by John Edward
“Okay,” she said finally, just to get back to sleep. “We can talk tomorrow. I can’t promise anything.”
The next morning, I got up all excited. Linda was going to give me a phenomenal reading. I knew it, felt it. I had such a strong feeling that this was going to be what I had waited nine years for that I just about thought she was going to get on the phone and say, “Hello, John, I have your mother Perinda here. She died of lung cancer on October 5th, and she wants to tell you Princess and Springfield and thanks for putting the Pooh bear in the coffin.” There I go again. Easy, boy. Take a chill on those expectations.
I call her, ready to go. I have my phone headset on that I use when I do radio shows or phone readings. I’ve got my pen and my legal pad. I’m ready to throttle up the speedwriting I learned in high school.
“I’m very excited to be doing this,” Linda says. “ . . . I have a lovely woman here, and she’s standing behind you . . .” Oh, no. “And she’s sending much love and . . .”
I’m crushed. She can’t be one of those. That’s not what her book was about. I totally shut down. Instead of listening to what she’s saying, thinking about it, I just write it down, for lack of anything better to do. She keeps talking, and in return, I offer only an occasional grunt of indifference. She tosses out some stuff and asks me to validate it. Uh-huh. Yeah. No. Okay. I’ve already sold my stock in her; she’s not going to be the IPO who’s going to make me millions. She’s a gypsy fortune teller on the streets of Lower Manhattan.
But she gives you your money’s worth, I’ll give her that. I’m already on page six of my pad. “Your mum is telling me to tell you that she was your guiding light,” she says.
“Not really,” I reply dismissively. “She gave me a lot of direction, but I don’t know if I’d call her that.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What?”
“Your mum is quite a forceful woman.”
“She could be.” I’m not giving her an inch.
Now Linda changes her tone, slows down, lowers her voice as if something momentous is coming. “She wants me to tell you . . .”
“Yeah?” Okay, what’s my big message?
A pause. “Guiding . . . Light.”
Silence on my end. Then . . . Ka-BOOM! That’s it—gone. Done. Case Closed. Can’t speak. Tears pouring out. Nine years of anticipation erupt in a spectacle of pent-up emotion.
Sandra walks in, sees I’m a mess. Oh, God. Who died?
I try to pull myself together. I still haven’t been able to say a word, so Linda has no idea that she’s just become my new best friend. “You’re a very difficult young lad to read,” she says. “You don’t really offer up much validation. I don’t know if what I said to you made any sense.”
“Linda,” I said, finally able to say more than a word at a time, “it made more sense than I could possibly tell you.” I told her the whole story, and she said in her understated British way, “Well, I’m glad I was able to help you.”
And then I thought about how amazing my mother is. It was so obvious what the last nine years had been about. By holding back all that time, she was making a point that she wanted me to drive home in my work: the problem of expectations. She wanted me to teach through my own experience. Here I was, a professional medium who knows all the pitfalls, and I was doing the very human thing of holding out for that one nugget that I just had to hear, as if it contained the secrets of the universe, or at least the meaning of life. As if hearing the name of a soap opera would really change anything. I already knew my mother was around, leading an active afterlife. Look at all the stuff I let pass right by me because I didn’t want to miss the Big One. Stuff I can’t even remember—that’s how much I ignored it. Great gifts of validation from mediums who just weren’t delivering the packages I ordered. So I returned them. It was a ridiculous thing to do.
Still, I know why I did it, and I know why everybody does it. If you get the one thing you’re asking for, it seems like a slightly higher level of validation. It’s as if your mother or your husband or your daughter is answering you directly. And if that’s happening, it really means they are there, as if they got a phone call through from a constellation so far away it hasn’t been discovered. On an emotional level, that’s incredibly powerful. And it’s wonderful if you get it—witness the sentimental wreck I became when a woman I’d never met said two words to me over the phone from across an ocean. But what if you don’t get it? Does that mean they’re not there? Does it mean there’s no afterlife? What if a medium can’t get that, but instead can get this? If it’s a solid, specific, factual validation, does that make it any less valuable? This is the inevitable trap of the Great Expectation.
I wrote in my book that after nine years, I still had not received the signs from my mother that she had agreed to send. I said I was okay with that. And by the time the book was finished, I was. She had come through to me many times, in many wonderful ways. I’d love to get the signs, I said, and still looked forward to the day when they came. In my weaker moments, I could even fall back into the trap. But I offered myself as Exhibit A: Don’t lose the big picture. Appreciate the messages you get.
I said all of that in One Last Time. The book was edited, printed, and ready to ship by September. A few weeks later, I was on the phone to England in the middle of the night, my nine-year wait about to come to an end. It was a much-appreciated gift from my Guiding Light.
The Amazing Donna
IN JANUARY OF 1997, when I was just starting to become known around New York, at least among the psychic cogniscenti, Newsday, the large Long Island newspaper, published a very unusual story in its Sunday feature section. “Is John Edward Communicating with the Dead?” the headline asked. What made the story unusual was that it wasn’t about poking fun or taking easy shots or dismissing what I and others do as “cold reading,” lucky guessing, or executing some absurdly elaborate con game. It was the most objective, open-minded, and genuinely inquisitive article I had ever read about spirit communication in a mainstream publication. It was also the first major story about me. Beginner’s luck, I guess.
The writer, Bill Falk, had called and said he had heard about me from a colleague who knew someone who’d had a reading with me. He was intrigued and wanted to spend some time exploring what I do. Already wary of the press—I knew my elder colleagues weren’t always treated with respect, and I myself had been mocked in a couple of small news articles—I called a journalist friend and asked him what he knew about Falk. He told me he was a serious journalist with an investigative bent and a solid reputation. “He won’t do a hatchet job,” my friend said. “He’s exactly the kind of guy you want to write about you.”
Falk took the time to interview me in depth and independently explore the phenomenon. One of the things he did was to bring someone to me for a reading. Not an original idea, but I was impressed he didn’t just want a reading for himself. The person he brought was a middle-aged woman named Joan Cheever. I assumed she was a friend or relative of his, but she turned out to be an attorney who, besides being the former managing editor of the National Law Journal, had spent nine years trying to save a convicted murderer named Walter Key Williams from being executed in Texas. Along with another attorney, she had argued passionately that this man was emotionally disturbed and had received an incompetent defense. He had been convicted after a trial that lasted only a day and a half. The appeal failed, and at Williams’s request, Joan was present when the man was strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal poison.
“Cheever is not a personal friend, nor anyone Edward could trace to me through any private detective work,” Falk wrote, addressing one of the usual speculations people come up with when they can’t explain how legitimate mediums do what they do. “I found her through an extended chain of personal and professional contacts. She hasn’t appeared on TV or in newspapers here in the New York area. I am as sure as I can be that he knows nothing about her—not even her last name.”
As Falk
later reported in his story, several of Joan Cheever’s relatives came through with the standard initials and sketchy details that are close enough to excite a believer, but too general for a skeptic. And then another spirit stepped forward, one who was not related to her. “Is there someone around you who had a sudden passing?” I asked, with Falk’s tape recorder running. “I’m getting a very sudden feeling. Is there someone whose actions led to their passing? It wasn’t a suicide, but their actions brought about their own passing.”
I got a stabbing feeling, or maybe an impaling. Joan gave me a noncommital look, as if to say, well, sort of . . .
“Did that make headlines? Because he’s showing me headlines. But it’s not just the passing that put him in headlines.”
I got only two initials: “M” and “L.” Walter Williams’s parents were Melba and Lucian.
“Did you do any work for this person, did you have a connection with work for him or with him?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You worked together on a project, on a team. It’s not like you just worked for the same company.”
Joan was acknowledging almost everything I said, but I still felt it wasn’t a great reading. This spirit had a lot more he could tell me, but he wasn’t. There was someone else getting in the way, confusing things, but more than that, I felt that the main spirit was not communicating clearly because he was not that spiritually evolved. Falk later wrote that he felt that here I was hedging. But then the spirit quickly acknowledged a Bob who worked in television, and for the first time, Bill and Joan registered a strong reaction. As I later learned, Joan’s partner on the case was a lawyer named Bob Hirschorn. He worked part-time as a commentator and legal analyst for a Texas TV station.
I got an “H.”
“Yes, there’s an ‘H.’”
“Does it sound like Hirsh?”
Joan paused, obviously stunned. “Yes,” she said finally.
The spirit told me that Joan was writing something about him. Yes, she told me, she was writing a book based on her experience with Williams.
“He says, ‘Make sure you get it right.’ ”
Again, Joan was taken aback. Before the execution, she had asked Williams if it would be all right if she wrote about him. “Make sure you get it right,” he had said.
“Did this gentleman have feelings for you?”
“No.”
“Yes, he did.”
“No.
“I’m sorry, but he had a crush on you. Maybe you didn’t know.”
Joan looked a little embarrassed, then fessed up. “I never told this to anyone,” she said. It was true, Walter Williams did have a little crush on her. But it was a prison thing, she said. He was isolated, dependent on her. She just ignored it and did her work.
“He’s very lighthearted about it,” I said.
Afterwards, Joan Cheever said she was “100 percent convinced that was Walter.” As for Bill Falk, he said he was still a tiny fraction short of 100 percent, “perhaps only because I’m afflicted with the occupational hazard of not being completely sure of anything.”
Falk interviewed others, and observed Shelley Peck. He also did the obligatory interview with James Randi, who has the distinction of being the only person in America who lists his occupation as “skeptic” and uses the preferred first name “The Amazing.” I’ve never met Mr. Amazing, but he seems to know all about me. He must be psychic. Falk concluded his five thousand-word story with an amazingly bold statement for a serious journalist to make in a major publication: “Either Edward and Peck are getting these details from conversations with the spirit world. Or they conjured up all this information through some unimaginably clever form of guesswork. Given all the evidence, I’m left with the strange conclusion that it makes more sense to believe they’re communicating with the dead.”
I heard from my friend later that the story caused a big debate in the paper’s newsroom. A lot of people, including the editor, couldn’t believe that their Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper had actually run a serious story saying some local guy sits around chatting with dead people. My friend thought that if you really thought about it, this was the biggest story any journalist could ever hope to have. Headline: THERE IS NO DEATH. Subheadline: ONLY TAXES INEVITABLE. But Bill Falk’s story was not only a brave piece of journalism. It was also a key link in a chain of events that ultimately gave me a gift I couldn’t have predicted. Bill never knew how powerful his story really was. Now he will.
DONNA MARIE (a pseudonym) was a slender, pretty woman who talked fast and smiled sweetly as the words came tumbling out. She was about my age and taught high school biology. I had no trouble imagining she was a popular teacher.
Donna’s father had died in November of 1995, and after seeing Bill Falk’s story in Newsday, she called my office for an appointment. When I saw her, the first thing she said to me was that she had almost had a reading with me more than ten years before, when I was just seventeen. “I was sixteen,” she said, “and I was with my friends. We decided to go to a psychic fair they were having at the Holiday Inn, just for fun. And you were there. They were trying to get me to go to your table. ‘You’ve got to go see this guy. He’s your age.’ But I was too shy.” She went to a more traditional psychic instead, one of the older women.
“I still do a mean card reading,” I said.
Almost as soon as we began the reading, Donna’s father came through. “He’s telling me he already knows your children,” I said. “He’s talking about Anthony, who will come down and be your son. He’s telling me specifically Anthony, not Tony.” Donna said she had just gotten married and had no children yet. But she had always known that someday she would have a son named Anthony. In fact, her father used to tease her that he would call his grandson Tony. “And I’d say, ‘No Tony. Anthony.’”
Her father’s message now was a powerful solace to Donna. His death, from a heart attack in his sleep at age fifty-three, hit her very hard. She was so sad that he would never see her children. I can’t remember a time when a spirit came through with such a significant message. It was also intriguing that he was saying he knew her unborn children. It seemed to mean their souls were still in spirit, getting ready to return to earth. When I was twenty, a year after my mother’s passing, I had a dream in which my mother, dressed in a linen business suit and looking tanned, came to me holding a chubby-cheeked little girl with curly blonde hair. “Look what I’m bringing you,” she said.
At the end of the reading, I told Donna how much I had enjoyed meeting her. It turned out that I knew her husband’s cousin. We were from the same world. “I feel like I know you,” I said. “I feel like I know your father.”
Donna came to a group reading a couple of months later, and she and a friend, a fellow teacher, signed up for another one I was having at a Holiday Inn in November. But the timing was bad, or so it seemed. That night, her grandfather, who had been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease, was slipping away. “He was near the end, and all the family was there,” Donna told me later. “A nurse said, ‘He’ll probably go tonight,’ and people were telling him, ‘It’s okay, you can go,’ even though he wasn’t hearing them.”
Donna wanted to stay with her relatives at her grandfather’s bedside, but she also felt she had an obligation to her friend. “I felt terrible because her husband and her son had died six months apart, and she was a mess. She didn’t believe in an afterlife, but she wanted to. We had waited six months to go to the lecture. At the nursing home, everyone said, ‘Donna, go. It’s okay.’ So I decided to go. I bent down and whispered, ‘Grandpa, please wait till I get back.’ I felt so bad leaving.”
Donna drove to the hotel and met her friend. I gave Donna a kiss hello, and they took their seats with the other twenty people. I read about half the people—Donna wasn’t among them—and then we took a ten-minute bathroom break. During that time, I saw Donna in the hallway, crying. My first thought, to be honest, was annoyance. I can’t believe that, I said
to myself. I thought she wanted to hear again from her dad, and was upset when he didn’t come through.
We went back into the room, and I resumed the readings. I read one woman, and then felt pulled in Donna’s direction. By now, she was composed. “Your dad’s here,” I said. “Oh. He’s got people with him. Did your grandfather pass?”
Donna nodded and began to cry again. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did he just pass? He’s like really new.”
“A half hour ago,” she managed to say.
That’s what Donna had been crying about in the hallway. She had gotten a call from her mother on her cell phone, saying her grandfather had just crossed over. And now he was coming through. But he was in the background. Donna’s father was doing the talking.
“You just came from a hospital,” I said to Donna. “You were having a party. There were two parties.” Donna said she and her family had celebrated her grandfather’s 80th birthday in the dining room of the nursing home the week before, and the balloons were still up. And tonight, they had ordered food in for all the family. “Your grandfather is here, but your father’s speaking for him because he’s so new. He wants to tell everyone he heard everything they said, and he says thank you, because it made it easier.”
Although he wasn’t saying much, Donna’s grandfather was coming through with great energy. “He feels like Superman, he’s just zooming around, he’s so happy to be here. Like he’s liberated. Like he’s been asleep for sixty days. There’s a lot of energy over there. It’s like he went from one party to another. There’s a crowd with him.” I was getting showered with names and sounds. Rose. Gregory. “There are a lot of people who greeted him. They wanted him to come, and they wanted you to come here to get the message. That was the reason everybody told you to come. So don’t be upset that you weren’t there. You had a much more important job to do.”