My memoir chapter last week was about the night my mother finally told me the truth about my dad’s death, that he’d been depressed for months leading up to it and had told her the night before he disappeared that we’d all be better off without him. When she told me, I did not feel moved to tears—maybe because I was so stunned. But when I recounted the conversation to my therapist the following week, I cried so hard that I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the tears. And when I did that, an image flashed before my eyes, of Dad throwing himself off a bridge and immediately thinking, “What I have I done? I did not mean to do this.” But it was too late. He was going into that icy lake and there was no way he was coming out alive.
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That was the first time I ever pictured the moment of Dad’s death and I don’t know where the image came from. I chalked it up to wishful thinking. Then, at my sister’s 50th birthday, 15 years ago last week, I met a woman who told me something that made me think perhaps it wasn’t my imagination.
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The Healer
I met Baba at my sister’s 50th birthday brunch. I was sitting at the dining room table when she came up behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders without saying a word. I was so startled I nearly exploded out of my chair. It was as if an electric love current were running from her fingertips into my body, like I was being hugged by a Higher Power.
I flipped around to face the person with the magical touch. “What was that?” I demanded.
She immediately removed her hands and apologized.
“No, please, put them back!” I ordered. “That was amazing.”
This time the electric feeling was muted. My raised voice had clearly weakened whatever connection we’d had, but the touch still felt like comfort. “How’d you learn to do that?” I asked, even though, really, all she had done was touch me.
“I’m a healer,” she explained.
Interpreting “healer” as midwestern for “massage therapist,” I said, “Well, you sure picked the right line of work.”
That’s when she suggested I come see her next time I was in town. I promised I would. My sister used to date a massage therapist. I figured she must have met Baba through him. I was psyched (oh, the irony of that word) for what was certain to be my best massage ever. If I’d known what awaited me, I wouldn’t have been so excited. In fact, I doubt I would have gone.
Baba welcomed me into her sunny, cozy house and led me to what appeared to be a standard-issue massage table in the corner of a front room filled with books and plants. My Edmonton massage therapist always made me take my clothes off before getting to work. Baba invited me to sit on the table, fully clothed, before engaging me in what seemed to be a casual conversation.
Very quickly the topic turned to my father. Soon I was confiding to Baba what I was sure my sister had already told her: Dad had disappeared when I was 13 and Amy was 14, his body had turned up seven weeks later in a lake where we’d never been, the coroner ruled it an accident and Mom concurred, and then she shut down every attempt we made to understand what had happened and why. We were both in our early twenties when we figured out the truth, albeit independently of each other: Dad had been depressed and had killed himself.
By the time I met Baba, I’d been telling the story of Dad’s death for more than 35 years. I generally reported it dispassionately, as if it had happened to someone else. But sitting on her massage table as she rubbed my shoulders, I grew uncharacteristically weepy. She handed me a box of tissues, and as I wiped my eyes she explained that we were talking about Dad because he was communicating with her. He had something he wanted to tell me.
If I’d known that a healer is not a massage therapist, I probably would not have visited Baba to begin with. Sometimes ignorance is useful.
It dawned on me then that a healer is not the same thing as a massage therapist. Temporary jolted back to reality, I felt momentarily embarrassed, a feeling that quickly gave way to gratitude. I’d always wanted to believe that Dad was with me, watching over me. Here was proof.
Not long after my Baba visit, a friend wrote a book with a psychic. I was tempted to call the psychic and schedule an appointment to reinforce Baba’s message but I never did. I’m still not sure whether that’s because I didn’t think I’d believe the psychic or because I was afraid to go down a rabbit hole in which I’d become addicted to psychics. I am, as I have written elsewhere, a person who has watched the movie Ghost and thought, “I’m sure that could be a documentary.” And yet, for some things, at least, the skeptic in me is stronger than the believer.
Baba was different: for one thing, she didn’t call herself a psychic. More important, she was Amy’s friend. If I hadn’t felt I could trust her, I would have gotten up and left when she announced that Dad had a message for me, but that wasn’t the case and besides, I was in too deep. I wanted to hear the message.
“Your father wants you to know that he did not want to die,” Baba said. “He’s very sorry.”
Her words unleashed an unexpected flood of grief. I hadn’t sobbed with such intensity about Dad since the day I’d told my therapist that he’d believed we’d all be better off without him. Maybe if I’d come prepared to hear him speak to me from beyond the grave, I’d have been more composed when Baba told me the one thing I’d always wanted to hear: that he was sorry, he hadn’t meant to kill himself, it had been an accident after all. Or maybe I was crying because the news had come too late.
Had Baba delivered Dad’s message when I was still deep in denial, during the years between finding the condolence cards that suggested he killed himself and hearing the truth from Mom, I would have clung to that word, “accident,” as it were a life raft, confirmation that Dad hadn’t left us intentionally.
But sitting on the not-really-a-massage table, digesting the news that Dad was sorry that he had hurt us the way he had, by dying the way he had, made my heart ache the way it had years earlier when Irm had gently prodded me to understand why he had chosen to die.
That day with Irm was the first time I had envisioned my father throwing himself off a bridge. Part of that vision included him realizing almost immediately what a mistake he had made, but by then it was too late. He was sailing into the water. There was no way to undo what he had started.
Now, on Baba’s not-a-massage table, I wondered for the first time, could the image have come from an unacknowledged sixth sense? Maybe Dad had been trying to tell me that’s what had happened and I hadn’t known how to listen, so he had chosen Baba to relay the information.
Had Dad chosen Baba to deliver his message because I was too obtuse to get it on my own?
When I finally calmed down, I thanked Baba, paid her, and drove back to Mom’s place. Baba had told me not to tell Amy what she said Dad had said. She didn’t have to tell me not to tell Mom; there’s no way I would have done that, which Baba probably knew.
I kept my secret from Amy for a few hours—until I saw her. She was neither surprised nor particularly moved. She’s more of a skeptic than I am—she’d never availed herself of Baba’s healing powers and had no immediate plans to do so. More important, she felt as I did, and still do: Dad’s intention when he drove to the lake and climbed up on the bridge was to end his life. And even if he changed his mind at the last minute, it was too late. What he had planned is what he did.
In the years since my Baba experience, things have happened that have strengthened my belief that ours is not the only universe. (I’ve written about that here.) But I still haven’t taken the initiative to see a psychic. I wonder, readers, how many of you have been to a psychic? What was your experience? Have you gone back? And those of you who have never gone, what’s stopping you? I am curious! Please, if you are so inclined, share. Maybe we’ll get a good discussion going.
I have never gone to a psychic or medium, I think, because I am afraid of what they may tell me. I know someone who “sees dead people” and has given messages to people from them, unsolicited. I also know someone whose daughter, when she was a young child, spoke as a different person at times. Past lives therapy showed that she had been in the Holocaust. There is so much we don’t know or understand….
I have met one true psychic, and many charlatans. The real one was a Jewish lady here in Edmonton, who recently passed away at nearly 100. She only did readings for charity, and her guide was a little boy who died in the Holocaust, who started talking to her because he wanted someone to say Kaddish for him. I will tell you all about her when next we chat.