Re-meeting My Parents

Communicating with those who have died has become popular again. It's a media thing. There's a popular TV show "Medium," in which Patricia Arquette plays a psychic who helps to solve crimes. There was Haley Joel Osment, the child psychic in "Sixth Sense." And there are real-life psychics like Sylvia Browne, John Edward, James Van Praagh, and others. I don't doubt that these people see what they say they do. It's just that other people aren't seeing it. Nobody else experiences it. People watch the shows and are suitably impressed (or not) by the powers of the stars.

Now I am an incorrigible skeptic. I'm not just any old skeptic, mind you. I have been a psychic reader for over thirty years. But I am suspicious of anything that becomes a fad. And connecting with those who have gone beyond seems to have become another fad. So let me get a few things off my chest.

We humans are the only species that know we are going to die. Some people have concluded that this is the very reason for spirituality. These folks say that humans need to believe in something more than mortality. And there's the rub: belief.

Admittedly, there is something ungracious about speaking against belief on a website called "Beliefnet," but speak out I must. For belief is the acceptance of someone else's experience. There is a great chasm between believing and knowing. And people have believed in just about everything from the desirability of eliminating one's neighbors to the man in the moon. But what we

is in our hearts and souls and belongs to each of us alone.

The notion that those who have died are still around is comforting. But it can easily be a false comfort. There is a wonderful book used by grief counselors who deal with children who have lost parents. Its title expresses the point clearly:

. The book cautions people not to tell children that their dead parent is still around or will return. The loss is forever. The empty space is never filled. That's life. That's death.

It is the mystery of death that eludes us. We so desperately want to see things in ways that we can understand. We want lost loved ones to have the same form as when they were alive. We want to be able to speak with them. We want to know that they are not gone. And this desire is as old as the human race. We don't want to accept our loss.

So we have people who become "telephones" for the dead. We have images of ghosts in forms that we can recognize. We have, in short, the demystifying of the mystery. But wishing doesn't make it so.

The irony is that the more we try to make mysteries commonplace, the more out of reach they become for all of us. Hollywood has turned the supernatural into a cinematic cliché. Ghosts that shimmer and fade, evil winged creatures that arise from cracks in the earth, giant serpents, animated skeletons-these have passed down from the medieval witch hunters to the present film studios. In alchemy of their own, the mass media have transformed all mystery-all that which is beyond the rational-into something both horrible and familiar. In truth, the supernatural-the mystery-is neither horrible nor familiar.

In my experience, mystery is not scary, even though it is unknown. We are taught to fear the unknown. My experience of those who have died is limited but very real to me. Again, it is something I know-not a belief.

When I was a child, two important people died. One, my mother, died when I was nine months old. When I was two, my father married the woman who was to be my mother for the next 56 years. My father went off to war, returned, and died when I was nine.

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