Ridge continued to visit often. He became a close family friend over the following months and years.
Immediately after John’s death, I kept wanting him to act as a go-between (or what I would now call a psychic medium) to find out what was happening to John in the spirit world, and to carry messages between us. There weren’t many. I was given understand that John had other things going on now, and could not give his whole attention to me. (As to what those things were, that remained largely unexplained; not for those still in this life to engage with, I gathered.)
But he did answer some questions. When I asked if he was willing for me to bring out a book of his poems – after his notebooks and typescripts arrived in the post shortly after his death (his mates in prison, as I learned later, having taken it upon themselves to smuggle them out out to me for that purpose) – I was surprised that John in the spirit world didn’t care. Ridge passed on the reply that such earthly matters were no longer important to him, despite having been of great concern while was alive. He didn’t mind if I did or didn’t publish his poems.
(I obtained permission from his family, subject to their approval of the final manuscript, but in the end I didn’t go ahead. His best work had already appeared, only a short time before, in the Pentridge anthology, Blood from Stone.)
Sometimes Ridge was given information without my asking – though perhaps my thoughts and emotional energy were conveying a wish to know which was picked up on. One time, Ridge was flooded with a feeling intense joy, to convey John’s reaction to my loving him: ‘Joy to the point of tears,’ he told me. This, I understood, was what he felt while he was alive, and also continued at the soul level after his death. A sense of it was conveyed to me, emotionally and physically, as Ridge gave me that message. It was the most precious communication I could have received!
Ridge was also a trained hypnotist. One afternoon he suggested that he might be able to put me into more direct contact with Jon via that method.
I didn’t think I could be hypnotised (some people, apparently, can’t). The psychiatrist I saw in my twenties was a qualified hypnotherapist too, and when I was pregnant with my first child and told him how terrified I was of childbirth, he offered to try and hypnotise me to reduce the fear. After some time of my remaining wide awake, he told me I was evidently resistant to hypnosis so it was no use continuing. (I got through childbirth the same way I did other fearful things I couldn’t avoid: you get yourself there and begin, and then there’s no choice but to go on through to the end as best you can – even if inch by inch and trembling all the way as with rock climbing, or screaming and swearing as with childbirth.)
I agreed to let Ridge try, though. He said it might work better if I lay down on the sofa and close my eyes, so I did. I didn’t think that I was losing consciousness at all, but then I saw what seems to be a vision John, as I had known him, standing in a field of flowers. He looked up and saw me, and walked towards me, smiling. He seemed serene, well, and welcoming. Then the vision faded, and I came to, feeling reassured and deeply peaceful. Afterwards I realised that the clothes I saw him wearing were not the prison clothes (jeans and t-shirts) I had alway seen him in before. (He was wearing dark brown trousers and a white shirt with the top two buttons undone. Not that I was paying much attention too anything but his face.) When I did realise this, it seemed to me some kind of evidence that I wasn’t ‘just imagining’ this brief but comforting contact.
None of these happenings prevented my many months of deep grieving, but they surely kept me from plunging into absolute despair.
It seemed quite soon that Ridge told me John had, for the first time, sought him out with a message, on the previous night. Before that, he had responded to my communications via Ridge, but did not initiate any. This message was that he needed to ‘move on now’ and would not be available for such communications any more. Ridge didn’t know exactly why, only that there was work for John to do in the spirit realm, and he needed to give that his attention now. Not that he would be cut himself off entirely from those he still loved in this realm, but there wouldn’t be the close, continual focus any more.