The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  I left that church and we never went back.

  But then, almost a year later, I got a phone call for a reading. It was a new client, and I gave her directions to my condo, and we set up an appointment for the following afternoon. When the bell rang, I opened the door, and standing there was a very thin, dark-haired woman, very pretty. It was Caroline’s mother.

  The expression on her face was as surprised as my own. “I didn’t know it was you. I’d heard that there was a local woman who could contact the dead, but I didn’t know it was you.” We both started to cry.

  After we had hugged each other and calmed down, I led her into my kitchen. Gavin was playing on the floor with his knights. He looked up at her and smiled. I’m not sure if he remembered her.

  I didn’t even need to take out the cards. The moment we sat down I could see Caroline beside her. “It was my time,” said Caroline.

  The priest had been right, only he hadn’t known what he was saying. I wasn’t sure I understood what Caroline was saying either.

  “I’m coming back, though,” she told me happily. “I am back.”

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” I asked Caroline’s mother.

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe.” She was startled by this information.

  “You’re pregnant,” I told her. “With a girl. It’s Caroline. She’s already come back.”

  Caroline’s mother began weeping uncontrollably. “That’s all I want,” she said, “but why? Why? Why did she have to leave me?”

  She told me then what had happened the day before Caroline died. It had been snowing, softly, heavily, and she had been unable to find her little girl anywhere in the house and became panicked. But then, through a window, she had glimpsed Caroline outside in the backyard in the snow. She wasn’t making snow angels or snowmen. She was sitting absolutely still with her back against a large tree, her eyes halfway shut and the snow swirling all around her. “She was like a little Buddha out in the snow,” said her mother. “She didn’t look like a little girl. I called to her. ‘Caroline, what are you doing out there?’ But she didn’t answer me. She could hear me, I could tell, but she just sat there. The snow was covering her, making her disappear.”

  “She knew she was going to go,” I said softly.

  “Yes,” said her mother. “She was so peaceful, but already so far away.”

  “But she’s not far away anymore,” I said. I could see Caroline touching her mother’s arm.

  “I knew she was back. I could feel her come back,” said her mother. “But I thought I must be crazy, that I was just wishing for it so, so hard. But I could feel her close again.”

  “She’s back.”

  That afternoon Caroline’s mother called me. She was pregnant, and eight months later she gave birth to a baby girl.

  I still don’t know why Caroline had to leave in the first place. Was she sacrificing herself for something? For what? Was she needed elsewhere? Where was she going? I have so many questions these days about life and death, reincarnation and heaven. Why was I even born? What am I supposed to be doing with my life?

  For all the women who show up wanting to know if their boyfriends are cheating on them and the men who come hoping for some fast track to wealth and power, there are people who come to me like Caroline’s mother, and I feel like together we touch something vast and mysterious and important. That’s when I’m glad I do what I do, as hard as it sometimes is.

  A couple came in who had recently lost their dog. I could see him at once. His big golden head was resting in the woman’s lap.

  “Yes!” exclaimed the man. “He was a golden retriever.”

  “Tell my mommy that my kidneys failed,” the dog told me. “But I don’t know what kidneys are.”

  The woman began to cry. “He did die of kidney failure. Poor thing. Is there another spirit there to watch over him? To hold him when he gets scared? He was such a big baby.”

  “He doesn’t need anyone else but you,” I told them. “He wants you to know that where he is now there are no thunderstorms and there is no night and he is never alone.” The words shot out of me and I knew they were true.

  14

  Burn Me, Drown Me, Kill Me … I Just Keep Coming Back

  I was hearing the whistling sound a bomb makes before it explodes more and more often now. I’ve always had flashes of different times. I think everyone does, but they dismiss the intuitions as a vivid imagination or channel them into some enthusiasm for learning everything about a particular period in time. We all have interests and fears connected to who we once were. But I was becoming overwhelmed by memories of the Blitz in London during World War II, and I didn’t really know why.

  Every time I would shut my eyes, I’d see bombed-out buildings or the murky underground rooms of an air-raid shelter. Songs from the forties were stuck in my head. I kept hearing Vera Lynn crooning “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” “When two lovers meet in Mayfair, so the legends tell / Songbirds sing. Winter turns to spring.” These visions were becoming ever present and increasingly upsetting. I wanted to let go of them so I could be in my life with Gavin and just be his mom.

  I mentioned all this to a client one day, and she suggested I consult with her sister, who was a hypnotist. She helped people process karmic information about reincarnation, but she wasn’t all new-agey about it, said my client. She was a real psychologist who did hypnosis on the side. “She’s not a flake.”

  I immediately made an appointment with her, and David drove me to her office the following week.

  She was a very ordinary, settled woman with a traditional-looking office—magazines in the waiting room, a potted plant or two. She explained to me that she mostly used hypnosis to help people quit smoking and lose weight. She was more clinical than spiritual. Still, she said she’d helped people “go back” a number of times to conquer phobias. She told me that fears about flying or snakes or spiders were often connected to past-life traumas.

  I explained to her that I wasn’t a particularly fearful person, but that I felt like there was something I needed to know from my last life so that I could let go and be fully who I was supposed to be in this life. She understood what I was talking about without too much more explanation.

  I lay on a couch in her room. It was very comfortable. The lights were dim. Drapes covered the windows. She counted backwards and told me to listen to the numbers and let myself drift into a relaxed state. I let go and began to fall the way I do in readings. My eyes were shut. Apparently, I am very easy to hypnotize.

  “What do you see?” she asked softly. “Look down at your feet. What kind of ground are you walking on?”

  But there was no ground. There was the piled wood of a pyre and there was smoke. Flames licked at my bare feet.

  “You are looking at the moment of your death,” she told me.

  I was burning.

  There was no experience of physical pain, but I knew I was seeing the moment when my spirit had separated from my body. It wasn’t frightening. There’s no reason to be scared of that moment. We’ve all done it before. We’re all going to do it again. Here we go again, that was the thought in my head.

  There were people standing around and staring at me. My hair was bound and long. There were mountains nearby.

  I wonder if this is why I can never strike a match or light a candle. I’m not afraid of fire itself; it’s just that first moment a flame bursts into being that unnerves me. Maybe that’s what I’m remembering; maybe that’s why I don’t ever have candles or incense in my house. I just can’t do it, but I do love staring into the flames. Once the fire is roaring, it’s not frightening anymore; it’s exhilarating.

  “What else do you see?” asked the hypnotist.

  I was somewhere else now, and I was being burned again. There was another pyre beneath my feet. I could smell smoke. I saw a huge cathedral like Notre Dame and the stone steps leading up to it. There was something I wanted to say, that I had been trying to say, but they had
burned me before I could speak. I was in France. I hated France. I would never go back to France. I’d go to London.

  I’m not sure how the therapist got me there, but next I saw myself, a chubby little girl hiding in a house. I felt a longing for the mother and the father of that life. That mother had cradled me in her arms when I was a little girl. We had sung together. I saw a room with faded rose wallpaper that I knew from my dreams. It was a poor house, but it was filled with flowers and love. That mother had loved me the way I loved Gavin, with all her heart, with joy, with celebration. I don’t think she ever knew I was a psychic, I died when I was so young in the Blitz, but it didn’t matter. She had loved me.

  I was peeking out through the window and I could see soldiers marching by, and I could hear the steady rhythm of their footsteps. I knew my older brother was a soldier. He had gone off to war in a green woolen uniform. The texture of that uniform was very real to me. I knew he’d been killed. I saw men with headlamps looking through the rubble for bodies. I was running down a street and heard the bomb going off. I was killed in the Blitz. I felt the fire. Always fire. And more fire.

  I could smell something acrid—a mixture of gasoline and burning rubber. I was dying slowly. I was burned and crushed beneath the rubber. But again there was no pain, only a consciousness that I was going somewhere else, to a place where the angels were.

  Why did that little girl have to die in the bombs in London during World War II? It seems so unjust, so unfair, so wrong.

  But what I saw was that the brief, loved life of that child was a gift to me.

  We take love with us from lifetime to lifetime, and I had that mother’s love inside of me. I hadn’t known until now how much her love had sustained me during the sufferings of this lifetime. That short life had been a little recess from the challenges of my so-called gift. When I was born in this life, I was again an old woman, the weary, well-worn psychic who had seen and known too much, but there had been a family, a mother, a father, and a brother who had loved one another. In five short years I’d experienced lifetimes of love. I wanted us to be together again. I wanted my brother again. He was waiting for me on the other side. He had already died.

  I called out a name as I was dying. “Jack! Jack! Jack!” I must have called the name out loud in the room.

  “Jack?” whispered the therapist. “Who is Jack?”

  “Jack, Jack, Jack,” I repeated. “It was the name of my brother who had died in battle during World War II. I’ve got to get to him. I’ve got to find him.”

  “He’s gone,” she said. “That time is gone.”

  “No, he’s not gone. I’ve got to find him. He came back. He came back to find me. Jack. It’s Jack.”

  “Jack who? Can you remember anything else?”

  “Jack…” I could feel a name emerging from deep within me. “His name this time is Jack Wild.”

  I knew this with an instantaneous conviction. The older brother I had lost during the war and longed to see again was really Jack Wild. He had been reborn as Jack Wild. That was why I’d always wanted to find him again. I had to find him in this life. I knew it at that moment. He was my brother. He really was. We had been brother and sister in our last lives, we had both died during the war, we had both been reborn during the fifties, and we had some even greater, inexplicable connection in this life. But what was it?

  “We’re going to go further back,” the therapist told me.

  Usually in these sessions you go from one life to another in a straight line, but my lives were all out of sync for some reason. I suppose time is always very fluid for me—the past, the future, the present, it’s all happening at the same moment for me.

  I was in a cave with bars across it. The walls were soft yellow limestone, wet to the touch. With my finger I was scratching my name into the wall. Estella. The cave was so small that I could barely stand up in it. I could hear waves crashing at the shore, smell the salt in the air. Maybe I was in Cornwall, maybe Brittany. It was somewhere wild like that. I saw my father coming to the other side of the grate. It was he who had locked me in. He would bring people to me for readings, but only people he chose. There were things I knew that no one else should know. There was no mother in that life, she had died, and I was alone with this terrible man.

  He wore a wide-brimmed black hat.

  I was about to scream, but I saw his eyes and they were not the vacant eyes of the man who terrified me. Only the hat was the same, as if this man was a strange echo of the figure that had haunted my childhood. This man was a Puritan, a witch burner. His name was Axelrod. Somewhere nearby were my rescuers, David and Richard. My perpetual guardians, one lifetime to another.

  I saw more fires, more burnings. Again and again I was destroyed for what I was. Murdered. Raped. Beheaded. Burned. I saw myself kneeling before a block and trying to position my head properly in the indentation. I wanted to do it right this time. This time. I had so much practice at dying. I was frightened that it wouldn’t happen fast. There was a rage in me, too, against the Pope. I knew he was one of my enemies.

  I’ll tell you right now, I can’t remember it ever being easy for me. If some people see me as an oracle, there are others who have always wanted to kill me for what I am.

  But Gavin wasn’t in any of these old memories. Nowhere. I’d never been a mother before. There is something new about the life I am living this time. A mother at last.

  I was very, very far back now. For a moment I saw white columns. Egypt? Greece? Somewhere older than that? At last all I could see in a blue sky was a blue heron flying overhead.

  I looked up at the heron flying away, and I knew what I was thinking at that moment. I’m flying away, flying away … and then I’m coming back.

  I was sobbing.

  So many people imagine that when they look at their past lives it’ll be an ego boost, and they’ll know for sure that they were Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn or King Arthur. They think if they can claim some celebrity in a past life, it’ll justify their being a loser right now. But it doesn’t work that way. You shouldn’t live less of a life this time around because of who you used to be. Sure, we can all make up stuff about who we used to be. There’s no way to prove any of this. Not really, anyway. But if we are ready to pull back the flaps of time and really see what’s there behind us, we can begin to understand a little more about who we are right now and what we have to do. Every life makes us who we are, but we also get to a point where we get beyond what we were.

  I look at those memories with some detachment. Yeah, I was there, but I’m here now—and that’s what I have to think about.

  Why was I born in America? It seemed like the first time I’ve ever been on this side of the Atlantic. Was it an accident? Are there ever accidents with these kinds of things? Gavin certainly wasn’t an accident. He came despite everything. He was meant to be.

  What I do know is that I have never been anything else other than a psychic. I saw that very clearly during my regression. This is what I have been and will always be. It’s the only thing I can do. I have no other skills. None. Never have. But no matter how often I was silenced or executed or imprisoned, I just kept coming back doing the same thing. Put me in a cage, burn me, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere. None of us are.

  The therapist brought me back to this lifetime. She explained that she always stopped just at the point of death, because she didn’t want me to experience any pain. I almost wanted to laugh. I had been at the moment of death in every lifetime and there wasn’t any pain.

  What I hadn’t seen, though, was that place immediately after death that the Tibetans call the bardo realm. Why don’t I have any memories of it, even though I’ve certainly been there plenty of times? Does anybody? Does anyone ever remember deciding to come back? Or can we only do that in near-death experiences? Maybe if we remembered that heaven, we’d all want to be dead and we wouldn’t incarnate again.

  Why do I choose to keep coming back? I guess I don’t want to miss any
thing. Persecution, torment, poverty, immolation—who wants to miss it?

  She was one of the happiest women who ever came to me for a reading, but she should have been the saddest.

  I saw at once that she was surrounded by angels, and one of the angels was very young, just a little boy.

  “That would be my son,” she said.

  “He drowned in a pool when he was only four,” I said.

  “That’s right. But I know he’s close. I feel him close. Thanks for confirming that. I always knew it was true. But still…”

  She was completely serene. The drowning had happened a number of years before. Still, I thought she would be disturbed, even devastated, when she talked about it. But she wasn’t. She was totally at peace.

  I couldn’t help but imagine what a mess I would be if it had been my son.

  I am filled with wonder at the faith of some people. And it amazes me that someone like me, with such wavering faith, can help to strengthen theirs.

  15

  Has-Beens on Parade

  Now I really had to find Jack. I was having more and more dreams about him. Increasingly it felt like he was communicating directly with me. He came one night wearing a tweed jacket, telling me he had to meet me. It was real, but also deeply strange. The dreams became more insistent, and I was obsessed with meeting him. I was beginning to sense that he didn’t have much time left in this realm.

  Here I was, married with a family, and I felt the same pull I had as a child to find this person. Was I just an obsessed fan, like the client who was convinced she was supposed to marry a movie star? It didn’t feel that way to me, but it probably didn’t feel that way to her either. The past-life therapy had confirmed that once upon a time Jack and I had been brother and sister, but what was our connection now? What kind of power could an aging has-been child actor exert over me? Was he part of my soul group in some way? I felt like I should have outgrown this fascination as an adult, and instead each day I was consumed by this nagging feeling that somehow I had to find him.