by Salicrow
From the vantage of age, I know I planned this life in great detail. Through life experiences and psychic searching, I have viewed the spaces between my lives. I have seen the pattern and the threads of the tapestry I’ve chosen to weave. I know that I picked my most trying experiences in advance so I would develop the skills needed for my work—Grammy Brown’s death included.
But at the time, I was just a girl who had lost her most beloved companion.
Almost all of Grammy Brown’s belongings were donated to charity. She had survived the Depression, which meant she’d saved just about everything. Most of her stuff wasn’t worth much monetarily, as she was not a woman of earthly treasures, but there were things of hers that I wanted: the black high heels I had played with every time I visited as a child, and the beaded dress from the 1920s that was more stylish than I could ever imagine Grammy Brown being. These things landed in the charity pile before I could prevent it. I did get a few items: a traveling ashtray with the Viceroy cigarettes logo on it, which she always carried in her pocket; her dresser; a sweater; a few of her house dresses; a handful of inexpensive jewelry. Other family members kept a few things. The rest of it was taken away in unopened boxes like refuse.
In my mourning, I started wearing her house dresses and sweater. I made it work with a few scarves and a lot of jewelry, but it really bothered my father. He would get mad and tell me I looked like the town tramp. This confused me because I thought the word tramp meant slut, and I failed to see how old-lady house dresses could be seen as provocative. In reality he meant I looked like a hobo, which I’m sure reminded him of how poor he’d been as a child. Either way, I wasn’t deterred by his opinions. I simply put them in the same category as the other mean things that escaped his mouth after her death.
My father had experienced great trauma and loss too. He was practically destroyed by the death of Grammy Brown. After all, she had raised him as her own, making her his mother as well as his grandmother. Unfortunately, I was too young to see anything but my own pain, and I was incapable of understanding his behavior. I just saw it as another way the universe was screwing me over.
I started drinking and smoking cigarettes at thirteen. The cigarettes were easy to get because there was no age limit on buying tobacco in the eighties. I could simply walk into the store and buy them myself. The alcohol was a bit more challenging to obtain. At first my friends and I would drink beer at slumber parties if we could convince someone’s older sibling to buy it for us.
By the time I was fourteen, I had started smoking pot, and that seemed a better fit for me. It didn’t make me puke the way alcohol did, and it was easy enough to purchase. You could always get it from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who sold it—or I would steal it from my parents’ stash.
By the time I was fifteen I started hanging out with older boys. I say “boys,” but most of them were in their early twenties. I know that may sound bad, but this was the eighties, and I was part of the generation that liked to believe life wasn’t worth living past thirty. Plus, it was normal in my eyes. My parents had gotten married when my mom was fourteen and my dad was twenty. That’s not to say my parents approved of my activities. I kept them to myself or lied about it.
The wounds of Grammy Brown’s death didn’t seem to be fading with time. They seemed to be festering into something else.
At home, life was spiraling out of control. My father’s drinking and womanizing became acute. My parents fought often, with each other and with me. I lied to them about where I was and what I was doing. If they found out I had been somewhere other than where I said I was, I would look them in the eye and say, “You obviously know where I was, so why are you asking?” I was defiant, argumentative, and brazen.
Along with drinking, smoking, and use of the occasional harder substance, my self-destructive mind had another tendency. I became both anorexic and bulimic. I spent my teenage years vomiting, whether because I had drunk too much or because I was purposely making myself vomit for the sake of body image. “Karmic puke” is how I like to refer to it now: those moments when things are so toxic that we literally can no longer keep them inside. There is no straight path to wisdom and virtue, so do not expect that from me, jump-girl psychic today. I had to rescue myself first. I had to live through what life and karma had to teach me.
Anorexia was about control for me, as it is for others. It began when I was fourteen with a simple decision. I decided that I was going to lose weight by drastically cutting food out of my life. There was a defining moment—an exact time and place when I made the decision—and like a magic spell of self-destruction, once it was set in motion it had an energy of its own. This is cosmic energy at work too. All life is ordinary. All life is magic. All life is sacred.
The moment took place when I was sitting at a restaurant with a group of friends. We were at an out of-town drama festival. None of the people I was with knew me particularly well because most of us had met through the play we were performing. No one there knew me well enough to have expectations about my behaviors. No one would think it unusual if I hardly ate at all. It was the perfect mix for negative manifestation. I stepped out of my chaotic life and into a new, more controlled spiral into oblivion.
My parents were too caught up in their own troubles to be aware of mine. It took many months and many lost pounds before anyone even noticed my diet. I survived on pickles and peanut butter. When my mother finally noticed my lack of eating and weight loss, she imagined that she could handle it by demanding I eat. That’s when I started puking. It was a perfect response to her demands. She could make me eat, but she couldn’t make me keep it down.
My mind was like a computer infected with a virus that wanted to make my friends jealous that I had such good control and could lose so much weight. I journaled obsessively, listing everything I ate each day, how much I weighed, what size clothes I was wearing. I fantasized about how much better my life was going to be when I lost five more pounds: more popularity, better boyfriends, happiness, abundance. I would pretty much conquer the world.
I had moments of clarity when I was both within and beside myself at the same time. At these times, the “me” inside was flailing about in the world of illusion, while my higher self, the observer soul, was looking for a solution to my predicament. It could see my life force leaving me just as it had when I’d nearly drowned in the cold waters of the Ammonoosuc. It knew I needed saving, but this time no one seemed to be watching. Everyone was too distracted with their own troubles. I was on my own.
Even my ego self knew I was fucked up. Deep down inside, I knew. When I thought of Grammy, I knew, and I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I didn’t want her to see how far down the hole I had fallen. I could feel her out there, and I knew her spirit was watching me, but she felt so distant. It wasn’t that she had grown distant from me; I had created this distance. At the time, I imagined that she was ashamed of me. But she knew what was happening, just as she had from our first moments together. She could bide, and silently guide.
19
Mad at God
The holy-roller church we were attending held services in the American Legion Hall because they didn’t have a building of their own. It felt like some kind of carnival act, with people speaking in tongues and everyone having on-the-spot close encounters with the Holy Spirit.
No one was able to tell us what the people speaking in tongues were saying, which I found absurd. If God wanted to talk to us and insisted on speaking through people in an unknown language, you’d think he’d at least provide a translator. To make things more comical, the two most prestigious ladies in the church were dueling in God-speak. When one of them started speaking in tongues, the other followed suit in a louder, more grandiose fashion.
I spent my church time counting the eagles on the wallpaper and silently mocking the hypocrisy. I had begun to question whether God actually existed at all. This was an incredibly painful thought, for deep inside I yearned fo
r the faith of innocence that I’d had as a child. I wanted to find that connection again, to slip back into my comfy seat in God’s choir, but it continued to elude me.
When I was fifteen my parents finally got divorced. A year of hell preceded their life-changing decision. During most of it I was grounded or acting out in a way that would soon get me grounded. I had become dark and godless, but my spirit guides were still looking out for me. This was when I started playing with the Ouija board. It wasn’t my idea; in fact, I was adamantly opposed to it, but my friends wanted me to. I sat on my friend’s couch and cried with fear of demon possession and hell.
I blame my fear on Scooby-Doo cartoons, bad eighties movies, and holy-roller dogma. I wasn’t afraid of spirits; I had never been afraid of spirits. I was afraid of the board itself. I believed that it was a gateway to hell and that, by using it, I would be inviting demons to take up residence in my soul. At some level I knew that was nonsense, but the fear was real. Whether I was remembering something from my past lives or foreseeing it in the future, I knew that possession was real.
After much harassment, my friends convinced me to join them at the Ouija board. The spirit on the board kept spelling out, “I want to talk to Sali.”
We took to using the board obsessively, all weekend, every weekend, for months. We weren’t choosy; we would talk to any spirit or entity that would speak to us. We asked questions about our past lives, future lives, the lives of the spirits, our connection to them, and so on. With no thought of protection, we lapped up most of what they had to say like cream. But protection is crucial when communicating with spirits, as is knowing both the light and the dark of oneself.
After a while we were talking to the same group of three or four spirits. Two of those I have had continued contact with in my work as a medium. In fact, one of them remains my main spirit guide, Peter, whom I have nicknamed Big Business. Peter was the one who beckoned me to the board, appearing as an older woman named Sarah. He was not pretending to be Sarah; Sarah and Peter are different incarnations of the same soul. When we’re dead, we become all that we are, and older souls learn to use multiple images and configurations of self at will. A skilled medium can recognize the energy of a soul regardless of its outer appearance. As a fourteen-year-old, I did not yet possess this knowledge or have the ability to discern spirit personae and shapes.
Fortunately, Sarah and most of the other spirits we encountered were guides and protectors. Then we met Tamlin. Sensual and charming, he seemed almost flirtatious. His attentions were selective, with a focus on either compliments or insults. He went after whatever each of us was most insecure about. He directed most of his attention toward one of my friends, telling her that over time he could take on physical form and become more real. He said he wanted to be her boyfriend.
My arrogant, matter-of-fact, tell-you-how-it-is, “I grew up on spirits in mirrors, dude” persona came out. “Bullshit!” I said to Tamlin at the board, in response to his claim of being able to assume physical form. “You know that is not true.”
He became curt and insulting to me, all the while playing up the other girl’s insecurities with flattery. He and I poked jabs at one another, passing scorn back and forth. I finally said, “Okay, if you can make yourself real, prove it.”
At that moment the lights in the room went out, and the stereo came on.
As a professional medium, I know that it requires a great deal of energy for a spirit to manifest in such a way. Lacking sufficient quanta to do this themselves, they must borrow energy from others in the room. There was no lack of energy to be had from a bunch of scared teenage girls who were completely open and vulnerable.
We stopped using the board immediately. The four of us were in shock. We didn’t go back to it for hours; when we did, we chose only to talk to Sarah. She advised us that we must be cautious about whom we interact with, and she confirmed that not all spirits are benevolent or well-intentioned. They can also be sneaky and manipulative. This should be no surprise, since we’re capable of such things in our earthly lives as well. Not all humans are kind, good, and trustworthy.
Sarah told us that my arrogance most likely kept us safe. My staunch belief that neither Tamlin nor any other spirit could have power over me prevented him from gaining power.
This belief came from within my soul, a remembrance of my higher self. I always know what I am capable of if challenged. In moments when I’m questioned about my psychic abilities—and it does happen—I know whether I can or cannot do something, even without ever having tried it in this lifetime. In such moments I become both the experiencer and watcher, my higher self present and alert as I examine my own mental state.
Our experience with Tamlin and the Ouija board led one of my four friends into a very dark place, a place of demons under the bed, dark voices grumbling on the phone, and a subsequent retreat deep into religion. She was not the one he had chosen to taunt, but she had a family history of mental-health problems. She struggles with delusional thinking to this day. I wonder if the Ouija board experience was too much for her psyche, or if she simply wanted to exist in a world of gothic fantasy.
I don’t believe the Ouija board is inherently evil. It doesn’t possess an intrinsic value such as good or evil. It is a tool, and like any tool it should be treated with respect. I often compare it to a chainsaw. A chainsaw is a fantastic appliance when used with caution and respect. However, if we treat a chainsaw like a toy, we are very likely to get hurt. The same can be said about the Ouija board or any tool that connects us to the sharp-whirring edge of spirit.
The spirit world involves a lot of unknown factors, even for a skilled medium with years of experience. I don’t know everything about their world. There are mysteries and secrets I am not allowed to know. In my work with the dead, I have had to develop strong relationships with spirits I know and trust. I rely on them to aid me in my work and help me keep my space clean and safe.
Another thing that the experience with the Ouija board showed me was that I still held a place in myself for a higher power. In the belly of my arrogance, a morsel of God remained. The real reason Tamlin had no power over me was that I was too bright and carried the love of God. This notion began a quiet questioning that would challenge me for the next couple of years. I was starting to see that I did believe in God, just as I believed in spirits; but I didn’t believe in the God that the holy-roller church and the Bible had preached at me. I believed there was a force for good in the universe and that I was directly connected to that force.
Despite these ruminations and my experiences with spirit on the Ouija board, my epiphanies were a flash in the pan compared to the full-force kitchen fire that was my home life. As my father’s drinking and womanizing got worse, so did the fighting at home. I continued drinking, smoking, and neglecting food. Exertion of control through anorexia became my staunchest companion. When I couldn’t handle the fighting, crying, and general shit-show of my home life, I would obsess in my handy journal and get down to business figuring out how I could lose more weight.
In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, my world came to a screeching halt. It all started after my family returned home from a trip to Maryland to visit my mother’s family. We had made that trip many, many times before, but this one was unpleasant. My parents seethed with tension the whole time. When we got back home, my dad went out with his friends and didn’t come home that night. At the time, this wasn’t out of the ordinary; he built ski lifts and traveled a lot for work.
The next day when I got home from school, I found him sitting on the couch by himself. He said, “I need to talk to you, kid.”
My immediate response was, “I didn’t do anything.”
He shook his head and told me that he and my mother were getting divorced. He moved out a few days later. Within weeks it was obvious that my mother had a boyfriend. Within a month, she moved to Vermont with my sister Stephanie, while Sandy and I moved into an apartment with my father.
My r
easons for wanting to live with my father were both sound and skewed. I was mad at my mother for leaving him, even though she had every reason to do so. He lied, cheated, drank too much, and verbally abused her and us. He was a walking disaster. But her decision to leave meant my life had to change, and I was afraid of what that would look like. Moving with her to Vermont would mean leaving my friends, which at this point were the only stable thing in my life.
I lived with my father and his new girlfriend for about six months. During that time, my new, wicked “stepmother,” Cookie, twisted and manipulated with the skill of a woman who had already been married four times. On the surface, though, she enticed us to love her, took us shopping, did girl things with us, and seemed to genuinely care about us and our father.
The daughter of her fourth husband went to school with me and tried to warn me. She predicted how things would pan out, explaining that first Cookie would buy us stuff all the time to win our friendship. Then she would slowly turn our father against us until we hardly had a relationship with him at all.
I wanted to believe she was wrong; after all, Cookie seemed kind, cool, and a bit mysterious. In fact, she gave me my first tarot reading. In it she told me I would start dating someone who was at least six years older than me, that I would soon be moving, and that I would someday meet a white-haired man who would give me an inheritance that was not money.