Move Over Medium

Remember a few months ago when I was obsessed with a visit that I made to a medium? (If you don't remember, or you haven't read it and are so inclined click here).   I haven't really talked about it since then, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it.  Actually, I spent several months ruminating  over the words she said, the potential meaning (or lack thereof) behind them, the validity of that evening's events.  I prayed to God for answers.  I begged my grandmother for a tangible sign of her presence.  I even made a deal with my aunt Carmen that when she dies, she'll drop me a few coffee beans from the other side!

I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that I have yet to be given any concrete answers.  (Thank goodness, my aunt Carmen is still living, so I haven't stumbled upon any coffee beans either!)  I may not have been given answers to the questions I was asking, but that doesn't mean I came away from the experience frustrated and empty handed.  Let me explain:

One night, weeks after I saw the medium, and well after my obsession with making contact with the dead began, I had a dream.  I was standing at the top of the stairs of Jacob's school, looking down onto Spruce Street in Hollidaysburg.  School was letting out for the afternoon and there were lots of parents and children walking around, greeting one another, getting into their cars, etc.  The sky was overcast, threatening of rain, but still dry.   I saw a woman standing at the corner in a tan, 1950's style rain jacket, cinched at the waist with a thick belt.  She had her back to me, and had mid-length, wavy, black hair.  I thought that she looked familiar, and I stared at her, trying to place her.  As I was looking at her, she turned around and faced me.  It was my grandmother, but she was not the grandmother I knew as a child.  The woman in front of me was my grandmother from an old photo I have of her and my grandfather some time before they were married, young and beautiful.  As I realized who she was, she slowly morphed into the woman I remembered, a woman in her early 50's, a little pudgy, a few laugh lines around her face.  She didn't say a word, but smiled sweetly, waved to me, and gave me a slight, knowing nod as she slowly got into a car that was parked on the curb.  Then I woke up.  It was the end of the dream, and also, somehow, the end of my darkness.  This dream occurred in the early morning, and I awoke right before my alarm was set to go off.  I opened my eyes to the faint light of day creeping through my blinds, and I felt completely at peace.

Now, what the dream really was is a question I will always have.  It could have been my grandmother who finally came to me and silently said, "I am here."    Or it could have been my brain's way of releasing the constant churning that had been going on for eons.  I don't know, and I can honestly say I don't need to know the answers for once.  What I know is that since I had the dream, I have felt more at peace with my grandmother's passing than ever before in my life.  I still think about her every day.  I still miss her tremendously, but I am not obsessed with contacting her.  I am not relentlessly searching for signs from beyond the grave.  For as long as I can remember, I have experienced random moments when an intense and sudden sadness overtakes me for no apparent reason.  I haven't had one of those moments in months.  I have fleeting moments of slight melancholy, of course.  I'm not completely cured.  A large part of those bouts are simply embedded in my personality.  Even with the touches of sadness,  however, I have not felt that extreme, unexplainable despondency since I had the dream.

I'm curious to see if this new-found peace will stay with me.  What strikes me the most is that after so many years, decades really, of actively searching, scouring the depths of my own soul to find peace, it somehow made its way to me quietly, on its own, without my help.  It was not something that I summoned at all, but rather something that just serenely emerged.  Had I been trying to hard?  Was I just not ready before?  Why now, has it come so easily?  I don't know why or how.  What I do know is that I am grateful.

For a while after I saw the medium, I wondered if I had made a mistake.  What if I had broken some kind of spiritual law.  What if I had summoned my grandmother from beyond without her permission?  Could I have caused a rift in the spiritual continuum, causing irreparable damage to the peace of her afterlife? What about the things the medium said?  Were they true?  Was I missing signs, not observant enough, failing myself in yet another area of my life?  What if the whole thing was one big farce, and I spent countless hours wrangling with my own thoughts and demons based on something that was simply not true?  How could I know for sure?  That final question is the one that bothered me the most.  I wanted, no I needed, to know for certain.

Over the last few months, I have lost that need to know for certain.  I still wonder.  I give credence to all possibilities.  I think that it's entirely possible for our loved ones to contact us from the other side, for them to guide and love us even in death.  I also think that there's a good possibility that there is simply nothing after death.  Lights out.  That's it.  I think it's highly likely that all constructs of life after death, even organized religion in general (don't lynch me here) are all simply elaborate, man-made postulations created to comfort our own fears and insecurities and give meaning to our existence.  I'm not saying I don't believe in God.  On the contrary, I do believe in God.  Personally, I think that the universe is just too complicated to be explained by science alone.  I absolutely believe in a higher guiding presence.  But I also see why many people do not.

The point was not to argue religion, though.  The point was to illustrate the change in my perspective.  I like to think we are guided to where we need to be in our lives and given the experiences we need to mold us into the people we supposed to become.  That's my personal take on life.  One can argue it many ways.  Fate or free will, guided or blindly stumbling, there's no arguing that what we experience shapes us.  I no longer look at my visit to the medium as a mistake.   I needed to question.  I needed the issues that have been floating around in my brain for so long to come to a head and be released.  The validity of her actual words don't matter.  The visit has been validated in its own right by my peace of mind.  In many ways, she truly did act as a medium for me - either by channeling my grandmother, or by simply acting as a bridge to my contentedness.  The medium was the jumping board for my serenity, and I am beyond grateful for the peace.  I no longer feel a relentless need to contact my grandmother.  I am at ease knowing that she is with me.  However she is with me - in my head or actually by my side - doesn't matter.  I don't need a medium to reassure me, all I need is myself.

That said, if I ran into Teresa Caputo, I would absolutely hit her up for a reading!  But for now, I'm happy to just be, something that I don't think I've ever been able to say before, something that speaks for itself and sets me worlds beyond my former struggles.