Delve Into The Mystical World

This may be a bit controversial, but I like psychics. Astrologists, mediums, tarot card readers, even palm readers fascinate me. Not the carnival or boardwalk type, who offer noncommittal generalizations, such as “you like being in a group, but also like to be alone” or, “you like the city, but also like the country.” I’m also not fond of the ones who ask too many questions and know too many details. I remember once when a reader knew too much – used too many familiar phrases and nicknames - almost like she had read my sister’s, brother’s or parent’s obituaries and then regurgitated that information back to me.

No, I like the ones that take you by surprise and who relay seemingly impossible-to-know facts during a session. Recently, I had such an experience. A few years ago my friend had purchased four tickets to a local firehouse medium event. Two mediums, one man and one woman, were to present a program for a group of just 30 individuals. When purchasing the tickets, she gave only her name, not the names of the other three people in our party. In fact, we could not even all sit together, as the folding chairs were spaced apart and in rows of only three across.

The evening started out with the mediums introducing themselves and their individual styles, backgrounds and expertise. Both were authors and had come to understand their abilities along very different paths. Participants were told that if they heard a message or description that resonated with them, they should raise their hand, as often messages will be meant for more than one person at a time. Other than that, there were no ground rules. Simple enough.

The woman went first, seeming to receive messages for various people in the group. Suddenly she came over to my row and said, “does the name Eleanor mean anything to you?” Yes, I confirmed, Eleanor was my mother’s name. The medium told me my mother was concerned because there was a lot of talk about the way she died, and not about the way in which she lived. She said my mother loved her life, and did not want us to remember her by the way she had died. This made sense to me because, at the end of nearly 8 years of my family meticulously caring for her, my mother had passed alone in an unfamiliar hospital at 4 am, only an hour after my sister and I had left, having been by her side for over 24 hours prior to her passing. Message received: celebrate life and do not dwell on death.

The medium went on to say that she was with another, younger woman, who was a teacher in life, (she did not mention her name, but I thought this must be my eldest sister, who passed at age 54 and who was, in fact, a teacher during her professional career) and that they took great joy in watching over her granddaughter and her toddler and soon to be born baby girl. Whoa. Pretty specific stuff because my sister’s granddaughter had a toddler and was pregnant with a second girl (that would be my mother’s great-granddaughter and great, great grandbabies.)

The man spoke next and read for various other people in the room before coming back to me. “Do you know a man whose name begins with the initial B?” He described him further as a “mountain of a man.” My brother Brian passed in 2020. To be fair, Brian was his middle name and the name by which we called him. His first name was James, so I was already impressed that he didn’t come across as a J name, but a B. Brian was 6’6” and indeed a force with which to be reckoned. The medium went on to say that Brian was with a woman whose name was Teresa – no, he corrected himself, like Teresa. Teresa was my eldest sister’s name, although we exclusively called her by her nickname, Tera. The presenter then asked, “you are married?” and he stated that my husband had cancer – yes, I said. He said, “here?” pointing to his neck area – I confirmed my husband had head and neck cancer. He thought a minute and said, “Brian wants you to know he’s working on that miracle.” I sat frozen in my chair. My mantra, in that five and a half years since my husband’s initial diagnosis, and every time the cancer returned was, “If you don’t expect a miracle, you won’t get one.” Tears began to prick at the corners of my eyes, yet he went on, “Brian shows me that you are surrounded by books; rows and shelves of books. What do you do?” Smiling, I replied that I was a librarian. I felt outed, and the audience laughed, but only I knew that my office is quite literally in the middle of the library. When I open my office door I am met with stacks and shelves and aisles of wonderful, joyful, soulful books. [Full disclosure, my husband did pass six years after his journey began. When I think about this now I wonder if the miracle described wasn’t that he would survive the disease, but that we got extra time with him and to bear witness to the indelible human spirit with which he fought.]

Make of that what you will: confirmation of an afterlife? The existence of spirits or angels? A vivid imagination and a series of tremendous coincidences? Huge, lucky guesses? Or, just that my mother, brother and sister were so loquacious in life, that even the great beyond would not silence them.

I know what I believe.

If you are interested in learning more about the mystical, Mercer County Library System has a variety of titles available: