by Suzan Saxman
“How’s whatsisname?” Pat would ask me about David when I came to London, challenging me to leave him.
One of the worst things that I’ve ever done as a psychic was tell Pat during a reading that he was going to leave Margaret. I saw it. It was true. But I shouldn’t have said it. And when he did finally leave her, I felt totally responsible. It broke up our friendship, needless to say.
But just before everything fell to pieces, I did one last channeling session at their flat. It was in October of 1987, but it was an unseasonably warm night. They invited over a lot of friends, and I sat in a red velvet chair with everyone arrayed around me and just let loose with whatever I saw about anyone there. Usually it was a very relaxed kind of atmosphere with people drinking beer, but that night I could feel something in the air, although I didn’t know what it was.
People have often asked me if I have a spirit guide or an angel who tells me these things, but it’s not like that. It’s more that I connect with the spirits that people bring into the room. Or at least that’s what I’d always thought.
But that night I shut my eyes for a moment and heard a sound like oars splashing in water, of feathers ruffling the air, and when I opened my eyes, there, standing in front of me, was a seraphim—an angel. She was slender and very, very tall and wore simple blue robes. She was staring into my eyes, and her wings were spread around her. Her wings were covered not in feathers, but in open, all-seeing eyes.
I was not afraid, but my blood was cold in my veins, and there was that moment, there’s always that moment, when I questioned my sanity.
There was nothing shimmery or vague about her. She was a real being, a being of enormous presence, completely filling that tiny room. I call her a she, but there was something androgynous about her, and she was more than seven feet tall. I could tell no one else in the room could see her. I hadn’t been calling on angels, I hadn’t been calling on anything, but there she was.
The room was cold. I could see people shivering. Inexplicably, Margaret began to cry.
I knew we were all protected in the angel’s presence and yet, simultaneously, I felt the smallness of human beings and everything we’ve ever done. Beneath the vast sky, even Stonehenge is small. We are all little men about to disappear, and there are beings so much bigger and more powerful around us than we can possibly imagine. We are too small to even see the spirits that are everywhere around us. How can a gnat comprehend what it is seeing when it looks at us? How can it read our expressions or our gestures, understand our motivations, or even know what we are?
She was showing herself to me in a way that I could see, but I knew she was so much bigger than this in reality.
I can dismiss a lot of things that have happened to me, but not this. In those tiny rooms in Lambeth I saw an angel, and I was never really the same ever again.
She stared at me for a long time without saying anything before she disappeared, but when she did, I remember looking out the window and seeing the sky turning red, absolutely crimson, and a strange wind beginning to blow. She might have been there for a second or an hour. I never knew.
I realized that I was crying and everyone was staring at me.
Life would never be the same again. That knowledge surged through me. It was exhilarating. I wanted to run out in the streets like some doomsday madman proclaiming, “The angel has come! The angel is here!”
But I could barely form words, I was so overcome. “Did you see that?” I whispered.
“Look at that red sky!” said Pat.
“The wind’s really picking up!” announced Margaret.
“I’ve got to get home,” said one of the guests.
All they could talk about was the storm that was brewing. I could tell they’d all been unnerved, but they attributed it to the weather. They wanted to leave. Angels are overwhelming even when you don’t see them.
There were reports on the news of a rare hurricane about to strike London. I had a friend, Gloria, who was back at our hotel, and Pat thought I should probably get back to her, that the storm was about to get a lot worse. But what I wanted more than anything at that moment was to be outside.
I felt a wildness within me as I stepped onto the street and the winds began to howl. I ran through the rain feeling elated and empowered. I had seen an angel, and it didn’t matter if the world was about to end because I knew there really wasn’t any such thing as an ending. There’s no death, only constant wild and wonderful change, and I felt absolutely like part of it that night.
The sidewalks were covered in leaves and fallen branches. Glass was starting to break, and the sky was even redder than before. I felt completely like part of the crazy energy of the storm. I reached my hotel and ran inside and begged Gloria to come outside and revel in it with me. She thought I was nuts, and I probably was, a certified lunatic, ready for Bedlam.
She locked the hotel room door and ordered me to stay inside. I went to the window and watched the swirl of the rain and felt exuberant and mad. Windows were shattering. Trees were crashing down. Sirens were blaring. At last, somehow, I settled down and went to sleep, but sometime in the night, during the storm, I awoke and there, standing at the end of my bed, was the man in the black hat.
It had been years since I had seen him, and I had forgotten how completely terrifying he was.
His eyes were neither blank nor on fire, as they had been when I was a child. Now they were red, as bright red and glowing as the sky. I felt a gust of dead air. Like a scared child, I pulled my blankets over my head, shut my eyes, and hoped he’d disappear by the time I woke up again.
I thought he was connected to the end of the world, to death and destruction, in ways that I couldn’t understand. I felt like he might signal Armageddon. That’s what he made me feel like. Crazy. The sky was red, his eyes were red, and sirens were blaring, and the flashing lights of ambulances were casting a red glow into the night. It felt biblical. Something was happening in the spiritual realm that I’d glimpsed but didn’t understand
All the spirits had come out to play.
I didn’t know that less than a mile away from my hotel room, Jack Wild was drinking a bottle of vodka when the only tree in his yard crashed onto his roof. For the first time in his life, he got on his knees and started to pray. He prayed that God would help him stop drinking.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, the man in the black hat was gone.
Trees fell, cars were crushed, and people died that night. It was a major national disaster, the worst storm to hit London in hundreds of years. David heard about it on the news and panicked. I was calmer than I had been the night before and I felt near me, again, the presence of my angel, even though now I could not see her.
When I got back to New Jersey a few days later, I started to do group channeling like I had done in London. Now every time I sat down with a group of people, I would feel my angel behind me. I never saw her again, but I knew she was there guiding me. She spoke through me, and she spoke much more politely and properly than I ever did.
I would shut my eyes with everyone sitting in a circle around me and then my head would turn in the direction of the person she wanted me to talk to, although she rarely spoke about personal issues. The angel had things to say about what was coming. She was prophetic. Years later I would realize that she had predicted the first Iraq war and the attack on the Twin Towers, but she spoke more than anything about what was happening to the Earth.
If human beings cannot learn at last to respect nature, the world will get rid of us. It could happen at any moment. She didn’t say how, but she wanted people to know how the Earth had been violated, drilled, abused, and raped, and that the Earth herself was a living, breathing being that could fight back. And would.
This wasn’t news to me.
And honestly, I don’t think it’s news to most people. We just don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to know it. We don’t know what to do about it.
One night a number of months after I had r
eturned from England, my angel whispered in my ear that I was going to have a baby boy in 1992. She also told me that I needed to get to the Catskills, that in the Catskills I would be safe from what was coming.
I knew then that I had a ridiculous angel. Not only did I not want to be a mother, but it would totally cramp my style, and the only thing I knew about the Catskills was that it was a kind of run-down old resort area filled with big hotels and has-been comedians. All I could think of was Dirty Dancing. Why would I want to go there? Needless to say, I didn’t take either of these two messages very seriously, which I suppose is the way a lot of people treat my readings. “What is she, nuts?”
In the beginning I often felt overwhelmed by the presence of my angel, but as time passed I began to doubt that she was real. I began to try to explain her. Maybe she was just my higher consciousness or something. I worried that I’d made it all up, that I really was crazy, that of course the one time I’d get a psychic reading of my own it would turn out to be a figment of my imagination. But that’s the thing—the moment I stopped believing in her, she disappeared. I stopped clapping my hands and Tinker Bell died. Not that I think angels die, but she left. She never came back. I’m no different from anybody else, really. I have a hard time believing this stuff, too. I really do.
But, of course, everything the angel told me turned out to be true.
A lovely woman from Eastern Europe came to me because the house she’d just moved into was “unrested.” She was sure it had an unsettled spirit. Every night when she was trying to fall asleep, she heard footsteps in the upstairs hallway running back and forth.
I saw a little boy, lost and unhappy, as she was speaking.
“Buy a teddy bear for him,” I told her, “and put it in the room at the end of a hallway. That will help him feel less upset and give him a place to go.”
She came back to me a few weeks later to tell me that the teddy bear had done the trick. But now she felt attached to this boy. Sometimes she went into the bedroom and bounced a child’s ball for him. She brought him little presents. She even set up an altar for him, whoever he was.
She wasn’t sure he was even in her house anymore, and neither was I, but she had come to love him and she felt like that love would take care of him wherever he was.
Ghosts don’t have to be frightening. They usually just need our help. This child just needed to be acknowledged. We can help them. They can help us.
Even now, so many years later, the woman includes him in her prayers.
12
Walking an Anaconda Is Easier than Thanksgiving with My Mother
I didn’t want to have children. I didn’t really like babies. I’d never babysat, never changed a diaper. I don’t even think I’d ever had a baby in any of my past lives. My mother always used to say, “I hope you never get pregnant. You’d be a terrible mother.” I was really good about using birth control because of that. But I did yearn for some kind of family experience, probably left over from watching The Waltons when I was little.
My Daddy had passed away from cancer while I was with Erik, and my mother was increasingly needy. She became extremely helpless, and my sister took care of the bills and details of my mother’s life. She couldn’t drive. She didn’t know how to write a check. She didn’t really know how to do anything. She didn’t read. She didn’t visit with friends. She didn’t have any friends. My sister tried to move out at one point, and my mother threw a fit and screamed that it was just because she wanted to have sex. My sister stayed. My mother made it impossible for my sister to have her own life.
My mother’s one experience of being alive had been her affair with my father, but she denied its importance and pretended it had never happened because it didn’t jibe with some pious idea she had of herself. If Steve’s name came up, she would say that he had forced himself on her. I guess he forced her to make bacon and eggs for his breakfast for ten years, too, and I guess he forced her to fly to Florida and drive cross-country and go to the movies on the weekends. Sometimes she’d glare at me and shake her head and say that I looked just like him. It upset her. She was so ashamed of it, of me, but really it was the one thing she’d ever done that might have given her a little joy.
Steve would still reach out to her from time to time, I think. He would send her opera tapes and these movies that he’d copied onto videotape—beautiful classic movies—and she’d be like, “I don’t want to look at these. I don’t want any of this.” And she’d pile them up in the corner, but she wouldn’t throw them away. She’d sit in the room with the television on, not really watching it. She was miserable.
I asked her for his number from time to time, but she would explode and say that he had been a terrible father to me. “He didn’t support you. He didn’t take care of you. What did he ever do for you?”
Her rage was so upsetting that I almost never brought it up. More than anything, I still wanted her approval.
One Thanksgiving I arrived for dinner with David and I was wearing a new shade of lipstick—Chanel Vamp. It was dark red, almost black, and very elegant. Everyone was wearing it in the eighties. I felt fashionable and beautiful.
“Oh my God. You look like one of those people,” said my mother the moment she opened the door.
For a moment I just stood there, speechless, winded. “I am one of those people!” I ended up yelling at her.
In my readings, I saw plenty of women who had wonderful relationships with their mothers: “My mother and I are really close. I can tell her anything.”
“Oh, yeah, I was addicted to crack for a while, but my mom really stood by me.”
“When my boyfriend broke up with me, my mom took me in.”
Dead or alive, these mothers all seemed to be nicer than my mother.
The thing I’ve realized from my readings is that you’ve got to figure out your shit right here, right now; that’s the only real way you can change your karma, whatever it is. We’ve all got our troubles, in this life, our past lives, and everyone else in our life does, too, and it’s all interconnected.
It was around this time that I was struck by a vision of my mother huddled and alone in the corner of a large stone room filled with people. It might have been a hundred years ago or more. Her hair was shorn, she was wearing rags, and she was crying. It was some kind of lunatic asylum, I knew that at once, and she had no one. No friends, no family, no one.
Whether she knew it or not, and I don’t think she did, my mother was carrying the memory of that life inside of her. No wonder she was panicked about being crazy; no wonder she was panicked about being left alone. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen this, but knowing it sometimes helped me to deal with her.
The one thing we did enjoy doing together was going to thrift shops and rummage sales. My mother had a lot of style, and I liked listening to her talk about good-quality fabrics and the cut of a coat. She was always looking for a bargain, and she could find them, too. I admired that about her.
I just liked touching the objects. I could feel their energy and their stories. I’d touch an old jewel or a glass or a picture frame and connect to the people who had cared about it. I could feel their lingering essences. People don’t realize it, but even the most inconsequential thing—an old thimble, a hairbrush, a sweater—every object that once was touched has a story to tell.
In the early 1990s, David and I moved to The Hills, a condo complex in Bedminster, New Jersey. My mother cosigned the mortgage for us in spite of her feelings about our marriage. We got approved for an apartment and taken immediately off the waiting list because I had done readings for so many people on the condo board. It was the place to live, with tennis courts and a swimming pool. But it had been built on an old Revolutionary War battlefield. On the one hand, it was a very normal, conservative kind of community. On the other, there was all this weird, powerful underlying energy that I really liked.
I didn’t have any formal place to do readings, so I started doing them out of our home. David was work
ing at the mall, at the Nature Place, and he’d come home from work and find five or six ladies sitting in our living room, like it was a bus stop. They’d all be lined up on the couch waiting to come into the kitchen with me for a reading. It was very intrusive into our daily life, I’m sure. But I felt like everyone who called deserved a reading, and it seemed like everyone was calling. I didn’t advertise; it was all word of mouth. And I wasn’t choosy about who came like I am now. No. I had accepted my calling. Doing readings was my job, and I had to do it no matter what. If people needed me, they needed me. That was it. I had whole families coming to see me, one right after another.
People tend to come to me for years. Marriages, divorces, babies—I’ve seen it all before it happens and then it happens. Sometimes my own life seems strangely uneventful when compared with everything I’m seeing.
This one family was obsessed with me. They owned a chain of pizzerias and wanted to consult about every person they fired and hired. Once, in the middle of the night, they were ringing and ringing the doorbell to my condo. Their house had just been robbed! They hadn’t even called the police yet. They’d come straight to me. The whole family had arrived, and the mother and father and their sons were all carrying their front door, taken off its hinges, put in the car, and lugged up to my apartment.
“They walked right through the front door!” they told me, pointing at the door. “Who did that?”
I was in pajamas, bleary-eyed, but I touched the door. “You know them,” I said. “Three teenagers, they live down the street from you.”