A couple of years ago, a journalist was in town to interview me after one of my live events. She joined my husband John and me for dinner afterward, and as, we were sitting there talking and eating rigatoni, I saw a man standing behind her. He felt like grandfather energy.
“Do you have a grandfather on the other side?” I asked.
“I do,” she said.
I looked at his spirit, and he communicated to me that he was very sorry. Apparently, he was the type of person who held a grudge when he was alive. He also tried to pit certain family members against each other. He lived for conflict and left this world with many enemies.
“He’s saying to me that none of the things that he thought mattered really matter,” I said. “He’s very sorry he caused so much pain. He sees how he hurt people. He wants to be sure you let the family know that he understands why they might not want to hear from him, even through a medium.”
The journalist’s eyes widened.
“Yeah, he was a pretty mean guy,” she said. “I’ll have to let his children know. Some of them are still not talking to each other because of the things he did.”
Her grandfather’s spirit showed me that he could see all the angst that he caused and all the sadness. It was a ripple effect that he’d had to watch over and over in his life review of past actions. For those who may be unfamiliar, when we die, our soul experiences something of an instant replay of the events of the life just completed. This is where we feel everything that we put into motion when we were alive, whether positive or negative—it plays out like a movie. So, if you lived a wonderful life, if you did your best and treated others kindly, your movie will be fabulous. If you were a real jerk, then that sucker’s going to be hard to watch! It’s my understanding that we actually feel the damage we have done to others and experience emotions of remorse. We also experience strong feelings of love, joy, and warmth for our beautiful connections with others.
“He says that he’s sorry for what he did after the reunion,” I said. I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about, but he was very clear that this was something I needed to say.
“Oh my gosh!” she gasped. I saw her eyes start to well up. “He didn’t talk to his son, my dad, for seven years after a family reunion. It was a battle of ‘he said, she said’ and he chose to shut out his son over a silly misunderstanding. It broke my dad. I don’t know if he ever got over it.”
“He says he’s with your dad now, and they’ve made up,” I said. Apparently her dad was also on the other side because, just then, another male energy spirit appeared next to the grandfather and they were arm in arm.
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that!” she said. “I had always wondered if they were together, and if they could put all that behind them after all was said and done.”
After the journalist returned home, she told me that she relayed the message to her family.
“Most of the people in my family were so excited to hear that my grandpa and my dad were together on the other side and had mended fences,” she said. “But, I have to tell you, my one aunt still won’t hear it. She would rather stay mad. She’s just not letting it go.”
We all have stories that are similar. But the amazing thing about being in the light on the other side is that it’s all about forgiveness. There are no grudges. It’s beyond anything we can understand. The dead tell me that there is nobody standing there with a clipboard saying, “You really were a jerk when you were a senior in high school!” They say that, in the light, there is only love. No judgment. We judge here. There, we see how we treated others, we get a greater understanding of why it all happened, and in the end, there is only love. For those who are still on this side, the things that were left unsaid can cause a burden of guilt that hangs over us like a cloud of doom. And we can be stubborn about letting that guilt go—we want to hang on to it like we own it—like a brooch that people decide to pin on their jacket. We beat ourselves up with the “shoulda-woulda-couldas,” the “if only I hads,” or, “if only I hadn’ts.”
What people don’t realize is that it’s just as easy to unpin it and take it off. But you have to be willing to do it. It’s a choice to hold on to that guilt. That’s part of free will. But every single person I’ve met in my work holds on to some sort of pin of guilt.
Even mediums.
When I was twenty-seven years old, I was one smoking hot tamale. I’ll be honest—I had it going on. I mean, now, things have gone south for the winter and I look like a map of Italy. But back then, I was a force to be reckoned with.
There was this guy, I’ll call him “Mark,” and he was in love with me. And I knew he was nuts about me and I would let him take me out, but I wasn’t really into him.
One day, he asked me to go to a wedding with him, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll go.” At the time, I didn’t have anything better to do, so why not?
And it’s funny because he kept asking me, “Are you sure?” It’s almost like he knew.
Sadly, something more appealing came along, and I didn’t go to the wedding. But I didn’t let him know this. I just didn’t answer the phone all day. I was horrible to this poor guy. Even now, I feel so awful that I did this. It was a really mean thing to do. This is one of my pins of guilt that I choose to carry around on my lapel. I know that what I did was so wrong. This is what we humans do to punish ourselves when we know we weren’t acting in integrity: We hold on to the guilt.
Years later, I saw him one night when I was out with my husband, John. We were at some fancy place, and I walked up to him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I thought facing the music would be better than walking in the other direction. As I approached him, the look of disdain that he shot my way felt like someone hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat. He didn’t say a word, but his eyes said, Forget about you, lady. And I deserved every bit of that anger. I had it coming. He walked away from me, and when I tried to find him later that evening, he was gone. I truly regret the fact that I never got to apologize.
But the incident with Mark isn’t the only screwup on my resume. I also got busted for shoplifting.
Whoops!
Let me set the stage: When I was in my twenties, I was in a shop called Bradley’s with another girl, and I was buying a pair of jeans. Now, at that time, the popular perfume was Lauren by Ralph Lauren. I had a shopping cart that had these big gaps in it, so I put the small perfume bottle in the pocket of the jeans I was going to try on, just so it wouldn’t fall on the floor. So, when I went to put the jeans on, the perfume was already in the pocket, and I thought Hmmm…who’s gonna know?
“You’re gonna know, Concetta.”
The spirits—my better angels—were trying to get through, but I just pushed them to the side.
So I went to buy the jeans and decided to keep that perfume hidden. It was a seven-dollar bottle, for gosh sakes! But I thought I was above the law, and tried to steal it. When I was leaving, every security person in the store swarmed me like it was a scene out of Cops. They had three squad cars outside for one small bottle of perfume. I’d never gotten in trouble with the law before, so I was completely embarrassed.
“I swear, I forgot that bottle was even in the pocket!” I screamed to the security guards. I was totally lying through my teeth because I was terrified.
When I got to court, the judge looked me in the eye and asked, “How do you plead?”
Just then, I heard the other side.
“Tell the truth, and that will help you. You will learn from this.”
I looked at the judge and told him what really happened.
“I did take the perfume, Your Honor. I’m sorry,” I said.
He shot me a very disappointed look and threw the book at me.
“I could make your fine be anything between a hundred and five hundred dollars, and I’m making yours five hundred,” he said.
At that time, five
hundred dollars felt like a million. I heard the other side as I soaked in my punishment.
“Are you going to learn from this, or do this again?”
We go through life like we are walking across a pond, and there are these stepping stones that we see as we approach, and we have to choose which stone to step on. I made a wrong step by stealing that perfume. And I got soaking wet. By accepting the responsibility and the consequences that went with it, I knew I never would take anything that didn’t belong to me again.
If I could take back that day I bailed on Mark and go to that wedding, I would. Even though I didn’t feel about him the way he felt about me, I should have kept my end of the bargain. Will I ever really feel good about the way I behaved? No. But I’ve had to learn to say to myself, “You’ve gotta let this go, because it’s a part of being human.” If I could take back the day I stole the perfume, I’d certainly pay more attention to the very clear message I was hearing from the other side and I wouldn’t have tried to swipe it. I knew it was wrong all along. But, here on this side of the veil, there is no such thing as perfection, and some things we just have to learn the hard way.
A middle-aged man came to see me for a reading, but he also had something he wanted to get off his chest. He told me he hadn’t been living in a way he was proud of. He knew he hadn’t been a good husband; he’d cheated on his wife. She hadn’t found out, but he carried the guilt. He also knew he hadn’t been a good father. He loved his kids, he told me, and he made sure that they had whatever they needed in a material sense, but he had not given them his time. He wasn’t around for them.
He’d had a heart attack and was having surgery to have a stent put in. During surgery, he had a near-death episode. He felt like he was out of his body and traveled to the other side. There, he said, he spoke with someone whom he recognized, but it wasn’t someone he knew in this life, it was someone he believed he knew from a past life. He told this person all his concerns and regrets and had the clear understanding that he was being given another chance to do better. When he came back into his body, he was determined to do just that.
He said, “I know this sounds crazy.”
I said, “Nope. It never sounds crazy to me, honey. Remember who you are talking to!”
We shared a laugh. Then he said he was doing the best he could to change his ways and live a better life. He hasn’t cheated again; he’s doing his best to spend time with his kids, from soccer games to homework, all kinds of things he said he had never done before, things he’d put on his wife as if it were all her job. He said he wasn’t angry anymore; he was calmer and more forgiving. But what made him feel the most changed is that he laughed more. He said he used to be always in a sulky mood, never saw the humor in things, and got annoyed when people around him seemed to laugh easily. “Now,” he said, “I laugh every chance I get, and I just feel better for it.”
Here’s an interesting thing. On the other side of the veil is complete peace and harmony. We do have a life review when we cross, and we come to see the harm we have done as well as the good things we’ve done. Then all is forgiven. But the spirits still are so grateful if they get a chance to apologize for anything they feel they messed up, and will take any opportunity they can find to comfort a loved one here, especially if they believe they have wronged that person in some way when they were in the flesh.
At a recent show in Fairfield, New Jersey, I called on a young man who was hoping to speak to his mom. She came through quickly and said that he looked just like her. Actually, she said that if we put a wig on him, he would look just like her, which made me smile. He was the apple of her eye. And he confirmed that he did indeed resemble his mother. But more importantly, his biological father came through. His dad apologized to him for not being there for him in his life. This meant a lot to him because he’d never had a good relationship with his dad, and he always wanted an apology when his father was alive but had never gotten one. Clearly, once over there, his dad realized that his behavior toward his son had hurt him, and he grabbed the chance to try to make amends.
Nearly every single one of us has done things in our lives that we are not proud of. I remember a client I read for whose mother came through and mentioned a car accident, saying to him, “It’s not your fault.” She went on to say that, on the other side, unconditional love was waiting for him. I had no idea why she felt he needed that message, but he got very emotional and confessed to me that he felt horribly guilt-ridden and filled with sadness because he had been in a car accident and the person he was with in the car, the driver, was unconscious. He left the scene of the accident, left this person unconscious. He was involved with this person in some way that he did not want his wife or family to know about. I’m not sure exactly what the story was, maybe an affair or maybe just someone his family felt very strongly about, to the point where he’d promised not to see them. The driver of the vehicle did not die, but he felt like a coward for leaving the scene when they were helpless, and he was unable to forgive himself. It happened long ago. The other person recovered and had a life, but because he had not stuck around, he carried this guilt all these years and wondered what his judgment would be on the other side. Of course the accident wasn’t his fault, as he wasn’t driving. But his concern was about leaving. However, his mother kept repeating that he would be met by unconditional love. She said to him, “Don’t ever be afraid of God,” and that he would not be judged. I hoped hearing this from her would reassure him that God is great and God is good.
I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years, both because of my own human experiences and because of the stories my clients tell me. I know that guilt must serve some positive purpose or it would never exist. The guilt that I feel, I choose to feel over and over for some reason. It can of course help me remember to treat others the way I’d like to be treated while I’m still alive. But I don’t have to keep judging myself so harshly for the rest of my life. On the other side, you don’t have to relive these difficult moments over and over. Apparently, in our life review, we witness it only once, and we quickly get the perspective of the ones we hurt.
So, in my life review, I will experience a moment where I’ll be in Mark’s shoes, and I will feel all the pain and rejection that he experienced because of my behavior—with the full understanding that I caused that pain.
Ouch!
But, along with these really unpleasant episodes (and others—we all have them), I will also feel all the love I gave to my parents, my brother, my husband, my entire family, and all my dear friends. Every heartfelt moment, and every pissed-off moment. It all comes flooding back in an instant.
Believe it or not, we watch this life review without judgment. It just happens, kind of like when you watch a sporting event you don’t really care for, like maybe a soccer match when you don’t understand the game all that well. You’re just observing these people as they run around in circles in these silly-looking shorts on the soccer field, and you really don’t give a damn who just scored. (Any soccer fans, please forgive me. I just don’t get this game.) It’s not bad and it’s not good. It just is. That is how the dead folks explain the life review. They watch and acknowledge it, but they don’t judge it. It’s about understanding, not punishment. And in my work, I’ve seen a lot of healing happen after the dead see their life review. People who treated others very badly “get it” and they want to make amends.
One example of this came from a woman whose husband had passed. After I’d delivered a number of messages that validated for her that this was indeed her husband, he mentioned something he had written. This was an unusual case because, usually, when a spirit refers to something they have written, they seem very happy about it, but in this case I could tell he had a lot of remorse surrounding it. Then he said, “I’m sorry for the list. I’m sorry, forgive me.” I had no idea what he was referring to, but the woman told me that after her husband died, she’d found a list of complaints he’d
written out, about his life, his wife, and his family! Needless to say, discovering this had broken her heart, and as she told the story, she was crying. Then he said, “Please remember Paris.” My client looked up—she had also found a postcard from when they were first married. He’d gone to Paris for work and he’d written her a postcard where he’d professed his love for her and wrote about their dreams for their life together. He had put a heart symbol on the card, which he showed me. As I conveyed this to her, she smiled.
All of us do things we regret. We all would like to have some kind of do-over for things we’ve said or done.
Here among the living, even when we say we forgive someone, do we really do it? Think about this for a second. In our world, if you get in a fight with someone, or if someone has an affair with your husband, and then they come up to you and they’re big enough to say, “I’m truly sorry about that. Do you forgive me?”
You might say, “Sure, I forgive you.” But it’s very hard. Again, we are human, not perfect. We are emotional. And the reality is, we probably store that memory away. We forgive part of it, but we’re still holding on to those feelings of disappointment and betrayal. We’re still keeping score. We might be out laughing and talking to them and having a good time, but in the back of our minds, we’re still thinking, I remember what you did, you jerk!
I’ve had clients ask me about the role karma plays in all our “crimes and misdemeanors.” Karma is nearly always a part of it, and certainly any such action will accrue karma that we’ll have to offset, either in this lifetime or in one to come. There’s also such a thing as instant karma, when we zing someone, whether intentionally or not, and we get zinged right back almost immediately. There’s also such a thing as literally attracting powerful negative energy by our behavior and losing control of our emotions.
I Kissed a Ghost (and I Liked It) Page 5
