THE GIFT OF HEALING FROM A MEDIUM

There are some things in life that need to be experienced first hand to get the full impact of what it means to be gobsmacked. The Grand Canyon, being a parent, listening to a medium tell you things there’s no way they could possibly know. 

My first experience getting messages from a medium was a surprise from beginning to end. The medium contacted me out of the blue through mutual friends. The friends called me to say their medium friend, David Edge, in Liverpool, England, had messages for me. I was living in Hawaii at the time and couldn’t for the life of me imagine how someone I’d never met, who was on the other side of the planet, had messages for me.

Curious, I called David and he started right in, telling me my dad – who had transitioned two years previously – was with him and then he told me, in detail, exactly what I’d been doing the day before. “You were looking at houses because there’s a problem with yours.” “Yes,” I told him, my ex-wife suffered terrible mold allergies in the house where we were living so we needed to move to a drier part of the Big Island. “The house with the big tree in the middle of the circle driveway and the pasture overlooking the ocean… your dad likes that one for you.” How could he possibly know this, I wondered.

He then said to me, “so you have two brothers and two sisters?” I thought “Aha!” I had busted him. I said, “no, I have two brothers and one sister.” Considering everything else David said was a direct hit on the bullseye, it was something of a hollow victory, but nonetheless, at least my life wasn’t a completely open book to him.

David said, “Hmmm,” and then told me a couple more things he couldn’t possibly have known before saying, “Karl, are you aware your mum had a miscarriage?”

At this point I had to pick up my jaw off the ground. I said, “Actually David, I am aware of that, but it wasn’t a miscarriage. It was a full term still born. And it was a girl.” So David says, “Well, she’s here with your dad and she just wants ya to know she loves ya and would like to be more a part of the family. And she’d like you to tell your mum that she’s okay with how things turned out.”

Words fail to convey what it felt like to hear the sentiments of a sister I’d never met. A sister I’d never played with, or read books to, or tried to steal dolls from to tease her. A sister who had never taken a single breath outside the womb wanted me to know she loves me. A Grand Canyon moment to be sure…

The impact of David’s words on my mom was monumental, and the healing that resulted was miraculous. Tears flowed, tears Mom thought she had cried in 1962. Mom and Dad had buried my sister without a name, so Mom named her Nora, after her grandmother. I called the cemetery in St. Croix Falls where her infant body lies, and had them remake the headstone with Nora’s name and her birth date – February 14th.

The following February 14th, as was customary in our family, we made a birthday banner for Nora and hung it on the banner wall. We baked her a birthday cake, lit her birthday candles, and sang happy birthday to her. Suddenly a nameless baby girl who’d side stepped life at the threshold and drifted into the realm of repressed heartbreak had a name, a birth date, a place in our family. Another Grand Canyon moment…

How this phone call was even possible, I don’t know. Spirit moves in elegant ways, laying out stepping stones to unseen bridges so they can whisper their messages of love into our consciousness. I don’t know how my dad found David, or knew that David would get his and Nora’s messages to me from the other side of the planet. But I’m glad he did. I got more than a phone call that day in Hawaii, I got a rewrite to my family story. Before, when people would ask how many siblings I have, I’d tell them three. I don’t say three anymore. Ever since that phone call, I say four. Two brothers, and two sisters, just like David said.