown in a straight jacket and put away?  It had gone on for almost a year and I was exhausted from the nightly emotional overload.  Our lease was about to expire and it was time to move.  I wanted our family as far away from that place as possible. 

After we moved, the dreams stopped.  Ashley returned to normal.  Life had taken on its once normal balance and things felt quiet again.

Twenty some odd years later, I was watching an investigative report show, I can’t remember which one. The lead story documented the 1979 rape and murder of Tracy Fresquez, a young woman from Shawnee, Kansas.  It caught my attention, because we had lived there years ago.

 At the time, the story had hit the media by storm--in 1998, Daniel Crocker, a born again Christian had come forward and confessed to the crime.  He alleged the guilt was too much and he needed to clear his conscience.  As the story evolved, I watched a quick pan of the apartment complex she had resided in at the time of the murder.  That was where we had lived!  I broke down and cried, feeling immense sadness for Tracy’s family, yet thankful, at best, the crime had been resolved for their sake.  That family endured so much pain, they had to experience the phone call that none of us ever want to receive. We had lived at Arrowhead Apartments in 1986, so the crime had not been solved yet. Had Tracy been trying to tell us her story?  Was she communicating with Ashley too? I say yes.

Recently, I spent two days searching for the original episode I had watched. I could not find it.  Instead, I found a video on YouTube—On the Case with Paula Zahn, a story called The Ultimate Sin that documents the story.  The address, although blurred out, gave enough information to give me confidence that she had lived in our building or the building on either side.  It was validating, yet the kind of validation no one really wants.

The crime had been solved and almost thirty years later I had some answers regarding what had gone on that year. 

The lesson in this story is that sometimes you just don’t know what is going on.  The message may be loud and clear, but the pieces never quite fit.  I look back on the experience with much regret.  Could I have done something?  I genuinely wished I could have.  I realize now that the confusion I felt over if this person was male or female was a way  of expressing how the event was experienced...she was trying to tell me about Daniel Crocker,  the male that was involved in this incident.

Rest in Peace, Tracy.  You will never be forgotten.

Here is an article on the case

On The Case with Paula Zahn  (it costs $1.99 to view)

The Strange Case of Eugene McCarthy

I have mentioned before that many times some of this medium stuff makes literally no sense to me at all.  At times, it is so incredibly random that I can’t even figure out the purpose.  Do dead people just drop in to see what’s up with no agenda? Why, yes they do. 

Before I share this story, here is the thing I just can’t wrap my brain around.  In the “psychic” world this is how it is explained;

Apparently, being medium, psychic, intuitive, lightworker, sensitive, Energy Healer ™, bat shit crazy lady means you give off some kind of ethereal light that emanates in the netherworld.  But ONLY in the netherworld.  Not to regular people who have a pulse.  The dearly departed see this light and come to it, like a moth to a candle.  Then, they want to tell you all kinds of shit because they like talking to lights.  It's kind of like Aunt Hazel in the nursing home talking to her plastic flower arrangement.  They are kind of crazy that way. 

I will argue that, although it’s a very nice notion, explaining it away with such authority leads to a lot of distrust.   The truth is NO ONE KNOWS how this works!  I know.  How DARE I say that.

I keep a notebook with me most of the time, even one by my bed.  I feel an obsessive need to document things that come to me and I have volumes of spiral notebooks full of incidences with notes containing my own questions about why and how this happens.  An in all honesty, “WTF?” has been jotted down so many times, its almost comical.  As the Internet became a part of daily life, I began emailing a trusted friend so there was a time stamp on what I was documenting. 

My notes always include things such as; what did I do that day that might have triggered a memory could have lead to this?  Did I read something, hear something, see something and so on.  Did something related to this come up in a conversation?  Was I having a train of thought that lead to this? What I have learned over the years is there is a distinct randomness that occurs and once I ask myself all those questions, I will validate it for myself.

 This one wins the lifetime achievement award for head scratching. I went into a full spin cycle for days after this happened and still think about it- I have no clue what it was about. 

I was in bed about to doze off.  I was snapped out of it by an overwhelming sense someone was standing over me trying to tell me something.  Fully aware that I was the only person in the room, I grabbed my notebook and frantically started taking notes. And that was it.  I got no message, just a presence.  Yes, someone will think I wrote this up last night...I did not.  You will have to trust me and please, forgive the horrible art work.

I immediately got up and hit the internet, using keywords from what I had written searching for who this was.  I snapped a screen shot of what I found, but be aware that this was in 2009 and Wikipedia was still in it’s infancy.  Feel free to Google keywords yourself.  It now leads to a more sophisticated article, with the same information available.

The lesson learned?  This may be the first time in history that a politician had no specific agenda.  WTF?