Interpolation: Communications with the Dead

The Goodbye Messages

John wasn't the first person to reach out to me from beyond the grave. (Strictly speaking he wasn't one of them at all: I reached out to him, via the mediumship of Ridge. He, I believe, reached out to me on the night he chose to die, while was still alive.)

There was my Nana, when I was four, which I wrote about in Chapter 2. As I grew older, I came to believe that had only been in my imagination, as my adults tended to explain many of my experiences. By now, I'm open to the possibility that it was a real communication. 

I was 40 the next time, and while there might be various explanations for what I experienced, imagination is not one of them. It was a very physical experience, felt bodily.

I had a dear friend who had had a troubled life from childhood. Not that there was anything victim-ish about her. She was a strong, vibrant, strikingly beautiful woman. When I knew her, she was a wife and mother with three young daughters of primary school age. My husband, Bill, got to know her husband through the fishing industry. Her daughters were close in age to my sons. We saw each other at work-related events, and the two families became friendly and began to socialise. She and I also developed a fond, sisterly friendship in our own right, and occasionally went out together just the two of us, for an afternoon drink and chat. She trusted me more than most people, I think.

The marriage wasn’t very happy, and eventually they separated, taking it in turns to have the children. We didn’t see each other in person for a few weeks, as she got settled into a different suburb, but I expected we would soon.

I woke up earlier than usual one morning, perhaps at first light, to find myself full of what I could only describe as ‘a white feeling.’ It included both peace and happiness. It was gentle, deep, and full of a kind of quiet wonder. The idea of Fran came very much into my mind, in a happy, unworried kind of way. 

Only a few hours later, her husband phoned to give us the news that she had died in the very early hours of that morning in a car crash, ‘under the influence’ and speeding.

Many of us believed it was what’s called a subconscious suicide, i.e. not consciously planned to end the person’s life, but in response to a very strong underlying wish to ‘end it all.’ And yes, I was very shocked and sad despite the early morning visitation, but I had no doubt she had come to say goodbye, and even to assure me that she was now finally at peace.

This doesn’t always happen when people close to me pass on, but there have been a few more occasions.

I was always very close to my dad’s younger sister, my Aunty Kathleen, known as Katy, but had not seen her for some time (for geographical reasons mainly) when she died. Even our affectionate correspondence had lapsed. (In those days, letter writing was how most people kept in touch.) In Katy’s final years she had that dreadful condition, motor neurone disease. 

I was visiting my Mum in Tasmania, when one evening the white curtain over a small (closed) window I happened to be looking at started fluttering gaily with no obvious cause. At the same time I suddenly had a strong mental image of my aunty, smiling at me in a fond, slightly teasing way that she had. Simultaneously, I felt a sense of delight and freedom. Sure enough, it was not long later that Mum received a call to say that Katy had died. (She and Mum were very fond of each other, and had stayed good friends even after my parents’ divorce.)

There have been several other such instances over the years. The most recent was my dear friend Dallas, a man I met in the same prison workshops where I met John. He was not one who had what I later identified as a criminal mindset (though everyone soon gets a prison mindset); it was a heroin addiction which put him there. This was a strictly platonic friendship, but a close, confidential, and loyal one. We had many interests and values in common, and after he was released our friendship continued. He worked for my husband, Bill, for a brief time, while he was getting back on his feet Outside. We later became friends, too, with the lovely life partner he found, visited her and their newborn son in hospital after the birth, and so on. Eventually we moved geographically distant from each other, but ended up as facebook friends, and used to chat a bit behind the scenes. He kicked the addiction before the baby was born, with the help of methadone, and had a long, happy and useful life after his time in prison. We always loved each other dearly.

He read my Pentridge memoir in first draft, in 2023, and told me it was good. Soon afterwards he became ill with what was first thought to be cancer, but turned out to be severe respiratory problems. He recovered somewhat, but his wife had some years earlier become an invalid, so could not care for him. His daughter eventually found him a home which could accommodate the fact that he needed to be hooked up to a breathing apparatus. He celebrated his 73rd birthday there, with balloons, feasting, and his loving family. The photo on facebook looked happy. I believed he had recovered from his illness, albeit with lingering consequences. I was looking forward to sending him the completed and published Pentridge book and its companion volumes of poetry. 

One night I woke briefly from a very deep sleep, to become aware that someone disembodied was standing in the open door to my bedroom. I knew this was someone who had come to say goodbye, someone tall, male, and kindly disposed towards me – but I couldn’t wake up enough to register more than that. I guess I made some kind of acknowledgment, just in the fact that I registered his presence. (And that’s OK; I know he would not have needed anything from me. It was more that he wanted to give me the farewell I would need.) Next day, I had the (to me unexpected) news of his death, and knew immediately who my visitor had been.

The Unknown Supplicants

In the course of my life, I eventually completed studies in a number of energy healing modalities, and received other kinds of spiritual development training, including past life regression and energy clearing – which I’ll deal with in forthcoming chapters of my narrative. Fairly early in this developmental period, I told the Universe, as a commitment, that my energy was available to be used for the good, as and if required. I've been taken up on that in various ways.

At a certain point – by which time I was comfortable with such happenings – I started being approached by spirits who were 'earthbound,' unable to move on, and wanted to use me as a conduit to do so. I knew this by sensing or feeling their presence, and got an immediate knowing of their purpose. (I didn’t enquire into and wasn’t told their personal details.) I found I didn’t have to do much to have this happen. Just having the intention seemed to work. I could feel them moving via my energy. (I don’t understand the details and could not really describe them. I am mainly clairsentient – knowing by feeling – and claircognisant – getting an ‘inner knowing – and that’s how I received this particular knowledge too. )

In the end, this was happening so often that I became quite blasé about it. Finally it became a nuisance, as they crowded around me more and more often. I do have other things to do with my life! I was happy to be of service, but not for such a large proportion of my time. I don’t know that I ever asked for relief, but I did become rather grudging, and would sometimes respond to requests with an impatient, ‘Wait!’ or ‘Not now!’

I think we are only given what tasks we are willing to shoulder. Anyway, the spirits gradually stopped coming to me for help to find their way home. I know I am not the only person who can do this service, and I did do it faithfully for a number of years, so I don’t feel guilty. 

 Other People's Loved Ones

I have also had brief contact with particular spirits on behalf of other people. For decades now, I've worked as a psychic medium, putting people who asked for it in touch with their late loved ones. In that case, I reach out to look for them, sending out a sort of call with my energy and intention. 

This work was given to me; people just started asking, so I decided to see if I could – and I could. Any training I had came from Spirit. My clients do confirm that what I am getting is recognisable as the person they are seeking. I always double check, describing bit by bit what / who I am getting. I don't want to waste anyone's time with the wrong connection!

Though perhaps 'wrong' can be 'right.' One lass wanted to get in touch with her beloved grandmother, who had just died. I started describing the woman I was seeing mental images of. After a short while, the client said, 'That's my other grandmother, who died when I was little.'

I'll address this particular form of communing with the dead – how it came about and how it developed – in my chronological narrative, 

14. Up Close and Personal

 

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. It was we, his friends who were left alive, with our connection to the living man, for whom it mattered. The guys in the prison knew I would feel as passionately about that as they did.

(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 of 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 John felt while he was alive, and also continued at the soul level after his death. A strong 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 loudly while in 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) which 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 to 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 from those he still loved in this realm, but there wouldn’t be the close, continual focus any more.