ABOUT THE MEDIUM

Mr. Anderson explains it this way “I do not communicate with the souls, so much as they communicate to me. Their goal during a session is to reach out to their family that is still here on the earth and is something that they do willingly because they care about us and want us to know they have moved on to their reward. I am only the instrument.” It’s of no importance to Mr. Anderson to know anything about you or your circumstances or even your name.

Your loved ones that have passed tell Mr. Anderson whatever they are trying to communicate to you. Mr. Anderson then passes that information on to you. The only thing he ever says to you once he has relayed the information is for you to respond “Yes, no or you understand.” In my discernment I sat in a chair across from George. His ability is remarkable. I am still amazed at how detailed the communication was.

When it comes to mediumship, Mr. Anderson is definitely in a league of his own. For over forty years George has communicated with the departed. His ability has brought so much comfort and joy to so many. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, or what language you speak, he always has been able to communicate with the departed with uncanny accuracy.

I was fascinated when he told me that the prince of peace appears when children are involved. It’s comforting to know that Jesus is there for them and he will also be there for you. If you’d like to know more about Mr. George Anderson you can visit his website or read one of his many books that explains more about him and his ability.

With the express permission from Grief Support Programs we will be highlighting at the beginning of each month a chapter from the book WALKING IN THE GARDEN OF SOULS. For you to have a better understanding of how the process works and what the souls are communicating to George.

Walking In The Garden of Souls
The Life of a Medium

THE MIRACLE OF COMMUNICATION

One of my biggest idiosyncrasies is that I have no capacity to deal with noise. Not your common, everyday noises, but those insistent, irritating ones—like car stereos booming as they pass down the street, or someone shouting to another person who stands four inches away from them. This was the reason why, in 1987, I gathered together whatever savings I had and decided to move from my tiny apartment to a real home of my own. I had started doing private sessions from my apartment for people who either knew me or knew of me by word of mouth in the community, all the while keeping my full-time job with the phone company. It was a breakneck pace—nine to five o’clock at a switchboard and then six to ten o’clock at home with clients for the sessions. When relatives or friends needed to stay a while with me, I would have to conduct the sessions in my bedroom—some of those brave, pioneer clients at the beginning actually sat on the bed listening while I sat on the floor and discerned their loved ones in the hereafter. The hectic pace of work, the cramped space, and the insufferable noise of an apartment complex with walls as thin as paper sent me out into the home buyer market ill-prepared, but enthusiastic.

I am living proof of the old adage that the Infinite Light (or God, if you prefer) watches over fools and small children. I bought the second house I saw with no research or negotiating. The house cost more money than I thought I could ever raise in ten lifetimes, but somehow I was able to manage the down payment. By anyone’s standards, the house was an ordinary one on a nice street in a working-class neighborhood, but to me, it was a palace of peace and solitude in the country. I suppose if I had been less in a hurry about buying something, I would probably have made better choices (or cheaper ones, at least). But I was drawn to this house, not because of the backyard, or the extra bedroom, or an “eat-in” kitchen you could really eat in. In all actuality, it was the first-floor room that I was drawn to more than anything else in the house. It was, and still is today, the Quiet Room.

The Quiet Room had in it one overstuffed chair and two ugly lamps-the pole type that had its own little table built right onto it. They were parting gifts from the previous homeowners, who thought so little of them that it was easier to leave them in the room than to discard them. I accepted the furniture gladly, because there was no more money in my budget to furnish the room. The chair was also very comfy, and somehow it fit the feeling of the room. And the room did have a distinct feeling; there was a palpable energy about this room which gave it a feeling of calm. I knew immediately that this would be the room that I would do sessions in when I made the decision to leave my full-time job and devote my time to what the souls were insisting I do for years—concentrate on communicating their messages to their loved ones here. I continued to work in that room for many years, and the walls have heard many stories—some tragic, some hopeful, some disturbing, and even some funny. There have been literally thousands of people who have come and gone through that room, from here and hereafter, and somehow everyone has left their mark in one way or another. What I experienced in that room led to the writing of this book. The souls want to be heard. Not just individually to people one at a time, like in the sessions, but on a much wider scale—to as many people who will listen. That is the true miracle of communication with the souls in the hereafter. They want to help shape our understanding about the world around us and the world to come—the world they happily inhabit. I have found that through these messages, I am both student and teacher—I must learn, than I must teach others what I have learned.

Working in the Quiet Room was an ongoing education in mediumship. At the very beginning of my work with the souls and their loved ones here, I was much too earthbound in my philosophy—the tragic stories were really tough to hear, the injustice was hard to deal with, and the pain of otherwise wonderful people was hard to reconcile. What began happening as I continued sessions in that room, however, was that I was noticing how well the souls in the hereafter were taking their own passing. Their circumstance of death was not important to them—they reported the manner of their passing with no real concern. I also noticed that they didn’t care at all what became of their bodies on the earth. In fact, they now thought of their body as the old suit they wore when they were on the earth—discarded when it was no longer needed. I began looking and listening more carefully to the souls, and what I realized startled me. They are well—young, pain-free, able to walk and run, to experience joy again, and truly happy in the hereafter. It began to dawn on me that it really is rather a happy ending in the hereafter, no matter how bad we think their passing was. It is truly a case of the end justifying the means, and it gave me much better insight and more perspective on the souls and their passing. We on earth see our loved ones as dead, but the souls are more alive than we are. I finally started understanding that the exhilaration I felt during a session was the sheer joy of life the souls had in the hereafter. That concept changed forever the way I thought about the souls and my ability to hear them.

One of the most frequently asked questions of me is what it is like to communicate with the souls in the hereafter. My answer is to tell people I do not know what it is like not to communicate with the souls—to learn from their spirituality, their patience, their understanding, and sometimes their humor. The ability to hear and see the souls who want to communicate has been as natural to me as it is for people to see color; it is not extraordinary unless someone who cannot see color points it out. Only then does the process—seeing something someone else cannot—become extraordinary. The process of hearing or seeing the souls in the hereafter is not so much a question of “on” or “off”, but rather whether I am “tuned in” or “not tuned in.” The currents of electromagnetic energy that the souls use to communicate are always open, very much the same way radio waves are always in the air, regardless of whether the radio is on or not. The souls use these currents to communicate to each of us; but for some reason, my brain is able to tune into and organize their thoughts more clearly. When I hear the souls, I am very conscious and very aware on this level, but I am also conscious and aware on their level as well. It is very much like having a television on in the background while you are speaking on the phone. You won’t hear the television unless you consciously focus yourself away from the phone to the television. It is for this very reason that I feel like I am always listening to two conversations—one on earth, and the other in the hereafter. Even if the souls are not speaking, the line is always open. It is a constant in my life that took some getting used to, not only because I have to focus either on the souls or on the earth, but also because it makes me rather inattentive to the physical world around me. I have had many friends and coworkers laugh because they knew I did not hear a word they just told me—my mind was elsewhere, probably listening to the transmissions of the other side that I suddenly became focused on. It is like having each foot in a different world.

Even when I am not consciously focused to what the souls are telling me, they still have the ability to speak directly to my subconscious, where their messages will still be heard and noted whether I realize it consciously or not. This is the way the souls plant the seeds of hope within all of us without our realizing they have actually helped guide us. The souls want to help us without running our lives, so their suggestions whispered into our subconscious will still ring in us, whether we have actually heard them audibly or not. The only difference between myself and most people is that the souls can appeal to me directly and consciously.

Sometimes the messages from the souls are intended for others, like in a session, but sometimes the messages are told to me so that I can share them with the world about hope, peace, and fortitude during our struggles on the earth. There are some messages, however, that even I cannot understand, and they are told to me in a dream state so that I can receive the information without even being conscious of having received it. I regularly dream of St. Catherine Laboure’, who sits near my bed and speaks to my subconscious. I recognize in these dreams that the information she is giving me is quite profound and life-changing, but I am at odds to produce even one bit of information when I am awake. I think perhaps that is her intention, and it is the souls’ way of keeping me to a higher purpose in this lifetime without fully understanding what it is. It makes for an interesting irony—no matter how many times I hear from the souls, and no matter how many profound messages they give me, it is not for me to understand the earth and why things happen the way they do any better than anyone else who is struggling here. My relationship with the souls renders me no special treatment—I am a student here just like everyone else. I do know, however, that I have been entrusted with a special job while I am here—to give the messages of the souls in the hereafter a human voice. It is a responsibility whose importance I understand very well and take seriously, and have since the first time their works rang in my heart.

The wise words of the souls have always been in my life, at times whether I liked it or not, and guided my path here, again, whether I liked it or not. The souls are very much like concerned parents who know they must teach and protect, but also know when they must allow us to run free and stumble on our own. Each of us has a lot of learning to do, and I am no exception—the souls allow the gift of free will until all that freedom and lack of judgment sends us too far afield from where we should be. Then, without judging, they silently walk with us back to the straight road of knowing right from wrong. I know that if my emotions get the better of me in any situation and my thoughts go to the wrong way of handling it, I will be reminded in pretty short order that obedience to my spiritual journey is more important, and love stronger than hate. The souls know I am human, and prone to the same pettiness and childishness as everyone else, but they also have a job for me to do. I have to be able to communicate their messages of hope to their loved ones here, so the souls will step in when they need to, in order to ensure that I am communicating with clearness of mind and purity of heart.

THE MECHANICS OF COMMUNICATION

Although I have said this many times over the years, it bears repeating—I do not communicate with the souls, so much as they communicate with me. Their goal during a session is to reach out to their family still here on the earth, and it is something they do willingly because they care about us, and want us to know they have moved on to their reward. The souls communicate for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason by far is because they want to. They want to help us understand that all is not lost when physical life here is over, and that we are all on a road which will eventually take us back to them, where they are waiting for us in the grace and beauty of the hereafter. And the souls are waiting for us—they promise they will be there when we arrive. Forget what you might have read or hear about the “dead”—they are not resting, you will never be bothering them by thinking of them constantly, and asking for their help whenever you need it will not keep them from moving on in the hereafter. They have also told me without exception that they will help us to help ourselves here as often as they can, no matter how many times we ask them. For them it is a joy to help our spiritual growth on the earth, and they are in the hereafter working as our “guardian angels” so that we can come to the same reward in the hereafter when our time on the earth is done.

Another thing the souls have told me is that we can communicate to our loved ones on the other side whenever we want –they will always be listening. The souls have also told me that you don’t need a medium for the souls to reach out to you—the souls are able to communicate to us in many ways, even if they are not as clear as what I do in the sessions. Their goal is to help us understand that we are never alone in our journey on the earth, and very often people have reported to me having dreamt about their loved ones, or smelled a fragrance that brings a strong presence of their loved one with it, or even having seen them briefly. Those who haven’t had an experience of their loved one trying to reach out to them should not despair or become concerned; each of the souls has told me that when we are ready to understand and accept a sign from them, it will happen. They also caution us not to expect a “burning bush,” or other obvious signs, for proof that the souls are still around us; sometimes the signs are subtle and easily missed. Regardless, the souls assure us that they are always around when we need them, especially at times when we feel the most alone or frightened. Part of their spiritual growth in the hereafter is to guide us through the remaining years of our lives here—a job they are most happy and willing to do, for as long as it takes before they see us again.

I am glad to see that in recent years, there has been more of an understanding of mediumship and its value as a form of grief therapy. Hearing from our loved ones is a wonderful thing, if only to get closure and to help us understand loss as a temporary separation from our loved ones. As with any field that suddenly finds itself in vogue, mediumship is also fraught with people who claim to be able to teach others how to “communicate with the dead.” Although it is only my humble opinion, I do not for a second believe that mediumship can be taught, no sooner than someone can be taught to have blue eyes. There may be people who “feel” they can communicate with the souls, and even teach others to have this “feeling,” but if you could be me for five minutes, you would be able to tell the difference between a “feeling” and direct communication from the souls. Something physiological changes in my brain when I am listening to the souls communicate—it is almost as if I am dreaming awake. My brain waves will register a “sleep state” while I am fully awake during a session—something that has been tested many times through analysis of my brain waves while hearing from the souls. There is a very good reason why not everyone can hear from the souls in the hereafter, and it is the same reason why the souls will not prove to the world’s satisfaction that they are in fact communicating to the earth. It is simply an issue of faith. Part of our existence here is to live with some circumstances that the heart must understand even though they are illogical to the mind. The souls want us to believe in our hearts that there is a reason to bring peace, joy, and love to the earth in order to find the path to the hereafter. If the existence of the hereafter was proven to us without any doubt, then working toward a spiritual perfection would be something we had to do, rather than something we want to do. Again, the choice is up to us—to believe what our hearts see rather than what our minds understand. Part of everyone’s path on the earth is to keep our hope and faith in spite of tragedy and disbelief—a learning lesson that the souls there will never take from us. Besides, they have told me many times, we will find out for sure soon enough—when we ourselves enter the hereafter.

In the course of hearing from so many souls in the hereafter, I have found that the souls understand exactly what they are doing during a session, and will communicate the information they feel is necessary. They have a variety of jobs to do during a session—they try to help us understand that they do in fact exist, and they also want us to realize that they have been listening to us and following our lives since we last saw them. As much as it would make my job easier, I can no sooner make the souls tell their loved ones here what they want to hear during the session than I can make things work to my own satisfaction. It is up to the souls what they want to communicate. They do, however, know that we have a need to hear from one soul more than another, and they seem to also have the ability to answer the questions we have in our hearts, without our having to actually ask out loud. It is one of the most fascinating aspects of the sessions, and the reason why I don’t allow the sitter during a session to ask anything. If the souls are able to communicate, then they should also know who you need to hear from and why. I cannot stress that strongly enough. While I understand that they cannot answer everything for us, they will do their best to help us understand that they are looking out for us and are still with us.

I tend to caution people before a session that the souls will not perform “parlor tricks” for their family—in essence, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is, in fact, them communicating—but I do notice in some of the sessions that the souls will go out of their way to help us understand the value of their appearing for us when our hope needs to be bolstered. It often happens to me that I am visited by a soul, sometimes days or even weeks before their loved ones on earth will meet me. Their express purpose is to impress upon me to bring something with me to the session that is intended to help their loved ones here know for sure they have made communication. Sometimes it can be as simple as a prayer card, and other times they will be insistent that I bring an object of their choosing to the session. A while back, I was asked by a television program to allow them to film a session with a family. A few days before the taping, I was visited by a soul of a young man who insisted I bring a stuffed toy frog with me to the taping. So out we went, two days before flying to Cleveland, to find a gift shop that sells frogs. We walked through the mall, but all we could find were the usual teddy bears and dolls. No, the soul insisted—it must be a frog. Our last chance was a card store at the end of the mall. There we found what the soul asked for—one green stuffed frog. I packed it in my bag and took it with me to Cleveland. During the taped session with a lovely couple who had lost their son in an automobile accident, this soul made reference again to the frog, I told the couple that their son had impressed upon me to bring them the frog because it had significant meaning to them. They accepted it with a look of complete surprise and gratitude, indicating that, indeed, it had significance to them. It was only afterward that the couple told me that their son’s nickname for his father was “The Frog.” For some reason, it was important enough for the soul of that young man to appeal to me a few days in advance to bring proof that he was really communicating and was alive in the hereafter—something that his parents may have been struggling to understand. I wish the souls would do this for every family, but they don’t. By the same token, not every family needs to be convinced in the same way that their loved ones are communicating to them for sure. It seems that the souls know better than I do what is the best way to appeal to their family—something I will always be grateful to them for. In their own way—through the use of a certain phrase, a name, a circumstance, or even a physical prop, the souls are able to impress upon their families that they are really hearing from them.

Sometimes, however, no matter what the souls do to help us understand, their words fall on deaf ears. I had a mother and adult son come to see me, and during the session a young man appeared, telling me he was son and brother to the couple in front of me. Although he communicated about the circumstance of his passing, and gave information about the lives of his mom and brother, I could still see the look of skepticism and denial in his brother’s face. Near the end of the session, the brother blurted out, “What is his name?” I waited for the answer, and his brother in the hereafter set about the process of explaining to me that his name was Daniel. His brother, nonplussed by this information, told me, “That’s not what I called him—what does he tell you I called him?” I wondered whether this young soul was going to bother trying to convince his brother that he was really communicating, but he did, surprising even me. He showed me a cup of Dannon yogurt, and told me to drop the last letter. “He tells me it’s Danno,” I told his brother. I could see that the information surprised the gentleman, but he did not relent in his disbelief. He left the session in a huff—more disturbed by the information than comforted. Even the souls will concede that they can walk us to the river of understanding, but they cannot make us drink. Sometimes skepticism is borne more out of fear than disbelief—it might open up avenues that we are not ready to deal with. The souls are remarkably philosophical about this, however—they simply say “Each will understand in his own time.”

One of the wonderful things about my relationship with the souls in the hereafter is the humanity that comes in dealing with people on such a personal level. I have made some great friends, and I feel as though sometimes the sessions are as much for me to learn something as they are for the families attending. Sometimes I am moved by the pain of a family who must endure tragedy, and also will search for the lesson in their pain. Other times, however, in the middle of tragic circumstances come small moments of laughter, whether accidental or intended. This light in the midst of sadness is a gift from our loved ones that cannot be measured.

Not too long ago, I had a session with two lovely young women with a distinct Noo Yawk accent, who, as it was discovered in the session, were sisters. In the course of the session, their mother appeared and talked at length about having breast cancer, and having done all she could to survive long enough to see her daughters become young women. It was an emotional session—their mom spoke about having to put on a brave face and keep life as normal as possible in order not to frighten her daughters while she went through the battery of tests and treatments. In the end, she told me, she realized that this was the completion of her road on the earth, and now, she is trying to help her daughters not to be needlessly frightened about their own futures. I could tell that the sisters were having trouble coping with the information they were hearing, and at some points I would stop speaking and allow the sobbing to subside before moving on. I began to worry that the communication was going to be too much for them to handle. But the women tried hard to keep themselves together, and listened the best they could through their tears.

“Your mom tells me that she couldn’t initially accept her diagnosis…” I told them.
“Yeah….that’s true,” they answered, crying.
“…and she had a very rough time prior to her passing,” I continued.
“Uh-huh,” they both answered, wiping away tears.
“Your mom also tells me she fought it.”
“What??” The women looked at each other, and then to me, suddenly surprised.
“Your mom says she fought it,” I repeated, assuming they did not hear me.
The sisters looked at me, then at each other, and burst out laughing.
I was stunned by the sudden laughter. “What’s so funny?” I asked them, slightly aghast at the inappropriate response to the message.
“What did you say? My mother farted?”
“No, dear,” I said as carefully as I could. “FOUGHT IT.”
“Ohhh—okay,” they giggled.

I have to admit that after that “misunderstanding,” the session had a decidedly lighter feeling for the sisters, and thinking about it on my drive home later on, I laughed so hard I had to pull over for a few minutes. Although I still smile when I think of that session, I marvel at how the souls can help lighten the mood by creating a little humor in an otherwise tragic situation. I don’t believe for a second that any of it was accidental, after seeing how their pain was diffused, if only for a little while. The souls, once again, may manipulate things (or words) just a little bit to help lighten our load and nudge us, even giggling, back on the road to hope.

THE REALITY OF COMMUNICATION—FOR BETTER OR WORSE

Mediumship is a wonderful opportunity to hear more clearly the wisdom of our loved ones in the hereafter, and that information can have a profound and life-changing effect on how we look at our world and the world of the souls. The one thing mediumship cannot do, however, is bring our loved ones back. I know that sounds rather simplistic, and something everyone knows, but it does bear repeating. Very often we will get very frantic calls to the office from someone who has just lost a loved one. The calls are heartbreaking. In the hours and few days after a loved one has passed, we will all scramble for a way to understand and cope, but some people just can’t accept the passing and think if they could just communicate with their loved one, somehow they would stay alive. They tell me that what they want is a session-to hear that their loved ones are all right and at peace, but I know from my experience that what they really want is to postpone the inevitable pain of the grief process. But no amount of communication with the souls will bring them back to us in the physical form. It is up to us now to accept the passing, and there is no short-circuiting the process of grief. The only thing that saves us from complete despair is time and perspective. In time, the pain will be easier to bear, and we will be able to survive the grief—one more minute, one more hour, one more day, one more week. The souls caution us, however, that in this instance, we cannot rely on them to pull us through it—they can only assist us in our slow walk back to our senses.

Communication with the souls is also not a panacea for all our mangled hopes and misunderstandings about life, death, and the world around us. Many people have come to a session expecting that the souls will sort the pieces of our lives and put them into tidy order for us. They will not. The souls tell us that no matter how much they want to, they cannot live our lives for us and make the road any easier. We will still have to make our own choices and learn from our experiences the way we choose to. One time a woman, her two adult sons, and one adult daughter came to a session, and the woman’s husband (and the children’s father) spoke at length about the strife that had consumed the family since his passing. He even joked that he was glad he was no longer on the earth to have to deal with it. He let them know as best he could how much he loved them all, and while he was concerned about the lack of communication between siblings and mother, he knew that in time they would learn to focus more on what was important—the family. The bottom line, he told them, was to “not sweat the small stuff” and to value their relationships with each other more than trinkets and money. As the session came to an end, I looked up to find the family completely underwhelmed by the messages. “Well, I thank you for your time,” the woman said curtly as she stood up. “But I have a hard time believing that my husband would have nothing to say about who should get the house and who should get his watch. Ask him who they were supposed to go to.” Before I could even answer her, I heard her husband laughing in the hereafter, saying, “Tell her it’s her battle—I’m done.” I told her what her husband said, and one of her sons laughed. “That’s Daddy,” he said. The message had no effect on her attitude; she smiled tightly and left as her children said good-bye to me. I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed later on. I don’t expect everyone to feel like the sessions were an earth-shattering experience, but this woman sat through an entire session where her husband poured his heart out for his family, and the session was a failure in her mind because he did not conduct the session the way she thought it should go. As much as I know I have no control over what the souls will and will not talk about (free will cannot be changed, here or hereafter), it still bothered me that the souls do so much to help us understand what is really important, and we just brush it aside to hear about trivial matters. I wish I could be like the souls, who laugh and take it all in stride—but I guess that is part of what I need to learn here.

The question I am most frequently asked, especially by media, is how I feel about skeptics. How should I feel? We should all be skeptics of something we cannot see, feel, or understand. We will never really know for sure about the Garden of Souls until we find ourselves there. I only know what I have heard, seen, and felt from the souls in the hereafter, and although I can share this information, unless someone can be me for five minutes, it is very difficult to understand. It is impossible to believe something just because someone tells you. You have to feel it. What I’ve found, however, is that when people experience loss, suddenly, whether it is conscious or not, they desperately need to understand more about the souls and the hereafter. I do believe that it is one of the profound phenomena we experience when we are dealing with the loss of a loved one. I’m not so sure this need to understand is something that we come upon ourselves; I think it is something given to us by our loved ones in the hereafter to help us understand. Some people go their whole lives without being the least bit interested in a foreign country, until they know someone who has recently moved there. Then the need to understand another culture begins to creep into the thought process. It is very much the same when our loved ones move on to the hereafter—they have simply moved to another place.

I have found, however, that there are two kinds of skeptics—those who say, “I don’t know,” and those who say, “I don’t want to know.” I have to admit that the latter is the more difficult to deal with. I still meet people who think what I do is a bunch of bunk. They are entitled to their opinion, for a variety of reasons. First, many skeptics come to their opinions out of fear—fear of the prospect of accountability for our actions on the earth once our time here is done, and fear that their religion or philosophical understanding may not allow them the latitude to consider the possibility of communication with those whom they consider “dead.” This is always surprising to me, considering that almost all religions believe in life hereafter, and that their deities have spoken to the earth at various times throughout history. I watched in amazement a few years ago the great Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, considered the ‘mother” of all death and dying issues, handle herself during an interview with a Christian fundamentalist. This very educated member of the clergy told Elisabeth that belief in mediumship was “the devil’s work on earth,” and that nobody could communicate with the “dead.”

“You are a Christian, aren’t you?” Elisabeth asked him, through her halting Swiss accent.
“Of course,” he responded.
“And you pray to Jesus Christ, do you not?”
“Certainly, every day.”
“And he hears your prayers, yes?”
“Every one.”
“Then, my friend,” she said wryly, “you are communicating with the dead.”

As I mentioned, there are people who I know well who thought what I do is nonsense—that is their right. They thought that way right up until the time their loved ones communicated to them. I must say that when the souls want to make the case for belief in them, they tend to pull out all the good silverware. My friend Marta recently married a gentleman named Larry, who avoided the subject of mediumship every time we saw each other. While he never said anything directly to me about his disbelief, he did make it known to Marta that he had no interest in my work. But when Marta needed to hear the communication from her twin sister who passed on recently, he stood by her and accompanied her to the session. During the session, Marta’s sister announced to me, “Michael is here.” I looked to Marta with the information, but her sister told me, “No, not to her. To him—tell him Michael is here.” I turned to Marta’s husband and repeated what the soul said. There was a look of disbelief on his face. The next voice to communicate was a young male, telling me that he is related to Larry, a cousin, who passed on young.

“Yes,” Larry answered, visibly stunned.

“He tells me he fell from great height, and passes on young.” “Yes.”
“I don’t know what he means, I continued. “He says nobody knows him?”
“Yes,” Larry said, sheepishly.

Michael continued to communicate about his passing having a profound effect on Larry’s fear of death, but went on to explain that he is around Larry like a guardian angel, and that he was proud of Larry’s accomplishments. He ended the session by saying that Larry owed Marta one, for making it possible for him to communicate to Larry.

After the session ended, Larry was pale. Marta asked him why he had never mentioned having a cousin who was killed at an early age. Larry could only respond by telling her that he knew when they were dating that Marta knew me, and that if I was really able to “talk to the dead,” that his cousin Michael would find a way to get to him. Larry apologized to me, but there was nothing to apologize for. I told him how the souls had reminded me on many occasions, “Each in his own time.” But I must admit that the souls do love setting the disbelievers on their ears once in a while.

The only exception I will ever take when it comes to skeptics is when those who “know better” decide that it is up to them to champion the cause of the “Poor, lowly bereaved” who are being “duped” into believing that communication with their deceased loved ones is possible. The most insidious of the ‘skeptic police,” who tout themselves as “scientific experts,” feel they must “protect” the bereaved because they feel the bereaved are not in a correct frame of mind to understand that they are being “taken advantage of.” I have said many times that because I have held myself out as a medium and stand behind my work, I have no problem being the target of naysayers and skeptics. They can say what they want about my ability and are certainly entitled to their opinions. What I will never allow is attacks against the bereaved for their spiritual beliefs. I have never seen someone lose their capacity to reason or make qualified value judgments just because they lost a loved one. Being bereaved does not make someone stupid—just bereaved. It is amazing to me when I hear that even members of the bereaved person’s family will fight with them tooth and nail not to believe in the existence of mediumship, at the very time they should be understanding and eager to help—even if that means honoring a different way of thinking. I have found that my clients, nearly all of them in bereaved circumstances, have done their homework with regard to mediumship, and are quite savvy, when it comes to placing their trust and hope in communication with their loved ones in the hereafter.

As with everything on the earth, time will tell. I have heard in many sessions the souls telling their loved ones here, “There is a hereafter, and you will soon see it—one of us will be proven wrong, and it won’t be us. When it is your time to graduate from the earth, you will never be so glad you were wrong.” The souls understand we are working under a severe lack of information, and they applaud our faith and hope in spite of it. I have had sessions where a soul would tell me, “When I was on the earth, I thought this was a lot of hooey. Boy, was I glad it isn’t.” What I find most interesting is that those who were the most opposed to the idea of communication with the hereafter actually make the most active communicators from the hereafter. They will do what they can to help those who are frightened by the prospect of life hereafter to have an easier transition to this understanding, whether it happens here or there. Like the souls say, each in his own time.

Communication with the souls truly is a miracle—of hope, of love, and of understanding. The souls have told me that nothing we endure on the earth will be too much for us to bear, and that no experience where we learn to be better people is ever wasted. I know in my lifetime of listening to the souls that the communication will never be perfect or understood by everyone. But the souls remind me that no matter how deaf we become to the wise words of the hereafter, they will never stop trying to send messages of hope to the earth.