Meeting Grandpa Mason

I have this silly little head game I play.  If it ever comes up in conversation, I say that I never met my grandfather when he was alive.  Most of the time this comment goes right over the head, but now and then someone gets my meaning and gives me either a strange or a knowing look.  I will also clarify – this is not the musical grandfather – that was my mother’s father.

This happened in about 1996 so this is the first trip I’m posting in the Way Back Machine.  But since Grandpa Mason was the second person to show up in my first reading, I am going to take a brief detour and post about my past history with him.

At the time this happened, my sister and I were getting back into the family genealogy project.  Our family has been researching itself for at least four generations; Linda and I picked up where my mother left off.  The odd thing is we weren’t even researching my dad’s side of the family when this happened.

My sister was living in California in those days.  She was flying in that evening for a visit.  I’d left work early so I could pick her up at the airport.  It was about 3:00 in the afternoon and I had a half hour or so before I had to leave, so I decided to lie down and take a short nap with my dog.  The dog we had at the time was Crystal – a nervous, yappy American Eskimo Dog.

I fell asleep, then opened my eyes and found myself lying on one of those sofas with the bumpy irregular upholstery that everybody seemed to have in the 1960’s and 70’s.  I sat up and there – right in front of me – were my deceased grandparents.  They were sitting in front of a window across the room from the sofa.  Really bright white light was streaming in through the window behind them.  Grandma was sitting in a chair and Grandpa was sitting on the ottoman that matched the chair, slightly in front of her.  My mother was sitting in another chair off to the right (she was alive then, but was still in this dream for whatever reason).  They (the grandparents) just radiated this intense feeling of warmth, love, peace, happiness ….

I’d never been in this room before but I recognized a lot of my grandmother’s furniture.  I am pretty sure she still had that chair and ottoman in the apartment she lived in during my lifetime, and her floor lamp with the embroidered shade, antique table, and some other things were also there.  To the right was a doorway going into another room that looked like it was either a dining room or a kitchen.  What is difficult to convey is how REAL all of it was.  I remember the way it smelled.  I remember the way it felt.  I knew it was somewhere they’d lived before I was born.  Lucid dreams are very much this way – they seem more real that waking reality does.

They hadn’t said anything at this point.  They were just smiling at me.  The dog was also on the sofa with me so I picked her up, carried her over, and put her on my grandfather’s lap.  He started petting her and I said, “Well, I guess she isn’t afraid of ghosts!”  They all laughed!

However in waking reality something had woken up the dog, and she was beginning to growl.  Even though I was asleep and in this lucid dream I could feel the dog growling next to me.  I knew that in a few seconds she was going to bark and wake me up.

They knew it too – they all stood up like it was time to go home – just like the end of a normal family visit on planet Earth.  Grandpa Mason was standing right in front of me and I can remember exactly how tall he was, how he looked, how he smelled.  There was something that caught my attention about his shirt.  It didn’t look like a normal store bought dress shirt.  It was very white and very starched and carefully laundered.  I started to get kind of emotional and teary eyed.  “At least I got to meet you once!” I said.

He gave me a hug goodbye.  He was tall, thin and had very broad shoulders.  Then the dog barked and I woke up.  I was completely freaked out!  Still crying a little I called my mother and told her all of this.  She immediately clammed up.  This was before they were very comfortable with the fact that I did this kind of stuff (and that they did it too) so she was rather evasive when I described the room.  Years later, when all the fear about these experiences had blown over, she told me that it was the living room of the little house in Kinlock where they lived in after Grandpa retired.  She said it was Grandma’s favorite house.  She had to move away from it after Grandpa died – she moved from there into the apartment where she was living when I was born.

When I picked my sister up at the airport I told her this story right away.  She looked at me kind of funny.

“Didn’t you ever hear that story about how Grandma saw Grandpa the day after he died, standing at the foot of their bed?”

“No!” I said.  “It happened five years before I was born!”

“Oh, I guess you’re right!” (They always forget I wasn’t there)  “Well, she did!  It was in broad daylight – she walked into the bedroom and there he was.  She never did tell us what they talked about.  But anyway – she said that he was wearing a shirt she made for him right after they were married.”

If that isn’t enough eerie history with this grandfather, there is one more story.  This is part of the whole I-was-originally-supposed-to-be-born-in-1956-drama of my childhood.  Somehow I went on a 13 year detour and by the time I finally showed up, I was shocked and horrified by how old everybody was and the fact that 3 out of 4 grandparents had died off.  In first grade one day they took us all to the school library and read us this story about family relationships.  There was a grandfather in this story and as soon as I heard it, I freaked out and started bawling and screaming.  The teachers could not get me to stop it so they took me to the nurses’ office, who also gave up and called my mother to come and take me home.  After rocking me in the rocking chair for a while she got me to settle down enough to tell her what happened.  And then she told me this story.

“When the other kids were little Grandma and Grandpa Mason came over every Sunday after church.  And he always brought a bag of penny candy for each kid.  But the funny thing was, he always brought four bags.  He never told us why he did this and I usually ended up eating the extra bag of candy.  But I think it was because he knew you would be born someday.”

I quit bawling and life returned to normal (for the time being, anyway).  Years later she denied this insisting she made the story up to get me to shut up, but did have to admit that he DID bring four bags of penny candy each week.  Why?  I guess I should ask him the next time I see him.

Getting Real: Professional Medium Reading One

I did my homework before I took this step.  I had read about a dozen books by this time (see Recommended Reading Page) and learned about the Veritas Project at the University of Arizona.  This project has completed but resulted in more research into the survival of consciousness and mediumship, as well as a non-profit organization The Windbridge Institute For Applied Research in Human Potential.  Beyond being just another research program about ESP type stuff (the government has been doing this for decades) these programs actually studied mediumship in a controlled laboratory setting.  And they were able to rate and certify the mediums based on their accuracy rate!

According to the strict scientific definition, a medium is "an individual who experiences regular communication with the deceased".  That pretty much makes me one.  So this is where I get up in front of a crowd of people and say "Hi, my name is Laura and I am a medium".

Anyway, through a long (boring) process of looking for people who were certified by these programs in various ways, and had good recommendations, I eventually located three different mediums.  The first reading I had was with Denise Lescano.  Denise resides in Florida.  Not that it matters - everybody I found does readings over the phone.  There is no time or space on the other side.  It doesn't matter how far apart the medium and the subject are.  These folks also conduct their readings under the same conditions as the laboratory experiments.  They go to great lengths to set things up so that they know nothing but your first name.

It was a sunny but cold day in late November in 2009 when I had my reading with Denise.  As suggested, I'd arranged for a quiet place where I could relax and nobody would interrupt - in my cat room by the fire.  I had it during the day while my son was at school and Bill knew what was going on and purposely avoided coming in so as to not mess things up.

She called me and explained a little about how the process works, then had me relax and concentrate on who I wanted to contact (Mom?  You there?).  The first guy she got I had no idea who he was - turns out, he was my dad's uncle Archie!  Denise did warn me that I could get information for other people, and they all knew full well and I was going to run over and play the recording of this reading for Dad the very next day.  So tons of relatives I'd never heard of - but he had known very well - showed up to tell him  

Next was my dad's father - Grandpa Mason!  I never met him when he was alive (but I did after he was dead, and I will post about that when it is time for a "way back machine" post).  He told her I was "a coal miner's daughter" - a family joke because Grandpa Mason was actually a coal miner.

At this point Denise says "hold on, there is someone here - I believe it is your mother.  That's who you really wanted to hear from, wasn't it?  She says to not worry - she is here but wants to let a few other people say hello first."  Which is EXACTLY the kind of thing my mother would say.

After a few more of Dad's childhood relatives recorded their greetings, Denise went back to my mother.  "She says she gave you a sign," she explained.  "She is showing me a picture of a blue butterfly."

"Yes!" I said excitedly.

"You were somewhere and you saw a blue butterfly?  Or one was following you?"

"Several, " I said, and told her the story about the train ride and the butterflies.

Then I got to hear from all of the Aunt Farm aunts, Grandma Mason, Grandma Anderson - they were all there.  It was hard for Denise to separate out all of these family members.  It was hard to do that when they were alive too!

Then a shocker: "I have a man here who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head!"  This is my husband's step father.  He did commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, about two years prior.  He was there with "Gladys."  I had no idea who Gladys was until Bill listened to the recording.  That is HIS grandmother!  George and Gladys show up at almost all of my readings.

My mother did not want to tell Denise that she too had committed suicide.  She lead her all over the place - the knee replacement, the infections, the beginning of dementia - but eventually I had to rat her out.  Denise was shocked - she said they almost always tell her right away (she has worked extensively with suicide survivor groups).  My mother got upset and apologized profusely for doing that and went on for a few minutes about how awful it was when Dad found her body.  I found this very interesting because I could not get her to talk about the suicide at all before this.  I had a few short dreams where I encountered her and tried to ask if she went into the light that night, or if she stayed earthbound until after I lost contact with her after her funeral, and who came to help her cross over (Jesus, sisters, parents?).  I mean, inquiring minds want to know!  But she would just look away and not answer or vanish outright.  It was another year before she was really willing to talk about it.

By now it was nearly the end of my hour and I asked if I could talk to Grandpa Anderson.  She got him easily (they were all there - going back many generations as she put it).  I asked about the music.  He told us he had classical lessons on violin and piano growing up at a local music store, and he was pretty sure there was still documentation that the store existed that was findable.  He gave the name of a violinist who was his role model - Fritz Kriesler.  I'd never heard of this guy and neither had Denise, but my classically trained violinist husband recognized the name immediately.  This guy - like my childhood piano playing displayed - was into a lot of Romantic style phrasing and RUBATO.  Then Grandpa told me to go sing - he said I had a huge range (turned out to be almost 4 octaves) and it would be like Susan Boyle.  People who had known me my whole life would be shocked when they heard me.  He gave me information for the CD and even better - he followed up with even more information via dreams - more posts on that to come!

Where The Music Came From

An adverstisement for
our piano - back in the day!

OK, so this unbelievable piano falls in my lap (continued from Synchronicity, Dreams, and Antique Pianos).  After it is safely installed in our house I remember that I have all of my childhood piano music packed in a couple of file boxes in the cubbyhole.  So I venture into the cubbyhole and drag it all out.  As I am sitting there in the bedroom sorting this music, I being to remember and think.

I got a piano when I was 12 years old.  It was a hand-me-down from the church.  A huge old upright, it was once a player piano until someone did a - what would you call it - a player-ectomy.  It still had the place where you put the rolls in and since that mechansim was long gone it gave you a pretty good view of the hammers and soundboard.  Anyway, this thing got moved into my parents' basement - which served the function of way today would be called a family room.  My mother produced a big pile of piano music.  Where did this come from?  I never thought about it then, but now I realized it must have come from the Aunt Farm!  And given the age of the stuff, at least some of it must have belonged to Grandpa Anderson (my mother's father).  From what I knew then he was a traditional old time fiddler.  What I didn't know at the time was that he was also classically trained on violin and piano in the 1890's - early 1900's.

While going through this box I found it - two handwritten manuscripts of tunes he'd written down, in the 1930's it appears, most likely to teach my uncle how to play.  Between the two of them they have 116 songs of varying age and origin - a very interesting collection!  And more than enough upon which to base a CD!  Funny thing is though, I couldn't figure out how they got in there when I'd never seen them before!

Fast forward a few days.  We had a gig at the Ramada Inn in Ligoner - it is a standing gig we have had for years.  Earlier that day we had a musical friend for lunch and I showed him these notebooks.  Later that day we went to Ligonier.  There are two songs that we do where I have to play fiddle.  I am a lousy fiddle player  but that night I sounded great!  It was like my arms and hands suddenly knew what to do.  On the way home I made the connection - I'd touched those notebooks only a few hours before.  I have had psychometery (reading objects) happen to me before.  I tried to play the same songs the next day and I sounded just as bad as ever - like I was strangling a cat.

While I was at the National Flute Convention in New York I bought a series of books we'd been trying to find for a long time.  Published by Oxford University Press, they are style guides for music of various periods.  One of them is the Romantic Period (early 19th century) and it included a CD of music recorded on wax cylinders and marking pianos (recording pianos) in the 1890's.  One track is a piano student of Schumann playing a piano piece in the true romantic style.  The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Why?  Fact is, nobody ever taught me to play piano.  I just did it.  After the church gave us that piano, it took me about three months of messing around before I was playing Beethoveen piano sonatas.  Aunt Mary & Uncle Harold (my father's sister and her husband) came to visit and were all impressed - Uncle Harold used to tell my parents to send me to Juliard.  Later on when I played for piano teachers they were always correcting the way I played - sometimes the left and right hand were not perfectly together, and I sped up and slowed down a lot (there is a term for this - rubato).  But nobody was into rubato in the 1970's!  Yet here I was hearing this person who was taught to play by Schumann - playing the same way I did as a kid having never been taught anything!

That's when I realized it: I'd been somehow channelling Grandpa Anderson's music.  And given that Grandpa Anderson had some serious issues and that things were getting weirder by the minute, I decided I had to KNOW once and for all if this was all just a figment of my wild imagination or if this was all for real.  I decided to book an appointment with a professional medium.  If this person told me all of the same stuff I was getting without knowing beans about me - then there must be something to it!  If not, well ... then I could try and go back to being normal?  Not that being normal was ever a possibility for me ...

Birthday Message: A Sychronicity

Many ADC's take the form of a sychronicity - something unusual that happens and you think, that just can't be a co-incidence!  It involves something closely associated with the deceased person, usually with a deeply personal connection.

The fall after my mother died I had my 40th birthday.  I was dreading it for a number of reasons - heck - who doesn't dread their 40th birthday!  I wondered if I would really feel terrible having a birthday after my mother died, and I am not very excited about being over the hill either.  So I pretty much decided to ignore it.  Still, the dreading of it made the two weeks before a bit tense.  I find it is often like this - the dreading of "whatever" is worse than the actual "whatever".  Nowhere is this more true than for Christmas - but that is another post.

So the birthday came and went.  Nothing happened.  I didn't feel any worse on that particular day and I was well on my way to forgetting it.

Then a day or so later - I can't remember exactly - I had a stream of numbers running through my dreams.  39403940394039403940394039403940394039403940 ... all night!  I was kind of going in the background and every once in a while it would break through and become very hard to ignore.  At the time I knew that it had something to do with my mother, but it being a stream of digits I didn't get it.  It is sometimes very difficult to access the left brain during sleep, even when fully lucid.  My deductive reasoning can be pretty far off and I miss the obvious.

So the next morning I woke up and was getting ready to leave - I had to be somewhere fairly early in the morning.  I realized, once awake, that the digits were 39 40 39 40 ... the significance being I was 39 turning 40!  I thought, was that Mom?  Then I thought, naw - I am just starting to imagine stuff because of all the experiences I have had so far.

I got in the car, started it up, then turned on the radio and hit "seek" like I normally do.  The dial stopped on a station we do not get.  I have never had this station before and I have never picked it up since, but that day it was as clear as a bell with absolutely no static.  It was 95.1 - there is a 95.1 in Washington DC (257 miles away) and Washington state (2400 miles away) both of which are pretty improbable!  Over this radio station that I shouldn't be able to receive I hear these lyrics, from a Simon & Garfunkel song circa 1966,  loud and clear:
Yeah, it's gonna be all right.
Yes, the worst is over now the morning sun is rising like a red rubber ball.

Besides the obvious message here this song has a meaning for me that only a few people - my mother included - understand.  It is one of my earliest memories.  People in my family also tend to be able to remember being much younger than the general poplulation.  I can remember my first Christmas, and I was between two and three months old!  My memory of this song is a little later - that summer or fall - I was able to walk and was toddling around on the porch wearing nothing but a diaper.  I was carrying - ironically - a red rubber ball and this song came on over the radio.  I guess the irony of this situation stayed with me.  My mother was also on the porch and also remembers it.  We used to talk about this kind of stuff all the time.

That is how I KNEW that was my "happy birthday" from my mother on the other side!

PS - ghosts - or spirits or people on the other side or whatever you choose to call them, can manipulate electronic devices and electricity.  Including, apparently, very distant radio signals!

The Dream Cell Phone - A First Method of Contact

I had a dream that my husband and I were on my parents’ deck rehearsing some music.  We had a disagreement about something and started to bicker.  I got annoyed and went into the house.  I decided I was sick of this diet (I started a diet with Bariatric Weight Loss, and eventually did loose 50 pounds), and I wanted a dang fried egg!  Besides, I reasoned, you can't gain weight from something you eat in a dream. [Note: I Lucid Dream - see the Lucid Dream page for more information]  While I was making the fried egg my cell phone rang and it was my mother!  I started telling her about the disagreement and other dumb day to day stuff, just like I did when she was alive.  I ate the egg at the kitchen table, still talking to her.  Then I walked out to the sun porch and noticed something strange.

“Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but the forsythia bush is blooming.   But it's fall!  Isn’t that only supposed to bloom in the spring?  I am going to check it out,” I told her.

Still holding the cell phone, I went downstairs and went out the back door.  I saw that the forsythia bush was not blooming.  What I was seeing were roses blooming that had grown through the forsythia.  There was a huge rose trellis behind the shed that had four sides.  Both yellow and deep pink roses were blooming on it in huge numbers, and then overgrowing into the yard in all directions.

“You are not going to believe what your roses did!” I told her.  I described how they were growing everywhere in abundance.  I was running through them and throwing petals up in the air.  Then I remembered the wisteria bush at the Aunt Farm [see below of explination].

“Hey, do you think that giant wisteria bush that we saw back at the aunt is still there?  Do you remember that crazy thing growing up that huge pine tree in the back?” I asked her.  She said she thought it was still there.

The dream changed, and I was sitting on an enclosed porch with my mother that was on the side of the house where the bedrooms are (this porch does not really exist).  She had her cane and I was helping her come down the steps from the porch door, so that we could go back into the house.

Note: I looked up rose color symbolism on the internet: Deep pink roses mean gratitude, and yellow roses mean friendship and happiness.  A blooming  bush means development and personal growth.  Eggs can symbolize creativity.

The Aunt Farm - when my grandparents got too old to live by themselves, three of my unmarried aunts moved back in to help take care of them.  After my grandparents died they kept the arrangement.  And it was an old farm - hence the "Aunt Farm".  One of them had a boyfriend who we all called The Ardvaark!

The dream cell phone becames a regular method of contact from this time on.

Mediumship At Work This Past Week

I decided to interrupt the long dialog I have going on my experiences with my mother to write about a series of events that happened just this past week.  It felt like a major milestone for me - instead of these things being entirely an "inner" experience, for the first time they were occuring specifically for the edification of someone else, and I was the intermediary.

Last year some long time friends of ours from one of our musical pursuits was diagnose with lukemia.  This couple had suffered a great deal over the year before that due to an accident suffered by the wife - Toni - when she fell off a ladder.  Having her husband Bob dealt this blow while they were still struggling to deal with the fallout from Toni's injuries.  She made a pretty remarkable recovery - we all feared she would be confined to a wheelchair.  But as anyone who has gone through something like that knows, there are always long term complications to be dealt with.

I think on some level we all felt that Bob would recover because it would be just too unfair otherwise!  We heard through a mutual friend that Bob wasn't doing well a month or so ago - was still in the hospital undergoing a lot of treatments but things seemed to be taking a turn for the worst.

Then this past weekend I had a dream where I saw Bob's newspaper obituary.  It was brief and I almost forgot about it, but something the next morning jogged my memory.  I told Bill about it and suggested that he should call Toni because Bob might not be here much longer if the dream meant what I felt it did.

So a few days later Bill did call and Toni told him that they had stopped treating Bob's cancer because it had advanced too far, and had sent him home on hospice care.  She invited us over to see him, as he had been enjoying all of his friends coming to see him as people heard about what was happening.  She asked him who told us and he made some kind of excuse, not wanting to tell her over the phone that his wife had some freaky dream!

On Friday night we went to see Bob, who although weak was still very much himself.  I was really nervous about this visit!  Nervous because I felt I'd been tasked with giving them a message, but I didn't know what - or giving them a reading, which I don't know how to do!  Or maybe offending them badly and being run off with torches and pitchforks.  But I sucked up and went because you have to learn to trust the process, and I really wanted to see them before Bob crossed over.

We get there and go into Bob's room, which is absolutely cracking with otherwordly energy.  As soon as I walked in I got a mental image of a man we met when visiting Toni in the hospital a year and a half before.  He also had lukemia from what I remembered, although this was long before Bob had his diagnosis.  I remembered him telling us about how he discovered he had it after he was just dog tired for weeks, and couldn't figure out why, then when to the doctor and the next thing he knew he was getting chemo!

Bill took his violin along because Bob also plays, and in fact had taken a few lessons from Bill over the years.  When Bill took his violin out I realized who was behind it - Grandpa Anderson!  I realized that Grandpa Anderson REALLY likes my husband - thinks he is a great violinist and wishes he could've played that well when he was alive.  But my husband is kind of leary of Grandpa Anderson, party because he's dead and partly because he was a character when he was alive and well, he had some issues.

So Grandpa Anderson is all excited because Bill showed up and is going to play, and I realize he has some connection to the zillions of friends and relatives Bob has hanging around helping him out through this process.  I know they are there because I feel like I am connected to an electric fence, and if I let my eyes de-focus I can kind of make out the outlines of them, like auras.

In the subsequent conversation I learn that the nice guy we met while Toni was in the hospital has since died and he is the first person Bob wants to see on the other side.  He won't have any trouble finding him because he's already there - that's why the image of him popped into my mind the minute I walked into the room.

I tried to do what I've heard other mediums do - I asked them if anyone close to them who died was into collecting or keeping up with obituaries.  They didn't take the bait so I thought maybe that was my queue to shut up.  After all these people are deeply religous and leaning heavily on their faith during this crisis, and maybe they don't want to know that we are here because of a psychic dream and that the room is full of dead people (albiet ones that are already in the light and are there to lend support).

But alas, after we left Bob to get some rest and went downstair to talk to Toni and her sons alone, Bill outed me.  Toni asked again how we knew and Bill said because I had a dream.  And the reaction was pleasant and curious, so I told them the whole story including the high points of what happened to me when my mother died.  I explained that someone in Bob's past family history knew my Grandfather and went through him to get a message to me, for no other reason that to let them know that Bob will be OK and that, well, their loved ones on the other side know what is happening and care enough to hunt someone who can bring them this message.

I could tell that this comforted them a great deal.  It is one thing to have faith that you have been taught and trusted because you made a conscious decision to do so, but another to KNOW.  And the knowing is on many different levels.  As we go through life's experiences we (hopefully) move farther on the contiunium from mere belief to that kind of knowing.  I think having a validating experience that can only be explained by paranormal means is often a jumpstart to that kind of knowing.  At least I hope so.

I am encouraged because this ability is starting to become more outward focused instead of being exclusively a solitary experience.  Because honestly for it to be an inward experience alone would seem like kind of a waste, when there is a whole world out there dying inside because is it afraid of death.

The First Butterfly

Late in August my sister, my son, and I took my dad on a tourist train excursion.  The Kiski Junction Railroad is located near where the Kiski and Allegheny Rivers merge and is only a short distance from where my parents formerly lived.  It was a gorgeous warm day.  We had been on this train trip several times when my son Henry was young - in fact we had one of his birthday parties on the train.  Dad had been through so much hell between the death, the funeral, and then moving into an independent living apartment.  We thought he could use an enjoyable day out.

The most interesting thing about this trip, at least for me, is the industrial ruins along the way.  The railroad itself is built on top of the filled in Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.  Timbers and rocks from the old canal are visible on some parts of the ride.  It also goes past at least two different abandoned mines.  One is the old Bagdad coal mine and the other was a tin mine, if memory servers.  In any case they are very creepy and interesting, and even more so for us since my dad's father (my grandfather) was a mine inspector (fire boss).

We choose the back porch of an antique caboose for our ride.  The train conductor was also sitting out there with us.  Twice during the trip a blue butterfly flew onto the train and hovered around us, sitting on the railing, the top of the door into the caboose, and once on Henry's head!  The second time it happened the conductor got a strange look on his face.  He told us, "In all the time I've been here, that has NEVER happened even once, let alone twice!"

I knew the butterflies were from my mother.  Years ago when these things happened to me I searched both the school and the local public library for information but came up with very little.  Just a few books with ghost stories and one book about scientists studying "ESP" with cards.  So I had to figure everything out on my own and never felt I understood it at all.  But this time - thank God for the internet!  There are many books published on the subject now and by this time I was buying them on amazon.com and devouring at least three per week.  I learned that ADC's (shorthand for After Death Communication) had been surveyed scientifically.  According to "Hello From Heaven" by Bill and Judy Guggenheim, ADC's are reported by millions of people all over the world.  And they fall into definite categories, one of which is odd visitations by animals.  Butterflies are common ADC symbols.  The fact that my mother spent years cultivating a butterfly garden and raising monarch butterfly caterpillars made it an even more obvious connection.

When I got home I told my husband about it and he casually dismissed it, but not long after he got a real shock!

Reconnecting - Sychronicity, Dreams, and Antique Pianos

Due to the rather intense grieving I experienced I did not have any contact with my mother for most of the summer.  From what I have read, strong emotions - negative ones in particular - block out this kind of contact.  Besides being miserable I was also a major bitch.  I exploded at the slightest frustration.  I doubted all the decisions I'd made about my life, debated putting all of my musical instruments for sale on Ebay, and almost had a nervous breakdown when I had to throw away my dilapidated old stuffed Snoopy dog that I found decaying in my parents' attic (more about him later).  One of my mother's roles in my life was to talk me through the various ups and downs of life.  When I got myself (figuratively) out on The Ledge she would talk me down.  Without her around to do that The Ledge had become more or less my permanent domicile.

I took at trip to North Carolina to visit Lisa - a childhood friend with whom I was reconnected at my mother's funeral.  Being a young widow (since remarried) she is kind of an expert on grief.  We sat up late many evenings talking about all kinds of things.  She reminded me of how I used to play piano when we were kids.  I was never really taught to do this.  The church had an old piano they needed to get rid of and I was kind of in the market for one at the time.  I really wanted a harp but my parents had no idea how to pull that off so they offered me this piano (don't feel bad for me - I now own seven harps) .  Three months later I was playing Beethoven piano sonatas.  I had an uncle who told my parents to send me to Julliard.  The politely told him to MYOB - music majors end up working in McDonald's.  Didn’t he know that?  They continued to insist upon this "fact" until I met my current husband who makes a very good living teaching music, thank you very much.

But I digress.  After I arrived home from South Carolina an opportunity to go to the National Flute Convention in New York suddenly appeared (a synchronicity) and as I was in the market for a new flute, I went.  I stayed with about five other ladies in an apartment a few miles away from the convention so I did a lot of walking.  While I was in New York, walking, and walking ... I started thinking, "gee, I wish I hadn't let Bill (my husband) talk me into getting rid of that old piano."  I had a beat up baby grand when we met, but when we got married and bought a new house, it didn't really fit anywhere and we decided to sell it.

I came home on the third day of the convention totally exhausted.  There was a concert that night but I told everyone I was too tired to go.  I went to bed on the sofa shortly after they all left for dinner out.  I should add that in the early ten weeks between my mother's death and August 19, 2009 I hadn't dreamed of her AT ALL.  Which is unusual in itself.  But in New York I dreamed of her every night.  On this particular night I had the my first contact dream.

I found myself in my parents' front yard, pacing back and forth and carrying on a telepathic conversation with my mother.

"You of all people should KNOW there isn't a problem with this situation," she scolded.  "You have got to quit mooning around like this!  You're driving everybody nuts!"

"Well, OK," I conceded.  "As long as I can keep talking to you like this, I think I can get used to it."

"OK, that's fine!  Just knock it off.  There is nothing wrong.  I am right here.  So for God's sake settle down!"

I talked to her for a while after that although I can't remember much more of the conversation.  Honestly it wasn't any different than what she would have said if she were alive!

I woke up from the encounter at about 8:00PM and immediately called my husband.  Before I had a chance to tell him about my encounter, he hit me with one of his own.

"You'll never guess what I just found!" he said.  "I went into Northway Mall to get a peice of equipment for my weight set, and there is an antique concert grand piano for sale in that little used piano store!  It's incredible!"

I told him about my experience (he was impressed).  When I got home we went to look at this piano and I was shocked because it looks almost exactly like the antique piano my grandparents had when my mother was growing up.  I saw it once - or what was left of it - sticking out from under a pile of junk in the attic when we were cleaning out that house.  When she saw the puddle of drool forming on the floor my mother reined me in.  During the depression they got tired of the piano taking up so much space so her father chopped it up and made it into a table.  Sorry - she said - we didn't know you would've wanted it.  This piano is an upgrade from the one my grandparents had.  It is an 1873 Decker Brothers concert grand in elaborately carved rosewood.  It is in completely original condition save about five strings that broke and had to be replaced when we had the sucker cranked up to A440.  We bought it with part of the insurance money so she paid for it too!  By sheer luck my Dad happened to be there to see it the day it was delivered - Mom's surprise gift from the other side.  As I played again after many years the lights in the room flickered mysteriously in agreement.

Not long after I was in our attic hunting for the old box of piano music I had from when I was a kid.  I found it.  While sorting through it I found something that wasn't there before: a handwritten manuscript with 116 of my grandfather's favorite tunes, written in the 1930's when he was teaching his son (my uncle) to play.  Then it began to dawn on me - where did this box of music come from?  I got the piano way back when and my mother produced this box of music from ... where?  Her parents' attic!  All this time I'd be bugging her about what he used to play, and she'd already given me a huge box of his music!

So that is when the idea hit me - I'll record a CD of my grandfather's music on period instruments!  We have lots of period instruments as one thing we do for a living is historical music performances in period costume.  This project is now underway.  Naturally there is a lot more of the CD story to come.  My grandfather was born in 1884.  During the Great Depression he got depressed and mostly gave up his music.  He died in 1969.  But his CD is coming out in 2011, which if nothing else proves that it is never too late!

The Gospel According To Mom

No changes have been made except to correct spelling and add paragraphs to make it easier to read.  The original is handwritten on both sides of 7 pages of notepaper.  I started a paragraph whenever it felt like a new thought or story began.

Felt presence in room and felt it wanted to help me.  Felt I was in a hopeless situation with no way out.  Gave up trying to find a way and asked God to help by showing me what I needed to do.  Was very depressed and felt helpless with no will of my own.  The “Presence” which I felt with me said by direct thought into my mind (no voice) that I was not strong enough or brave enough to do or to take all of the experiences I would have to go through to get well.  I said I would do or take anything to get well because I was in so much pain.  “He” said I would have to forgive my father for all the things he had done to our family [note: her father was very abusive].

This took me by complete surprise because I thought I was feeling so depressed because of the miscarriage of my baby and some other things (sins) of my own.  It also made me very angry because I hated my father and the very last thing in the world I would have ever thought to do was to forgive him.  Never, never.  And that is what I said – never I will die first.  And the “Presence” said “OK – I told you that you couldn’t do what you needed to do.  You’re not strong enough or brave enough.”

I thought about that for a while, maybe a week or so.  And I kept feeling worse – I was in a lot of pain that is hard to explain.  Finally I said “OK – I can’t do this myself but if you are God, you can give me whatever I need to be able to do it if this is what must be done.”  And the “Presence” said “Yes.”. 

 And the day came when I went down home and I was in the living room with just my father.  I said “I forgive you for all the evil things you have done to your children and to my mother.”  I said it right out with no explanation or discussion leading up to it.  My father became very angry and I though he was going to have a stroke.  He never said a word to me – just got up and went upstairs.  This was in the summer and for a long time when I went down home he would get up and leave.  He wouldn’t stay in the same room with me.

Then we got a new minister at our church.  I hadn’t been going for awhile because I felt so bad.  He came out to the house and asked me to come back to church.  No one in the family had noticed that anything was wrong with me but he saw it right away.  He told me very quietly that it would all turn out all right.  And I believed him.  I started back to church. 

On the 24^th of December I was in my room and suddenly a huge light came and just enveloped me and I seem to go up in the air and became part of it.  At first I couldn’t tell if it came down or I went up.  It was almost instantaneous but I merged with it and then time was not there anymore.  There was no time.  The light just seemed to spread out and encompass everything in the whole universe and I was a part of it.  It was everything – all living things and also everything else.  And the light was love.  It was warm and beautiful.  The most beautiful thing I have ever known.  The universe is a united whole – united by love.  That makes it work and binds it all together.  My mind seemed so much more clear about things afterwards – because I had felt very confused.

On Christmas morning there had been a very soft beautiful snow storm and the whole world was so beautiful it made me cry.  It seemed to be illustrating the song “Silent Night, Holy Night”.  Everything was so calm and peaceful and so clean and white and beautiful.  This was a miracle of some sort which I can never explain.  I had spent the night caught up in this light and a lot of what I felt there must have stayed with me when I returned – I was very much still in an ecstatic state for at least three days afterwards.  Some people that I met during this time had halos around their heads and their faces shown with some of this light.  No every one – just some here and there.  Some of the people I knew and some I didn’t - some were young and some were old.  And I felt filled to overflowing with love myself.  It was like being in the center of a Niagara Falls of love.

Then after a while I came down and I felt very bad because it was taken away from me.  I felt cold and almost dead like.  Then the hard part of it began.  The “Presence” was still with me but it had always had more of a teacher type of feel not this loving thing.  We could take to each other in thoughts.  And I remember saying or thinking “See – I did it, I forgave my father – is this a reward?”  And He said “You didn’t do anything – you just let me do it through you.”  And then I felt as if he left me and slammed the door.  I felt so bad.  To go from being so filled with love to not having any (or not much).

Then I had to go through a long period of being taught and shown what I had done wrong in my life and where I was very wrong in my thinking as well as in my actions.  This is very hard and humiliating.  Usually I would be shown why I had to experience these things as they happened.  I was told that He whom the Lord loves he chastises and that God purifies his children separating the good from the dross.  Like melting iron to take out the impurities.  It is very painful.  When I felt real bad I would sometimes feel a little bit of love in my soul.  And somehow I could “see” love in the light – in sunlight.  Again it is hard to explain but I guess for me both God and love will always be light, symbolized by sunlight.  That is somehow written on me and I can never forget it.  I am sure that is where we go when we die – into the light.  But I also know that God is in the dark – or what we think of as dark.  It is dark because we turn our backs to him instead of our eyes.  Also God is like a mirror.  When you see Him you see yourself – but you see yourself “darkly”.  And you see your flaws – both your sins of contentment and also the things you should have done and didin’t.

I began to hunt for books to explain to me what had happened and to try and see if it had ever happened to anyone else besides the people in the Bible.  Part of my “teaching” was to see these Bible characters as if there were as alive as I – they seemed to be right here with me.  I could almost see St. Paul when he was blinded and Stephen when he was stoned to death.  They were very real to me.  After I would ask questions in my mind and I would be told, sometimes, that the answer was too hard for me and not to worry about it. 

This Presence or Teacher could be very hard on me.  The minister of the church had done some things that were wrong and I begain to hear some gossip about him.  One night I was deep in thought about that and feeling very bad because he was not the perfect person I thought he was.  I kind of felt that he had betrayed me by not being good.  And into my mind came this thought: “How dare you expect someone else to live up to your ideals when you can’t live up to them yourself?”  That is a hard question but a very good one and a very true one.  I had no right to judge him (or anyone else ever). 

This whole process took over a year and I still learn some new hard lesson usually between Christmas and Easter.  In a way it has never stopped.  I have had the following items of a mystical experience with this: 1) Unity with God 2) Self-transcendence 3) Timelessness 4) Ecstasy 5) Conversion.  These five things are all present in all mystical experiences and also near death experiences.  I had learned a very real reverence for life and that the only thing that counts is what you do for others.  It does not need to be a big thing in the eyes of the world – just something that helps someone else to go along life’s way.  It has made me very grateful for my life – even though my life is so flawed.  There are so many things I would do differently if I could.  But each of us can only do what we were shown as children.  We can do different when our eyes are open and we awake and understand.   

God can forgive us for the things that were wrong but He can’t change them or completely wipe them away.  He can’t change the consequences of our prior choices.  If you skip school and miss the lessons then you will flunk the test.  Flunking the test is the effect of your choice to miss school.  But we can learn the lesson later – we each must start where ever we are.  We are the result of many people’s choices before we could choose for ourselves.  We are responsible for our own choices after we know this. 

Another thing I got from all of this was that the world looked so beautiful I could hardly stand to see it.  The flowering trees in the spring and the fall leaves were almost over powering for me for years.  This was very much in content like a near death experience except I was awake and except for Christmas Eve never felt out of my body.  It was very slow and took years.  What looks very much like a life review took at least a year itself. 

I have never felt unhappy or alone.  I don’t like to use my time in ritualized things – either religious or social.  They seem so shallow and a waste of time.  I see God in my garden and feel I am doing a service for Him in raising my butterflies.  They are also God you see and as such need a place to live.  When we destroy nature and the environment we are destroying God – I could cry when I see the rattlesnake round eyes and all that type of killing.  I am so glad we are working to save the environment.  This is no accident.  We will be very sorry if it goes.  I don’t know what lessons I have yet to learn but I know God really is love but he is also stern.

I think a church steeple is a symbol of the way the light came to me.  This experience comes to many people every generation and in all types of religions around the world.  There are examples of it written down and also in very old paintings.  It changes a bit for each type of civilization but it is still always the same.  Always the light, working up or being born again and that God is love.  It is almost as if we are being molded.  I don’t know if our souls are reborn again to learn the lessons we missed but I do know the lesson we must learn is to still our will so that His will can become one with ours.  That was Eve’s sin – no so much that she ate the apple, but that she did her own will instead of God’s will.  She was willful instead of being grateful for all of the other things that God had given her.  If we are ever perfected our will will be God’s will and we won’t know the difference.  We will do what we want and it will also be God’s will for us.  And that will be heaven.  I don’t think it will ever come for me – I am still too willful after all the time He has taken with me.  Even with all of this I still find myself doing the things I shouldn’t and not doing the things I should.  But so did St. Paul.  He was also a very willful person.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Don’t get me wrong – I am not implying that ADC’s (After Death Communication, as they are known to people who research them) are a get-out-of-jail-free card from the universal experience of bereavement.  Far from it.  The constant sense of presence and energy did not last forever – it lasted for about two weeks.  But it did get me through series of experiences I never thought I would be able to face, the primary one being the funeral.

In light of the signs of continued presence we all felt the funeral seemed very unreal.  It didn’t help that she didn’t look anything like herself.  We didn’t tell the funeral director that she always wore her hair up and with it down she looked like a total stranger.  Even after he changed it, she still didn’t look like herself.  I managed to play harp at the funeral itself.  I never though I would have been able to pull this off!  I remember once, a year or so before any of this happened, my dad got sick and went into the hospital.  Mom was convinced he was going to die any day.  This was before we realized this was coming from an irrational fear inside of her and so we believed her.  She told me about this on my way to church one morning when I was scheduled to play at the 11:00AM service.  She got me so upset I couldn’t play one note.  Yet during a time when I should have been even MORE upset, I played the entire gig effortlessly.

The other unexpected thing was how the funeral put me back in touch with all of these people I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, which set in motion several chains of events that answered nagging questions about the past, and rekindled some friendships that turned out to be very valuable later on.

I had a trip to Nova Scotia planned two weeks after my mother died – this was for a music workshop and I already had non-refundable tickets!  Seeing no good reason to cancel the trip I went anyway.  This turned out to be a good thing as I needed a break before having to deal with cleaning out my parents’ house.  It also brought me back to an idea I had years ago.  My mother’s father was an old time fiddler.  At one point during my 20’s, I was very interested in finding out about the music he played.  He and my mother had what I guess you could call a complicated relationship so she wasn’t very interested in talking about it at the time.  But Boxwood (the music festival) got me thinking about this again.

When I returned home and we began the agonizing process of breaking up our parents’ house we starting finding a lot of interesting things!  The first is a letter written by my mother sometime in the late 1990’s.  She put it inside a Memory Book I gave her for Christmas one year so that she could fill it out for my son Henry.  And fill it out she did!  She must have known that Memory Book would be one of the first things I would hunt.  Most of our paranormal conversations were rather one sided – me telling her about mine and her helping me figure out what they meant.  Sometimes she would share a few of her own experiences but not often.  Yet I always sensed there was more.  And there was – this document proves it.  Jokingly referred to as “The Gospel According to Mom” it is a high level overview of some incredible experiences.  The second post for today is “The Gospel According to Mom” in its entirety.