I never would have done it if my hairapist hadn’t put the idea into my head. Amy* is not the “woo-woo” type. She’s smart, funny, well-informed, and sensible. (She’s also a liberal, but that may be neither here nor there.)
She was cutting my hair and telling me all about how she and a friend had recently gone to visit a psychic. I was a little surprised—given our many years of conversations, it didn’t really seem like something that was in her line, but it sounded entertaining. Plus she had scissors in my hair and I wanted her to pay attention.
So I listened and asked a lot of questions.
What she told me was, quite frankly, astonishing. The woman they had gone to see, Mona*, was, in Amy’s words, “just a normal person.” There were no flowing, gauzy robes, dark rooms, or crystal balls. There were no trances or weird voices. There was just this attractive young (ish) woman who invited you into her living room, sat down in a chair with a legal pad and a pen and just….talked…with you. And, presumably, whatever spirits decided to show up on a given day.
That’s when the weirdness started.
Amy’s friend lost her young husband in an accident several years ago, and she wanted to see if she could connect with him. That’s her story to tell, so I won’t go into the details. But I will say this—Amy clearly believed that Mona was the real deal, and by the time I left the salon, I knew I was going to make an appointment.
I don’t know what they did in the “olden days,” but the modern psychic (or “mystic,” as this one likes to call herself) has a snazzy website and calendaring software so you can make and pay for your appointment online. She also offers phone and Skype appointments.
Mona wasn’t cheap—but she wasn’t outrageous either. I appreciate the efforts of women entrepreneurs and want to see them compensated for their work—and if psychic ability is real (more on that later), it’s work just like any other intellectual/emotional labor. So I took my birthday money and plunked down $150 for an hour-long consultation. I figured the same rules applied to this as to gambling: Never spend more than you can afford to lose. If she was a fake, I would be chagrined, but not destitute. And if she was the real deal, the session would seem cheap at half the price.
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I wanted to “talk” to my grandmother. She died 6 years ago, while I was out of town. At the time, she was in hospice, but she had actually been doing well—improving even—and I saw nothing that indicated her death was imminent. I had left her with another relative whom I did not completely trust, but my options for elder care at the time were limited and the trip was an important one.
I didn’t trust the relative because she was ditzy and she had some decidedly…eccentric…ideas about health care. In later years, this woman became a Trump supporter, which gives you some indication of her intelligence level and the state of her moral compass. But she’s also one of those people who believe that if you engage in all sorts of weird practices (e.g., drinking ionized water, fire walking) and never let negative thoughts in your head, you can live forever.
I can’t even imagine a fate worse than living forever. But I digress….
My grandmother was a brittle diabetic—meaning that her blood glucose levels (BGLs) were very difficult to control. It didn’t help that she had been diagnosed in her 70s with complete pancreatic failure, aka “Type 1” diabetes. (Usually, Type 1 diabetics develop the condition in childhood.) She had lived her entire life pretty much the way she wanted until the Big D came along and began dictating what she could and couldn’t do—and when.
She hated everything about being diabetic—but particularly the part that required her to eat breakfast every morning.
I’ve never seen anyone with such a pathological resentment of a meal. My grandmother took having to eat breakfast as an egregious affront to her dignity. She had never been hungry in the early morning, and the requirement to eat breakfast every day just to keep herself alive did not sit well with her. At. All.
But her BGL tended to plunge in the early hours of the morning—leaving her at risk of falling into a diabetic coma and never waking up. For a healthy person, the average BGL is between 80-100. My grandmother’s would routinely be between 40-50 at 5:30 a.m.
I felt an immense amount of relief when I finally found an acceptable workaround to the hated petite dejeuner. Even at that ungodly hour, my grandmother could manage to drink a cup of heavily sugared tea and eat a few vanilla wafers. So I got up every morning—365 days a year—at 5:00 a.m., made the tea, tested her BGL, and made sure she consumed the sugar necessary to keep her alive.
(Now before you get all judgy about the workaround, please remember that I was dealing with a fully mentally competent, autonomous woman. I know all that sugar kept her BGLs in constant flux. BUT. It also kept her alive for 15 more years than I would have had her otherwise. So I’m okay with that part. If you aren’t—well—your opinion of me is not my business.)
Frankly, I was gobsmacked when I got the word that my grandmother had died. I spent the back half of my trip making funeral and travel arrangements, and that didn’t leave me much time to think too deeply about what had happened.
But during one of our many phone calls those first few days, my relative made a comment to me that soon wormed its way into my head and my heart and I have never been able to dislodge it. The comment was something along the lines of “I looked in on her that morning, and she looked so happy and peaceful. She was smiling like she was having a beautiful dream.”
At first, I was grateful, because I thought that meant my grandmother had died peacefully in her sleep. Having watched my grandfather (her husband of almost 60 years) die a brutally slow death of strokes and dementia, that seemed like a true blessing.
But it didn’t take long before I started to ask myself: Did she get her tea and cookies that morning?
I know I should have asked Ditsy Relative, but the implication behind the question was so dark and terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to raise the subject. My grandmother had been in hospice, after all.
But I couldn’t let it go. It had worried me ever since. Did my relative—for whatever reason—fail to bring the tea and cookies? Did she LET my grandmother die?
I hoped the medium would be able to help me find out.
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If you aren’t a fan of Madeleine L’Engle’s writings, or the book A Wrinkle in Time, you may not get the title of this piece. In that story, the “Happy Medium” spends her time largely looking at things in her crystal ball that are pleasant and/or amuse her. Looking at sad things wears her out, and she avoids it whenever she can.
Mona took a similar tack. She advertised that she was there to pass along information that was for your “best and highest” good. In other words, she wasn’t going to tell you when you were going to die or anything traumatic like that.
So I wasn’t sure whether I could find a way to get the information I wanted. Asking if someone killed your grandmother is pretty much the definition of traumatic information.
When I arrived at her suburban home, Mona and her little Pekingese dog greeted me at the door. She was warm, with a wide smile and an easy laugh. Both her demeanor and the friendly dog put me instantly at ease.
I would guess she’s in her 30s. She said both her grandmother and her mom had “the gift” of being able to communicate with spirits but had chosen not to. (My guess is that they were Christians, and were afraid of the biblical prohibition against consorting with “witches”—but I didn’t ask.) I told her that I had a question about the way in which my grandmother “passed,” and asked her if it would be okay if I asked it? She encouraged me to do so. She also encouraged me to tape the session—which I did.
Our session was just the way Amy described it. We sat in her living room, and Mona started right in. I was stunned almost immediately by the fact that she was pulling up names and facts about my grandmother and great-grandmother. She mentioned things that most of the people in my family don’t know. She “translated” comments and questions from my grandmother and great-grandmother. Many of the things she said sounded like things they would actually say.
Mona also talked about my dog, who had recently died. My grandmother said that he hadn’t really accepted that he was dead yet, so he had retained the spirit form of a dog in the place where everyone supposedly congregates after they die. (Almost everyone there is pure energy—no bodies, my grandmother “said.”) He was still near me all the time, she said—watching over me.
I so want to believe that. Sometimes I still think I see him out of the corner of my eye…
Finally, it was time to ask my grandmother question that has been eating at me for over six years. I said “How did you die?” The immediate answer was “Why do you want to know that?”
Vintage grandma.
I explained that I had a lot of guilt about not being there when she died, and I just needed to know for my own peace of mind. My grandmother talked about how she thought she was having a wonderful dream, in which her sons (who both died within minutes after their births) had come to “walk her over.” She ended her story by saying, “Everything happened as it was supposed to happen. I am where I’m supposed to be.”
This was pretty much what I had expected to happen—whether the mystic was genuine or not. But to my great surprise, Mona looked at me and said “Well, she just side-stepped right over that one, didn’t she?! Do you want to press her?”
I nodded. I thought for a few seconds, and then I asked: “Did you get your tea that morning?” There was a long pause, and then my grandmother responded “I did not. Now can you let that go and get on with your life?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I still don’t.
But at that point, I believed. I believed that this young woman was channeling my grandmother and other members of my family. I believed that she had answered my question, and that my Ditzy Relative was, at least in some way, responsible for my grandmother’s death.
It was only when I asked about my grandfather that I got suspicious of whether I was being conned. The mystic told me that she could see him, but that she couldn’t hear him. She said he kept tapping his head—did that mean anything to me? (I didn’t think to ask until I started writing this how he could be tapping a “head” he supposedly didn’t have…)
I asked the question that anyone who knew my grandfather would ask first: “What color is his hair?” (The correct answer is “red.” ) I asked it several times, but she ignored it. Finally, I realized that she was trying to get me to talk about the fact that he had a stroke. It was so pointed that my hackles went up in spite of myself.
Mona also said she was getting messages for me from relatives of my grandfather—women with whom I had never really had any contact. My suspicions intensified.
The seed of doubt—which was always present—had been planted and watered.
As we were wrapping up, the Pekingese—who had been sitting quietly in my lap for an hour—got up and began barking frantically. Neither of us could calm him down. Over his frenetic barks, she said “He senses your dog here.”
He barked me out the door.
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The first thing I did when I got home was to google my name and city. Among the first entries was my grandmother’s obituary—which I had written. In it were almost all the names, family relationships, and facts that the mystic had brought up. Googling my grandfather’s obituary brought up the fact that he had died of a stroke, and the remaining names that the mystic had mentioned. My dog’s photo was available on my public-facing Facebook page.
One of the only things the medium said that she could not have known from a thorough Google search was what my Ditzy Relative said, and my grandmother seemed to confirm: “She was smiling like she was having a beautiful dream.”
I will never know for sure if I was conned. I think I probably was. But the medium’s answering of my question about the tea was unexpected. I can’t figure why she would answer that way if she was conning me. Unlike every other part of our session, it was not an answer designed to give me any comfort.
But I pray that the dream was as beautiful as she said. That is what I will hold on to until I get a chance to ask my grandmother myself.
And I will keep looking out the corner of my eye for my sweet boy. I always said he loved me more than any human ever did—apparently even enough to remain in spiritual limbo. That’s one more thing that Mona couldn’t have known.
In the end, I am left with only this:
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”—Aldous Huxley
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*Names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the potentially guilty.