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A Journalist's Experience With A Medium

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,517
Don't know if anyont else has posted this. A long but very interesting article.

http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a30986/losing-my-husband-and-finding-him-through-a-medium/

It's really worth reading in full. But for the impatient I'll extract the juice from it.

She describes the character of her late husband and the history of their relationship, and also the intensity of her grief after he died. 3 months on, though, and strange stuff began to happen...

She lists a whole series of incidents, the husband invading her dreams, the young son (DAVID) talking as if he was there with them, and lots of meaningful coincidences linked to her husband of the type most on here are familiar with. Most intriguing among them to me is the following: "On the evening of February 10, 2014, which would have been Peter's sixtieth birthday, I went out to dinner with the kids and two good friends. Because I was with everyone I wanted to talk to, I left my cell phone in my bag. Three weeks later I discovered a text, sent from my phone number to my phone number, dated February 10, 8:18 P.M.: "Lisa I cannot believe I'm funny I sent you the message love you see I."

Eventually she takes all these "signs" as a sense that he's calling, try9ing to get in touch. So on the recommendation of friends she contacts a particular psychic, who consults by phone. She was called back immediately. Here is the transcript of the conversation:

"He's here," she said. "He wants to talk now." Then, as if she were talking to someone else: "I like to get paid first." Then, addressing me, "Can you even do this now? Are you free?" Terrified and exhilarated, I said yes. This is how it began:

Lisa Kay: Who's David? Who's David? He has grown. He says, "He has grown." Testing, trial control. He's talking about goldfish. And marzipan. He doesn't like it.

Lisa Chase: I have no idea what that means….

LK: Acknowledging James. He's acknowledging someone named James. Are you writing this down? You should write this all down. Even if it doesn't make sense now, it will later.

James, of course, was Peter's brother. I was running around my house, looking for scraps of paper to write on. I found a bill from a local stationery store, forms sent home from Davey's school, a confirmation for a flight to Atlanta. I was frantically scribbling on the backs of all of them, grateful I knew how to take shorthand notes from my years as a reporter, because she was talking so fast, her melodic voice—she once thought about pursuing a career as a singer—stopping and starting, darting from subject to subject.

LK: He's talking about a ball. He says, 'Find the signed ball in the bag and give it to David.'

While Peter was in the hospital, a good friend, knowing he loved the Yankees and particularly Joe Torre, their longtime manager, got Torre to sign a baseball—a talisman. But the day I brought it in, Peter shook his head. "I can't," he said. "Put it away." I didn't know why it upset him, but I put the ball in his closet, in a canvas bag that I'd packed with his clothes and toiletries to bring to the hospital.

LK: He's showing me blood. Did he die of a blood clot? Something about blood. I'm seeing the word 'genetic.' She said it in an almost staccato fashion: Ge-net-ic.

LC: He died of a blood cancer. And his doctors told us it was probably related to the lymphoma his father died from.

LK: The reason—David will not get it. That's what he's telling me. Good for you, Peter! I like this guy. [In a different voice]: 'You can call me Pete!'

He says, 'Go ahead. You can have the red wine.'

I began to laugh. For the first time, I felt some relief from the cruelty of the way he died. This call had begun to do for me what the best antianxiety medicine and therapy had not been able to, which was pull me out of the whirlpool and see the beginning of a way out of my sadness.

Lisa would be talking to me directly, then talking to…Peter? And sometimes it was if she were Peter, talking to us both. Channeling would probably be the best verb. Sometimes she said things that made no sense to me. Maybe a third of what she said could apply to anyone who'd lost a spouse; things like, "I want you to marry again," and "It's okay that you cried in front of me." But there were many more specific things she said that she couldn't have known or Googled, as several people have suggested to me.

Anyway, try Googling the name of a person you know nothing about. It takes a lot more than five minutes to navigate to the page with the right information and absorb it all—the names and details and events.

LK: He says he controlled too much. He says, 'Take the good with the bad. I had my faults.' He's learning to be better at not criticizing.

Then she said something that shocked me.

LK: 'I'm a lucky guoy. I got the better end of the deal.'

What was amazing about this was the way Lisa pronounced it: "guoy," not "guy." It was precisely the way Peter said it, with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent. He'd use that expression when we were making up after a fight: I'm a lucky guoy…to have you. At this point I began speaking directly to him; I couldn't help myself.

LC: Peter, you weren't lucky! You died!

LK: I hear a dog barking. There's a dog with him. Did you have a dog?

LC: Yes, we did. Gracie was our dog. She died of Lyme disease. Peter felt super guilty about it—

LK: [In a grouchy tone] 'It was our dog, but it was MY dog.'

Was he social? Because people are calling out to him over there. Someone's yelling 'Pete! Peter!' I gotta calm him down.

He says, 'I was lucky to have someone so pretty and young.'

LC: I was lucky to have someone so handsome.

LK: 'That's true.'

Even in the afterlife, I was competing with others for his time. But I was weirdly comforted by the joking and grouchiness and grandiosity. It felt like my husband.

Lisa's cell phone started to die, so she gave me her home number, and I called her back. We'd been on the phone for about 45 minutes.

LK: Who met you?

LC: What?

LK: I'm asking Peter; who met you? Mom. He says mom. But he was clearly met by his father. He was starting his transition that last week.

'Did you touch my face? I wasn't in my body when you did.'

Until that last week, I hadn't been able to touch Peter's skin with my fingers or lips for three months; I wore rubber gloves and kissed him from behind a mask. A stem-cell transplant takes a patient down to zero immunity; a kiss from a wife with even a nascent cold sore can be deadly. But once we knew he was not going to survive, I took off the mask and gloves, climbed into the bed with him—he was in a morphine sleep by this time—and I did touch his face. After he died, I kissed his face and tried to close his eyes.

LK: He says, 'You did what you knew was right. I am well here.'

LC: Do you swear, Peter?

LK: 'No. But you do.'

A joke! It's true; I swear like a sailor. He hardly ever did.

LK: Who's Boo-boo?

At this I shrieked loudly enough that Davey ran into the room to make sure I was okay. Then I told Lisa that Boo-boo was Peter's baby name for Davey.

LK: He was a seal-the-deal kind of guy. He says, 'XOXO.'

LC: He didn't do that! I did that. I do that.

LK: He said, 'That's one for you.'

We'd been on the phone for a little over an hour. I thanked her and took down her address to mail a check for her $350 fee. I asked her if people ever called for another reading, and she said yes, but that she didn't encourage it. She didn't want people to become dependent; they had to move through their grief and maybe learn to recognize the signs themselves. We were hanging up when she said suddenly, "Who's Paul? Who's Paul? 'Give a hug to Paul.'"


THE rest of the article involves her consulting doctors and therapists to see what they make of it, and also a scientist researching mediums, and also deals with her meeting and befriending the medium herself, to find our her story, exactly what she's doing and how it started.
 
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Thank you. I took the time to read the whole article and it's very interesting. The 'self-texting' is particularly intriguing.
 
One thng which left me somewhat confused is that the medium's explanation of what's she actually experiencing is hard to reconcile with the example given by the transcript of the conversation.

What I mean she insists she doesn't see or hear the dead, that they are higher frequency energy blah blah and that she gets a flash of this and twinge there and so on. And yet the reading reported above is clearly suggestive of full sentence clear verbal conversation and interaction with the dead man. The example appears to belie the explanation.
 
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