Brazellica

My self-consciousness did not diminish when I got to the microphone. I could feel myself wanting to believe. I didn’t want to look like a sucker, grasping at straws in front of all the people in the audience. At the same time, I didn’t want to be so cynical that I missed out on something real.

I didn’t have long to think about these things. Anderson began, “This man is saying that he had a difficult life. He’s saying that he never got a break, and that you knew that, and felt bad about it. He’s saying that he has finally gotten a break, now, and he’s able to relax, and that you would appreciate that. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes,” I said. It certainly did.

“He’s saying that he’s here with his father. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes, it does,” I said. That was pretty good, I thought, that Anderson didn’t say, “He’s with his father and mother.” My father’s mother, after all, is still alive.

Anderson continued: “He’s saying that he comes to you as a father but also in friendship.”

That sounded nice.

“He’s saying that he had a hard life, but that he never thought it would be easy, and that you would know that he never thought it would be easy. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, and I was smiling despite the subject matter. It was funny, how often my dad would say, “William, no one ever said life would be easy.” Sometimes, in recent years, I have remembered him saying that, and thought, “Well, dad, of _course_ no one ever said it would be easy. Who in his right mind would ever say such a thing?”

Seed of doubt

On the other hand, these were all generalizations that could have applied to anyone in the room. Hard life, never got a break, comes to me in friendship – for how many sons would those sentiments hit the heartstrings? A lot, I figured.

“He’s holding a lemon,” Anderson said, sounding a bit confused. “He’s saying that would mean something to you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, and my eyes and voice lowered.

My dad did not like to do things unless he could do them well, and one of the things he thought he couldn’t do well was sing. As a result, he sang only rarely, and tended to stop if he noticed that someone was listening.

Consequently, when he did sing, I paid attention, while trying to seem as if I didn’t. And at least twice when I was young, I had stayed quiet while he sang the refrain from “Lemon Tree.”

It’s an old standard, one that’s been covered by Trini Lopez; Peter, Paul and Mary; and others. In it, a father warns his son about the dangers of love, comparing it to ‘the lovely lemon tree’:

“Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the whole lemon is impossible to eat.”

To me, the song had summed up the bitterness of my father’s life, and the difficulty of his marriage. It spoke to his confusion – how had things turned out this way? He didn’t know. Maybe it was just the way life was.

Six years after he died, I found the single for “Lemon Tree” in a second-hand record store near Boston. I had to buy it, of course. Didn’t listen to it much, though, once I’d heard it all the way through – I preferred to remember my dad’s version, which was shorter. My dad liked a few other songs, but “Lemon Tree” resonated most, and was the only one I ever bought.

When Anderson told me that the man was holding a lemon, the words slipped in under my defenses. I hadn’t been ready to hear about that.

Don’t make me blush

“This man is saying that he wasn’t a wealthy man,” Anderson said, “but that he passed on the good things – and one of them was you.”

Now I couldn’t stop grinning. Felt like a fool. The predominantly female audience gave out a collective “Awwww…”

I leaned into the mike and said, “Now you’re embarrassing me, dad.” And got the laugh I was aiming for.

“He’s saying that you’ve had a promotion recently, in your career. He’s offering you congratulations. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. It was true; I had been promoted about two weeks earlier, to a position I had wanted for quite some time. I hadn’t even told most of my family about the boost. I’d wanted to keep it secret, in case I screwed up and my company took it back.

“He’s saying that he made a quick exit from this life, but you don’t have to feel bad about that – he planned it that way.”

Planned it that way? But why would he have planned it that way? I couldn’t imagine. But I couldn’t deny that the exit had been quick.

“He’s saying he’s seeing all right now; he’s pointing to his eyes. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, it does,” I said.

My father’s eyes gave him trouble his whole life. His tear ducts didn’t make any tears, so his eyes were always dry; I never saw him cry. He had to put drops in the eyes every few hours. He was also nearsighted, and wore glasses, which he disliked intensely. Because his eyes were so dry, though, he couldn’t wear contacts. It was nice to think that he could see well now.

Walking into questions

“He’s saying he can see well now, and he can walk well now. Does that make sense?”

“Um …” I said. It didn’t. He had always been able to walk fine. My suspicions were aroused. Was Anderson somehow guessing his way through this – and if so, had he made a mistake?

On the other hand, did my father merely want me to know that he was physically sound – rather than dead, as he had been when I’d last seen him? We all say things like “he’s up and around” to indicate that someone is well again.

I didn’t know. But it was the first possibly false note.

There would be one more, and it would follow close on the heels of the first. Anderson said, “He’s saying his health is good now – that maybe at the end, it was not so good.”

I made a sound of uneasiness. It was true that my dad had expected to die young, as had his father and his father’s father (none of them had reached 46), but his health at 42 had seemed fairly good. I had golfed with him the day before his death; he had made no complaints that I could remember. Granted that he had a chronic kidney disease, he was, as far as I knew, asymptomatic at the time of his death.

I wondered if Anderson would say something specific about the boat accident. It seemed so obvious, and it would have been so reassuring to hear that kind of specificity.

Earlier, I had heard Anderson describe to a mother the manner of her son’s death, but that was not to happen here. Instead, Anderson said, “Well, maybe you didn’t know about it; maybe he kept it to himself.”

Certainly my dad kept many things to himself. It was possible that he had been in poorer health than he let on. At the same time, it seemed an easy out for a medium: Whenever your target disagrees, you could just say, ‘Well, maybe he never told you about that,’ and move on.

Anderson moved on. “He’s saying that he was a sensitive man, but he didn’t always know how to show it.” No argument there. “He was a hard-working man, and he had a difficult life, but he wants you to know that it was a fulfilling life.”

Hmm. That was interesting – to think that it might have been a fulfilling life. It didn’t look like one – but maybe in retrospect?

“He’s saying something about grandchildren. That there might not be any right now, but there will be soon, maybe in a few years. He’s saying that when the grandchildren are born, you and your family might say, ‘Oh, if only dad were here,’ and he wants you to know that he will be.”

My own eyes were not as dry as his had been.

“He says he wasn’t the greatest dad in the world, but that his heart was in the right place. He says that he appreciates that you loved him, and wished you could have done more for him, but that you did enough. He says that he knows that you wonder sometimes what he thinks about you, and he wants you to know that he’s very proud of you, and happy with what you’re doing.

“He reaches out with love to his family and his wife. He says that he embraces you with love, until you meet again.

“And now he withdraws, so that someone else may come forward.”

I returned to my seat, and began to take notes, so I wouldn’t forget the details. I knew that I would be reporting this to my sisters and brother and mom, and I wanted to be able to tell them all that I had heard, so that they could make up their own minds about what had just happened.

Inside, though, I was trembling. I didn’t even know what I thought about it, let alone how to present it to others.
(Originally published on The Guy Code, June 11, 2000.)

What happens to your relationship with someone after he dies?

Sixteen years ago, my father drowned. I was 16 years old at the time, the oldest of four kids. The youngest, my brother, was 11. The four of us kids, and our mom, went through some very tough times after this happened – substance abuse, chronic illnesses, thoughts of suicide. Our mom turned out to be stronger than any of us – including herself – could have guessed, and she kept us together by bringing us to family counseling, praying for us, and so on.

These days, we are much closer than most families with kids our age seem to be. We care about each other and laugh together. It was because of them that I moved back to the East Coast from the San Francisco Bay area, which was otherwise a fairly pleasant place to be.

Despite my closeness to my sisters and brother and mom, I have continued to feel my father’s absence wherever I have been, and have felt sorrow that his life was not happier.

He was a tense and brooding man. He was also a very bright and decent man. He worked hard for his family and loved us a great deal, but became frustrated when things at home did not go as smoothly as they tended to go at work. He was not comfortable with things he could not control; he did not know how to let go, to relax.

When he became frustrated, we would feel his rage. After we had felt it a few times, we grew to expect it even when it was not around. And once he was no longer around, I wondered if his anger or his disappointment in us, still might be.

Have I done a decent job setting the stage?

So last Sunday I went up to Rhinebeck, N.Y., for the weekend, to listen to some New Age talk about life after death.

A few of the speakers had good credentials. One was Brian Weiss, a Yale- and Columbia-trained psychiatrist who used to run the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami. One day, he hypnotized one of his patients, and she started saying that her neurosis had its roots in a previous lifetime. Weiss opted to take her seriously, and when he did so, her symptoms abated.

Another speaker was Tom Schroder, an editor at the Washington Post. Schroder, an intelligent skeptic, wrote a book called “Old Souls” about the time he spent with Ian Stevenson, a well-respected psychiatry professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. Stevenson has spent the past 30 years researching the apparently spontaneous past-life memories of thousands of young children all over the world. He goes to great lengths to compare those memories with the stories told by the families to which the children say they once belonged.

Then there was George Anderson. About him, I knew very little. He’s not a journalist, and he never went to medical school. He bills himself as a medium.

Our society has not agreed on the kind of diploma it should give to people who talk to the dead. As a result, a person who wants to make money in that line of work has to turn skeptics into believers on a daily basis. It’s almost like being a salesman. For those who approach the business as a scam, in fact, it’s _exactly_ like being a salesman.

Over the years, Anderson has converted a lot of skeptics. Other conference-goers told me of the ways doubting journalists had tried to fool him, by giving him false names and misinformation, and said that Anderson had cut through the b.s. without difficulty. It’s impossible to prove mediumship scientifically, but Anderson had managed to leave a large number of intelligent folks without an alternative explanation.

Attending an event involving a medium is a poignant experience. As you scan the faces of your fellow audience-members, you realize that everyone in the room has lost someone in a way that still hurts. You reflect on the process of your own grief, and realize, in a new way, just how common that experience is. No one escapes loss – neither the rich, nor the beautiful, nor even the smug.

The smug may not show up in rooms like this, either – but you know that their smugness, while it may shield them from the appearance of vulnerability, cannot protect them from loss. Each person in the room is surrounded by strangers who do not know or appreciate their absent loved ones. Everyone is willing to relive their grief, to dwell on the lost person or people, in the hope that someone will show up, and tell them that no matter how sudden or violent the death may have been, everything is really okay.

So Anderson began to talk to the 500 people assembled, laying out in general terms some of the insights he had gleaned from the ‘other side.’ He explained how he worked: “If I’m telling you about someone, please don’t add anything to what I say. If I say ‘There’s an Ellen here,’ don’t say, ‘Could it be “Helen”?’ The spirits are quite capable of making me understand them, and if I’m getting it wrong, they’ll correct me. So if I tell you something about someone you’ve lost, I’m going to ask you to say only ‘Yes’ or ‘I understand.’ Please don’t give me any leads or clues beyond that.”

People nodded. Anderson, who was raised Catholic, made the sign of the cross, and began.

“There’s a spirit here named Michael. I get the feeling he’s relatively young. Does anyone know anyone that fits that description?”

Several hands went up. Anderson began to narrow it down – “He was killed in an accident,” and so on. Then he said to three women who sat next to each other, all with their hands up, “I’m drawn to you three. Can you please go to the microphone?”

They could.

“Michael is telling me that he has a different relationship with each of you. One is his sister, and one is his mother, and for one I’m seeing a symbol of a heart – his sweetheart.”

At this, the woman on the right, evidently the sweetheart, began to break down. Poor thing. You could see that she was a wreck.

“Michael is saying to me that the two of you were not actually married yet, but you had talked about it, and he wants you to know that he feels that you are married in his heart.”

The sister was now physically supporting the sweetheart, whose tears flowed like rain.

“In fact, you’re the one – when I was leaving to come here today, a spirit told me to bring something. I didn’t know this spirit, but he told me to bring something from my house, that he wanted me to give it to someone today. And here” – Anderson got up from his chair and walked to a table, and pulled something out from underneath it – “here it is. Michael wants you to have this – he says this is the type of thing he used to give you.”

It was a small, goofy-looking teddy bear, about the size of a small fist.

“Do you understand?” Anderson asked.

“Yes,” said the sweetheart. She could barely stand.

“He says this is the type of thing he used to give you, and that whenever you are feeling particularly low, you should look at this and know that he loves you.”

The sweetheart was not the only one crying.

“But he wants you to go on with your life. He says you’ve been coming apart at the seams – I get the feeling he was a very direct person, when he spoke – he says this out of love, but he really wants you to pull yourself together. He says you have wished that you could have died with him, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, sobbing.

“Yes. But he wants you to know that it wasn’t your time to die. That you are supposed to be here. And so you have to go on with your life.” cover Curious about this medium stuff? Check out Anderson’s book.

Anderson went on from there, talking to a mother who’d lost her son, a woman whose ornery brother had died, and so on.

As I sat there, watching and listening, I thought to myself, “You know, I really don’t need to hear from my dad. It’s been a long time, and a lot of the people here have a much greater need for reassurance. They’ve suffered losses much more recently . . .” and so on. I certainly didn’t want to get in line ahead of another mother who’d lost a child.

But then I thought to myself, “You know, I really would like to hear from my dad. In fact, I want to.”

In my head, silently, playfully, I said, “Hey, dad – if you’re here, why don’t you show up and say hi?”

Less than 30 seconds later, Anderson said, “Does anyone know a Bill, or Billy?” He laughed. “In a room like this,” he said, “there are probably 40 people who know someone with that name.” Indeed, as many as 20 hands went up. One was mine.

“He’s saying the name twice, as if there are two people with that name – one in the spirit world, and one on the Earth.”

Some hands went down.

“I’m getting the feeling that he’s family. He’s a family member for someone here.” More hands down.

“I’m getting a fatherly feeling.” My hand stayed up; I was too nervous to keep track, at this point, of how many others were still raised.

I was sitting about halfway back, on Anderson’s right as he faced the audience. Now he pointed at me, saying, “I think it’s you, sir. Could you go to the microphone over there, please?”  (Continued in next post)

(Originally published by The Guy Code, May 28, 2000.)