Post by Joanna on Aug 25, 2015 17:00:09 GMT -5
Sometimes Mediums Can Help the Bereaved
LOS ANGELES – When I was 21, I made two promises to my best friend, Julie, who was dying. They were youthful vows, born of deep love and deeper grief. The first was that I would name a child after her, if I ever became a mother. The second was that I would visit a psychic medium after she was gone and attempt to find out how she was.
Julie learned she had an aggressive form of leukemia during our junior year of college. Her illness sent a wave of shock through our peer group, shattering assumptions about our own immortality. The doctors and her family urged us to remain optimistic and not to speak of her possibly imminent death. But Julie wanted to talk about it. She herself had never known anyone who’d died. She asked me if I believed there was an afterlife and whether there would be anyone to greet her on the other side. I had lost my mother when I was 18, so I, too, was curious. We kept these whispered conversations to ourselves, fearful of being admonished for being morbid. In the end, the doctors could not cure Julie and we were forced to say goodbye.
Over the next decade, I made a mental note of every milestone with the knowledge that Julie had not reached each marker herself: college graduation, graduate school, marriage and motherhood. The birth of my first child was momentous. Becoming a mother revived old fears about mortality, but it also made me think anew of my vows to my friend – though I didn’t name our baby after her.
During the years since Julie’s death, I had become a grief counselor, working in a hospice. Consulting a psychic medium did not fit the parameters that held my life in place; it was certainly never a course I would have recommended in my job. Even so, having yet to make good on either of my promises, I booked an appointment with a celebrated psychic medium, John Edward, for a “private reading” with a small group. I told no one but my husband what I was doing; I made my reservation in secret, using a false identity.
The very idea of seeing a psychic medium seemed a betrayal of the clinical grief work to which I was committed. I was not only skeptical of “the paranormal,” but also feared that participating in an attempt to communicate with the dead could discredit me professionally. I boarded the plane to Long Island, where Mr. Edward lives, with apprehension. But also curiosity. After working closely with the bereaved for a number of years, I understood something about what grief can drive us to. Initially, I justified my visit to Mr. Edward as research: I would be able to observe the other attendees. But what place of desperation must they be in, I wondered, to shell out a $600 fee, as well as travel time and costs?
I had always viewed the afterlife through a frame of agnosticism. Now, as I contemplated this encounter, I suddenly found this lens felt lacking – a hindrance in the search for meaning, as I kept my vow to Julie. So I forced myself to open my mind and let go of long-held assumptions.
Nothing about the experience was what I’d thought it would be. In the company of 14 others, Mr. Edward attempted to communicate with our deceased loved ones. Superficially, I was impressed at his uncanny ability to come up with details about our lost friends and family members. He was right that the engagement ring on my finger had belonged to my mother. An easy guess, you might think, but he also summoned a story from my father about how he had taught me to swim. But what struck me more deeply were the remarkable parallels between that room and the hospital conference room where I led groups for grief counseling. I realized that in acknowledging our grief so openly – sharing that vulnerability and bearing witness to the details of the lives of the people we all missed so dearly – there was healing. There was a kind of communion that came from stepping out of the isolation of our individual griefs and into a realization that loss is a universal experience.
I still remained unconvinced of the claims of psychics, but my interest was piqued by the way different views of the afterlife can affect the process of grieving. In researching my book,* I attended sessions with dozens of mediums – some one-on-one, others as part of large groups. I went into each session with skepticism and I emerged with skepticism intact. Ultimately, I decided that the question of whether psychic abilities are real or not is irrelevant; the healing effects I saw, in myself and others, from visiting these mediums were real.
Julie never “came through” in any of the readings I attended. Yet my sense of connection with her was restored. And my fears about what happens next, the dread about mortality that came with motherhood, were diminished. My psychic research also informed and changed my work with clients, whether I was helping them to let go of a lost loved one or helping them find ways to feel connected.
Grief can be a long, arduous process. Plenty of research suggests the greatest factor in alleviating the pain of grief is simply the passage of time. Again and again, though, I see a healing shift occur in people who feel that they have found a way to remain close to someone they’ve lost. This seems to allow people to accept their loss better and find consolation in the idea that they are still connected.
How a visit to a psychic medium measures up against more conventional methods of alleviating grief – like anti-depressants, psychotherapy or empty-chair Gestalt technique – no longer concerns me. I do not recommend that all of my clients attend a reading, but I believe that for those who feel open to the idea, there can be value in the experience.
When my second daughter was born three years ago, I named her Juliette. Today, I feel proud of Julie for having had the courage to acknowledge death in the way she did. I have come to see that the work I do is to help others do the same. It is work we must all do – to quell our anxiety about what happens next, whatever that may be.
Source: Claire Bidwell Smith, The New York Times, August 22, 2015.
* After This: When Life Is Over Where Do We Go?
