“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”

― Rumi

Part 1: A Profound Communication Calls Me to Shift

On Thursday September 5, 1996 at 2:18 a.m. the world around me changed profoundly, yet at that moment I didn’t even know.  What happened that day happens every day, somewhere.  A young person – or two or three – have a little too much to drink, and drive to meet their untimely death.  On this night it would be my niece, my wife’s godchild:  a young woman who had just a month before turned twenty years old.  As for us, we hadn’t seen her more than a time or two in years.  Her birthday card still sat unsent in our kitchen.  We didn’t know where to send it.  Five years earlier she had estranged from her family by choice, a choice I completely understood and agreed with.  Yet just five years after leaving her parental home this beautiful, strong, proud, powerful young woman would leave the planet.  For whatever reason, her work here was done.  I got the call at 7:10 a.m. from another niece, the deceased’s cousin, who at that time seemed largely unaffected.  My heart sank.

My loving and now deceased Michelle had been so special to my wife and I when she was young.  As we knew it, as it occurred for us, Michelle was not really welcome in her family.  Her dad made it clear, and with his temper demanded the same from his wife and elder daughter, that this young child was not to be loved.  It hurt to see one child so openly favored over another, and to watch affection being poured over one while the other received little else but playful name-calling and casual insults.  Michelle wasn’t welcome in her own home, and It truly hurt to watch.  We tried our best to give her extra love every chance we got.  When we were there at bedtime I’d carry her upstairs, as her mom openly refused to do so and instead coddled the elder sister.  I loved Michelle and she knew it.  When she left her home at the age of fifteen to live with friends (and without a fight from her parents) I was relieved.  Peace for Michelle at last!  I spoke with her like a friend whenever I’d see her, and she shared of her life and of her favorite music including Grateful Dead and The Cranberries.

When I received the horrifying phone call and got through the shock, I rushed off to catch my wife Carol at a shared ride station.  She had left for work fifteen minutes before.  I caught her there just before the van left and I pulled her aside to share the devastating news.  I’ll never forget those moments – they’re etched into my memory.  I don’t remember all of what happened afterward, the shock took over again and all I can recall are two pieces.  One was driving Carol over to her sister’s house – Michelle’s mom’s.  The second is feeling like I could hear Michelle telling me to let the family be and go on with the reason I had taken the day off of work: to play in a golf tournament.  What???  This made no sense.  But for some stupid reason I did, and for some strange reason I could ‘hear’ Michelle speaking to me on the long car ride to the golf course.  In one unforgettable moment she told me how to line up a very difficult chip shot that saved our team a stroke.  It seemed so real and yet way too absurd.  I brushed it all off as a combination of imagination and wishful thinking.  Why did I come here?  To even be here at this time was unsettling.  All I could think of that morning and early afternoon was the family.  Michelle assured me they were okay and that it was good we were talking.  That it wasn’t all imagination.  I actually asked her and we had conversations about it.  She sounded so young!  Like the four-year-old girl I carried up the stairs so many times.  She said sometimes imaginary conversations with the dead are imaginary, and sometimes they’re completely real, and in both cases they’re helpful.  After the tournament I drove back to the family home.  She spoke, we talked, and I played The Cranberries on my car stereo.  And when I got back I helped do the things a family does to prepare for a funeral.  A Catholic wake was scheduled for the following day, Friday, and my wife and I accompanied her sister Diane to the funeral home.

Two ‘wakes’, or viewings, are scheduled – one from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, and another from 7:00 to 9:00.  We arrive at around 1:30 and go through the agony of helping the family decide on open or closed casket.  Closed is the final choice, though Carol and I get a chance to see Michelle’s body and face one more time before it’s closed for good.  I miss her as I knew her, and I’m incredibly sad.  Yet In every moment of my deepest sadness I hear that four-year-old voice telling me not to worry, that it’ll be okay, don’t cry.  Such a beautiful person, now gone.  No more heartfelt conversations with my beloved niece.  No more carrying or comforting.  She keeps telling me not to cry.  The doors open at 2:00 for the public to enter and pay their final respects.  The line of people seems unending.

The line indeed seems unending.  After close family (my wife’s family is huge!) come more distant family members, and friends of all ages.  Young people, old people, some I know, some I’ve never seen.  Tons of young people!   Michelle apparently had more friends than I could’ve guessed.  Up in the seats closest to the casket, in the first two rows, are close family along with Michelle’s boyfriend, Bob.  I don’t know Bob, I never met Bob before this whole thing happened.  From what I knew Michelle didn’t really have a boyfriend that she spoke of.  Maybe this was something new, maybe something old.  I just didn’t know.  All I knew is that this good-looking, tall, young, blond guy was Bob, Michelle’s boyfriend.  A few other close friends I’d previously met are there, but I don’t know them well enough to remember their names except for Autumn.  Autumn and Michelle were always close from what I remember.

About thirty to forty minutes into the service I hear Michelle call out to me very loudly and very distinctly, “Here comes trouble!”.  It’s the same four-year-old voice, but this time it’s more real.  I can’t make out if it’s fearful or playful.  Seems more playful as she speaks again and says, “He’s in the parking lot.  Go see him unca (uncle) Dave”.  When I hear this I begin sobbing uncontrollably (even now as I write and recall the feeling from over twenty years ago I’m weeping).  I’m hearing the voice of my baby niece speaking to me in a child-like way and it’s completely unsolicited!  I didn’t think of her in any special way at that moment, nothing was out of the ordinary.  It just came loudly and clearly, as though the previous forty-eight hours of ‘imaginary’ conversations were preparations for this moment.  She says again that “(I) should go out to the parking lot NOW.  He’s here!”.   While my heart and soul FEEL the depth of this communication my mind resists acting on it.  I’m wrestling so hard inside, between what my heart is telling me to do: go; and what my mind is telling me to do: stay put.  I’ve already done stupid things like playing golf while the family mourned.  I can’t leave my wife’s side now to go outside the building based on a voice I’m hearing.  This can’t be real!  But I feel it. I’m weeping so hard that my wife turns to me and asks what’s wrong.  I just shake my head and wave my hand to let her know I’m okay… I’m just sad.  But I’m lying.  My deceased niece is without a doubt speaking to me VERY DIRECTLY!  She’s asking me to leave the room, walk outside, and meet someone there.  I can actually ‘see’ the person in my mind.  He’s a young twentyish guy, very thin and not too tall, brown hair, and otherwise unremarkable except for her insistence that I go out to meet with him.  I refuse to budge.   She keeps on talking and I keep on ‘seeing’, though this room has no windows.

I watch this young man surrounded by other people his age, friends of both he and Michelle I’m sure.  They’re consoling him and he’s crying.  His eyes are so red.  He begins walking toward the door.  I can’t physically see this at all.  There are no windows in this room and there’s at least a twenty-foot hallway separating this room from the entrance to the building.  Yet in my mind it’s all so clear!  I almost want to get up and go out, but at this point it’s too late.  He’s making his way to the door.  The line actually still extends outside the door – I can feel (‘see’?) that too.  I wonder what’s going on?  Who this is?  Why the request?  I start speaking to Michelle and she answers.  I don’t ask about who this is, it’s already too late for that.  I’ve blown the chance to act on her request.  I only ask, “Why I am I hearing you?”  “Where are you?”  “Why do you sound like you’re four years old?”.  She says I’m hearing her because I’m open to it.  I’ve been treading that thin membrane between imagination and reality for days now.  Years actually, if you count all the ‘imaginary’ conversations I’ve had with others over decades.  She says that some of those older ones were real, some were imaginary, but they all helped keep me in touch with what is actually real – that we all exist outside of these physical bodies.  That our bodies are truly shells, vehicles, for our spirit.  That the energy form that is ‘us’ builds a physical body around itself.

Michelle tells me that I know these things inside, and that the mind will always wrestle with the real ‘reality’.  That our conversations of the day before helped so much to get me used to it.  In response to “Why am (I) hearing you?” she says she’s not speaking to me directly.  She’s just speaking.  I’m listening.  And that’s what’s making the difference.  She could be talking with anyone else in the room.  They’re just not as open.  We’ve made a connection and it’s working.   “Why do you sound like you’re four years old?”   She says it’s my mind putting a voice on the thoughts she’s transmitting.  We’re actually communicating through thought alone.  No voice is necessary.  But my mind needs to ‘hear’ a voice, so my mind attaches the voice of the four-year-old child I knew and loved on the communications of another spirit.  She immediately says (in the voice of a four-year-old, “I could sound like this”.  Then in the voice of her twenty-year-old self, “Or I could sound like this”.  And then in the voice of a sixty-four-year-old Michelle that could no longer be, “Or I could sound like this”.   She lets me know clearly and directly that my mind will put the audio that suits my brain onto the thought patterns in which we’re communicating just so I can be comfortable (to at least some degree).

“Where are you?”.   When I ask this question, Michelle takes me – or my soul just goes to – a place where there’s nothing to stand on.  I’m just floating in blackness watching a rapidly spinning orb.  The orb seems to be about eight feet tall – again, just something my mind can be comfortable with.  I KNOW that the orb is Earth and that I’m watching time pass by at an incredibly fast rate.  I watch two misty-looking forms walk up to the orb.  I know they’re spirits, I know there’s nothing to stand on – they just sort of glide over.  And I watch them speak with one another in thoughts alone as one prepares to leap.  One spirit leaps as the other stays behind.   The leaping spirit becomes a fine, twirling mist and gets sucked down onto the rapidly spinning planet only to emerge again a few ‘seconds’ later and reassemble into the misty-looking form I saw earlier.  But now it’s wiser.  It’s learned some lessons.  It’s lived a lifetime on the planet.  I’ve watched it transition from birth to earthly life to death, and transition again back to spirit form.  A lifetime lived in what feels like seconds.  And now it walks (glides) off with the other spirit to discuss what was learned on this single journey.  One is like a coach or mentor to the other, and yet the roles may be switched in another lifetime’s journey.  This was profound for me to see and experience, yet it completely resonated with the ‘reality’ she was relating.  It was for me a literal re-membering.  Somehow my physical life form – here known as Dave – needed to see and be reminded of what’s going on ALL THE TIME.  Time is not as we physical humans see it, and spirit is more real than most of us will ever truly- and I mean TRULY- Know.

About twenty physical, human minutes have passed (or so it feels) since I first started speaking back to Michelle and having some of my questions answered.  The young man I saw in the parking lot has now made his way into the building and through the long hallway with the very long line of people.  He’s about to enter the room where I remained seated.  I’ve been completely aware of his every step, though he was out of sight while I spoke with Michelle.  He’s about to arrive.  It’s now time to return to the most important part of why she began speaking, why we needed to communicate.

 

(this important part of my spiritual journey to be continued in part two…. Check back soon!)