I didn’t choose to do this work. I was chosen … by God. Why? I have no idea. I can tell you I came into this work kicking and screaming.
I was born on Guam, a tiny island in the South Pacific. The people of Guam are typically Roman Catholic, and when someone dies, we bury them and don’t talk about them, let alone talk to them. It’s believed that doing so disturbs their “rest.” As a friend of mine who is also from Guam once said, “… no one in their right mind from our culture would ever [claim to talk to dead people]. ”
So how did I come to know that I have this ability, one that I didn’t even know, or believe, existed? Looking back, I really had been doing it for years.
For 20+ years I investigated claims of hauntings, apparitions, and poltergeist activity. While I used psychics in these investigations, I didn’t consider myself psychic, and would even bristle at the suggestion I was. I was invited to appear on a television show to talk about what I was doing, and the day it aired I received a phone call from Jennifer and Mike, friends I hadn’t seen in at least 4 years inviting me to dinner at their house.
I first met Mike years ago when I didn’t mention I investigated hauntings because, unlike now, most people would look at me like I had grown a third eye. Both Mike and I volunteered as Catholic youth ministers at the same church when we first met, another reason I didn’t reveal what I was doing. Later, I was the best man and Mike and Jennifer’s wedding.
The dinner talk eventually got around to ghosts, and the practice of praying for the souls in Purgatory. They both told me that they prayed for the deceased with rosary beads. I encouraged them to continue the practice. Mike pulled out his rosary and showed it to me. It was a beautiful old rosary. “Mike, did this belong to your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Did she die from cancer?”
“Yes.”
I went on to describe details of her life and death. “Mike, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the reason I know these things is that she’s standing behind you telling them to me!” After I said this, the thing that shocked me was the lack of shock on his face!
“My turn!” his wife said excitedly, handing me another rosary. “This belonged to my father.” I could have told her that because he “appeared” before me like a hologram. I passed information onto her from him, even mentioning a phone call she had with one of her brothers regarding their inheritance.
After passing on what I was hearing, I noticed she just kept smiling at me. I didn’t know what to think so I said to her, “I don’t know about you guys, but this is freaking the shit out of me!” I didn’t feel at all like I was a “medium.” I felt more like Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi Goldberg, in the movie, “Ghost.”
A couple of days later I was telling my friend Camille about what happened. Her own father died just about three weeks before. We were sitting in a coffee shop when she asked me to tell her, again, what happened with Mike and Jennifer. I picked up her keys to show her how I was holding the rosary beads when suddenly I felt an energy coming from them. I threw the keys on the table.
“What happened?” Camille wanted to know. I told her about feeling the energy, and she wondered what it meant. “Pick them up and tell me what you get!”
I picked them back up, and suddenly I could see her father! He started telling me how he wanted the real estate investments he own handled by his kids. When I passed this information on Camille told me that just the night before she and her sisters were discussing just that subject, and that the questions they had were now apparently answered by her father!
Camille’s husband Steve showed up a few minutes later, and I did a discernment for him. Ever the skeptic, Steve insisted that I must have gotten the information I passed along from Camille.
“It’s true,” I thought, “with both Jennifer and Mike, and now Camille and Steve, I might have heard a lot of this and simply forgot. But what about the phone conversations Jennifer and Camille had with their siblings that I had no idea about? How could I have “known” what those were about?”
I decided that the best way to put all of this behind me was to do readings over the Internet, via IM. I posted notices on various chat sites that I was looking for 100 people who had lost loved ones to contact me, and I would try to reconnect them. I didn’t want to know anything about the person they were trying to contact, and if someone wanted a discernment, I only wanted to know their first name.
I began to receive requests, and I set up appointments to do readings through instant messenger as I didn’t want to receive any clues, such as unconscious nods, frowns, or smiles. When the session started I would IM what I was receiving. If I started feeling weak, and growing weaker, I would say that the person died from a long term illness. If I had a odd taste in my mouth, I would relate it to chemo, and offer that the person was telling me that they died from cancer. If I heard something, I’d pass it on. I learned to make statements, rather than ask questions.
On, and on, for a hundred sessions with complete strangers. It was funny to me at the time that some of the people thought that they were doing me a favor (which they were) and would offer me suggestions as to how to do a better reading. I was just trying to find out if what I was doing was real!
After the hundred IM sessions, I started looking for volunteers among my acquaintances, then my friends. But none of it really sank in until after my friend Sarah died. I was on my way to her memorial service when I started talking to her. By this time I was convinced that if we talked to those who have died, they do hear us. I still wasn’t convinced (I didn’t want to be) that I was hearing them.
I told Sarah how much I loved her, and how I was going to miss her, and her friendship. The next thing I knew she was right next to me talking back to me! I could even hear her voice, which almost caused me to faint. What really startled me was when she asked me to tell her family she’s okay.
When I got to St. Marks Catholic Church for the service, I told friends what just happened. Each one of them asked the same thing, “Have you told them?”
“Are you nuts?” I would say. “I can’t tell them that! Why would they believe me?”
“Why not?” One of my friends, Cheryl, asked. “That’s your thing isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, ‘my thing’?”
“Talking to dead people,” she said walking away.
I didn’t tell her family that night. Why? I was still struggling with what all of this meant, and if it served any purpose whatsoever. Then a woman sent me an e-mail saying that I helped her do in an hour what she couldn’t do in over 7 years of counseling – move through her grief. I mentioned this to Camille and she told me how I helped her see her father, and mother (who had also passed away when she was 12), in a different light.
I kept saying to Camille, “Well, now that I’ve been a medium for (one week, two weeks, three weeks, which would make her laugh) this is what I’ve learned.”
She told me later she laughed because I’ve been doing this as long as she’s known me. She kept wondering why I wasn’t catching on.
It wasn’t anything I asked for, or wanted, so I struggled; boy, did I struggle with it, and with God. After years of struggle (my life’s dream was to continue to trade commodities futures) I’m at peace, with myself, with this “gift,” and with God.
After all this time I’ve also learned that no matter how much I do, it’ll never be enough – the “waiting list” of those on the Other Side wanting to reconnect with those they left behind is long.
I feel your peace.
Anthony