by John Edward
“What? What’s happening?” Paul asks.
“Get off the bridge!” I scream into the phone. “Leave your car there if you have to. You’re right. We are under attack. Get off the bridge.”
After hanging up, I sit in shock, horror, and disbelief. Now on CNN they’re saying that it was a hijacked commercial airliner from the East Coast that crashed into the World Trade Center. And all I can think about is Sandra. She’s in the air. Oh, my God. I put her in the air. I told her what flight to get on. She wanted to come the night before. I told her no, come first thing in the morning. I take a deep breath and try to tune in to my guides and ask if she’s safe. What comes back is that there’s danger around her. For the first time in my life, I think I’m going to pass out. Instinctively, I reach over to my nightstand and grab my rosary beads. And pray and pray and pray. I do this before calling anyone.
I try calling Sandra’s cell phone. No answer. I try various friends and relatives. I can’t get through. Home phones, busy. Cell phones—can’t get through. Pagers—all busy. There’s no way to get information. Finally, the phone rings. A friend on the West Coast was able to connect with my office and then to me. Sandra’s brother works for Delta and was tracking her flight, which was instructed to land in Cincinnati. She’s safe. Now I go down a mental checklist of people I know who might be flying or who work or live around the Trade Center. My uncle, my mother’s brother, lives right across the street, and I pray he’s all right. (I learn later that he left his building with a friend when the towers collapsed, helping many other people evacuate in the process.)
I think again about that 911 call last night. Around 11:00, I go down to the front desk and ask what police station a 911 call would go to. I want to see if they have a record of the one I supposedly made. The clerk says it would come to the desk first. He punches his keyboard and says yes, a 911 call did come from my room at 2:45 a.m. (5:45 Eastern time). He says I must have misdialed—probably dialed 9 for an outside line and 1 for long distance, but twice. If I did, I tell him, I did it in my sleep, because I was fast asleep when they called me back. The mystery remains unsolved.
By chance—but, of course, nothing’s by chance—Shirley, Dana, and Charles are all in Los Angeles, staying at the same hotel. We get together and watch the reports as the day unfolds. We are a close-knit family on the show, and we crave that feeling on this terrible day, especially since we’re all 3,000 miles away from our loved ones. We start talking about what to do now. Dana and Charles are thinking about going home, but Shirley wants to finish her business out here. She doesn’t want to have to fly back, especially in light of what’s happened today. She figures it will be a few days before they’ll be able to fly home anyway.
I have seminars scheduled for later in the week in the Southwest, but I know life will be on hold for at least two weeks. I cancel the seminars. Now what? My first thought is I’ve got to get to Sandra in Cincinnati. There’s no way I’m flying, even when flights resume. By the end of the day, I’ve rented a car and I’m on my way back east with three passengers: Dana, Shirley, and Charles. I call Sandra and tell her to stay put; we’ll pick her up in Cincinnati by Friday. She asks me if I’m coming to rescue her on a white horse. No, I tell her. It’ll be a blue minivan.
All across the country, we hear radio stations, one after another, rallying for our nation, and for New York. We are all four of us New Yorkers, and we feel the need to be there, to be home. We don’t talk about it until we reach Oklahoma, but we all have the same feeling—that in a strange way New York needs us, too. She’s been attacked, raped; and even though there’s nothing we can do, we need to be there. It’s a journey none of us will ever forget.
I drive seventeen hours a day, turning down all offers to share the wheel. “Don’t worry,” I tell them. “I’m not the only one driving. I have a lot of people helping.” The car falls silent. “It’s a joke!” I tell them. To pass the time and get our minds off the tragedy, we play ridiculous car games: Name a song that begins with each letter of the alphabet. Then we do movies and TV shows, actors, plays, then movies again.
“Name two hundred movies starring cast members of Saturday Night Live,” Dana jokes. All the while, Shirley wants to sing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and we keep threatening to put her in the glove compartment if she does.
At one point, we pull into a rest stop so everyone can use the facilities. Charles and I go into the men’s room, which is being cleaned by a man wearing a black vinyl apron and a pair of yellow rubber gloves. He’s just finished cleaning the insides of the toilets. The room is horrendous; it doesn’t need to be cleaned—it needs to be leveled. The cleaning man takes one look at me and yells out, “Hey, yaw that man that’s on my TV. You talk to dead folks. I ain’t never met a celebrity before.” He’s so excited that—to my horror—he wants to hug me. I step back. He puts out his gloved hand, still dripping toilet water. I thank him for watching the show and remind him why I’m here.
“I think it’s official,” Charles says as we walk back to the car. “You might be famous.”
It takes us three days to reach Cincinnati. It’s a great relief to finally see Sandra safe and sound. And she’s so happy to see us that she parades us around the hotel, introducing us to people she’s met, as if to say, “See, I really do have friends.” We have dinner and spend the night, then head for home in the morning.
We make our way out of Ohio, into Pennsylvania, and then New Jersey. It’s evening now, and as we get closer to home, closer to the energy of the event, we all become quiet. We approach the George Washington Bridge, and there she is, our wounded home. White smoke is still filling the sky around the devastation, illuminated by the lights surrounding the search and recovery. Seeing it makes it real. We stop on the highway to pause and acknowledge. We are home, and home will never be the same. We all silently wipe the tears from our eyes.
The Aftermath
MY PHONE IS RINGING OFF THE HOOK from friends and family, all wanting to know the same thing: What are you going to do?
Apparently, the consensus is that I should be doing something, and now. Why don’t I go to Ground Zero to help? Help do what? I ask. Help get in the way? One of my cousins tells me I should be helping the families of victims. For the rest of my life, I tell her, I will be working with those families. They are from New York. I live and work in New York. I have no doubt that I will be reliving the tragedy through my clients for as long as I’m doing this work. Of course I’ll help. But it has to happen at the right time. People are in shock. They need time to process this horrific event—and so do I.
Sandra is the first to ask me if I’m going to do anything on the show. “Absolutely not,” I tell her. My immediate reaction is that the cynics and the media will kill me: There goes John Edward, exploiting the tragic losses of September 11. In fact, the whole subject is so sensitive that the CBS station in New York takes the show off the air until further notice. (They’ve taken a lot of other shows off, too, replacing them with all-day news coverage of the terrorist attacks.) Meanwhile, I insist that the station remove the ads on buses in Manhattan that show my face and ask the question, “What would you do to connect with a lost loved one just one more time?”
As the days go by, I hear about more and more people personally affected by the attack. It seems you can’t go anywhere without someone telling you about someone they know, or know of, who lost their brother or their father or sister or cousin or friend. Then the letters and phone calls start, both to the show and to my office on Long Island. Families that know families. Cops, firefighters, rescue workers asking for help, wanting to connect with their lost “brothers,” as one puts it. But I don’t feel that I can do it. I don’t think I can stand up to the emotional stress of connecting with victims of the attack. My emotions will stop me from being objective. Paul and I decide to cancel all galleries for at least a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the letters and calls continue to pour in. Celebrities are calling my office and the s
how is trying to get readings for people they know who have had a personal loss. All the while, Sandra is telling me that I have to do something, that I have to help. She wants me to do readings for victims’ families on the show. This is a dramatic, devastating loss, she says, and so many people would be able to identify with those I read. But I’m not ready yet. I know that my guides will help me make the right decision, and I tell her that I need a sign—a message from them that lets me know that I should work with 9/11 families and broadcast it on Crossing Over.
Soon after, I receive an e-mail from Shala Mattingly, a well-known past-life regression therapist in New York. In the e-mail, she says she’s sending an attachment of a photo from Ground Zero that she says “clearly” shows my face. She says she “felt compelled” to send it to me. I start the download, which says it will take four minutes. I call Sandra in and joke that maybe it’s going to be like a Rorschach test, with my supposed image in smoke—“You know how these New Age types can be.” The download starts with the top part of the photo, and as it unfurls on my computer screen, I gasp. This is no face in the smoke. There’s nothing to interpret here. It’s a photo of an officer assisting an injured woman out of the area right after the collapse of one of the towers. The scene is shrouded in white as they cross in front of a bus with my face prominently displayed on its side, my eyes looking out right over the woman’s shoulder.
Okay, there’s my sign. But what do I do with it? I’m still not ready emotionally. I’ve been so paralyzed by the fear of connecting with someone who passed in the tragedy that I’ve all but stopped doing readings. We’ve cancelled all galleries and oneon-one readings on the show. This might sound selfish, but the truth is that—whether or not I have a sign—I just don’t think I can handle dealing with any of these families. I’ve always been able to maintain a professional detachment in order to do my work, but this is different. Like millions of people, I’ve never been so emotionally shaken by a public tragedy. The only appointment I keep in the three weeks after the attacks is a group reading with about fifty people in New Jersey on September 22. But I go in with trepidation and tell the group that if anyone comes through from 9/11, I would like them not to acknowledge it until the end. I’m worried that I’ll become too emotional. To my relief, no 9/11 victims come through.
By the end of September, I know that I have to move forward on the show. I still don’t want to do galleries—too much of a chance there of getting 9/11 families. Paul suggests I do one-on-one readings. Those are all selected randomly from the thousands of requests the show receives. I think about it and decide that would be a good way to get started again.
On October 3, I’m sitting in a chair on the disc onstage, and I’m nervous. As with all private sessions, I have no idea whom I’ll be reading, but I’m very worried that a 9/11 victim will come through. Am I ready? Is it too soon? The first two readings go fine—no one from September 11 comes through. Now, in the shadows off stage, I see Doug, our stage manager, about to escort two women onto the disc. And then I see a third figure right next to them. He’s a firefighter. He’s wearing a fireman’s hat and a long yellow raincoat. I know immediately that he’s a September 11 victim. Whoever you are, I think, please don’t come through. I look away, and when I look back, he’s gone. But I know what’s going to happen, and I’m feeling slightly nauseated. I want to bolt from the stage. But before I can think of an excuse, Doug is bringing the women up onto the disc and sitting them in front of me. They both seem to be in their forties; it turns out they’re sisters. I force a smile, say hello, and start to open myself up.
To my relief, the reading goes quite a while without any reappearance by the firefighter, or any September 11 victim. The session is dominated by the women’s older sister—I learn later that her name is Joan—who passed from cancer. But then Joan brings the firefighter in. “Who’s the fireman?” I ask. One of them realizes that Joan had a friend whose son was one of the 200 firefighters lost on September 11. Could it be him? I tell them that their sister is giving me a mothering feeling, as if she’s taking care of the young fireman. There’s another presence with him, an older female named Maria, who’s also taking care of him. The women don’t know who that is.
As I’ve discussed earlier in this book—and as anyone who watches Crossing Over knows—it’s not uncommon for a spirit to use a third party to get a message through to loved ones. When this happens, I always ask the recipient to pass on the information to the family members the spirit is really trying to reach. But when this session is over, I’m full of mixed emotions. One of the sisters, Eileen, asks me if she should tell the fireman’s mom that he came through. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. But it’s only weeks since the event. His body has probably not been found. I know the information is coming through for a reason, but I tell the women that his mother will give them a sign to let them know that she’s ready to hear about this. “He’ll make it okay to bring it up,” I tell her. “And his mom will give you a sign when she’s ready to hear the message.”
FROM THE TIME HE WAS THREE YEARS OLD, Michael Kiefer wanted to be a New York City fireman. “Every fire truck that passed caught his eye,” recalled his mother, Pat, in a conversation nearly a year after September 11. “He always wanted to go to the fire house. But it wasn’t just any fire department. It had to be the New York City Fire Department. I think FDNY were the first letters he learned. Every birthday cake had a fire truck on it, every gift, everything around the house and the yard had to do with the city fire department.”
Mike would ride his bike from his home on Long Island into Queens. He would go to the nearest fire house and hang out. One day he went all the way to Brooklyn. He had a police and fire scanner in his room, always tuned to the city fire department. He knew what all the codes meant, wished he could go on the calls that came over the radio, and dreamed of the day when he really would. He once told a priest who was trying to interest him in joining the priesthood, “You save the souls, Father, and I’ll save the bodies.”
Mike was a health nut who was a perfect physical specimen. He worked out every day, was a triathlete, and had been a lifeguard when he was a teenager. From his early teen years, he made sure to stay out of any trouble that might one day make it hard for him to become a fireman. His first opportunity to join the department came when he was in college while waiting to take the civil service test for the fire academy. He became an emergency medical technician for the fire department (and met the love of his life, Jamie, in the emergency room of the hospital where she worked as a physician’s assistant). Eventually, he got to take the fire exam and scored a perfect 100 on both the written and physical exams. Mike did so well at the fire academy that his instructors later told his mother that he was the best “probie” (new guy) they’d ever seen come through.
After finishing at the academy at the end of 2000, Mike told his parents the exciting news that he had been assigned to “one of the best houses”—Ladder Company 132 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. “To me, a ‘good house’ was in a nice neighborhood with not too many fires,” his mother said. “That’s a mother talking. To him, a good house is one where you’re out every night on calls and you’re working with the best.” Ladder 132 was nicknamed “Eye of the Storm.”
To Mike, the only thing more important than the fire department was his family. He and his father, Bud, who works in finance for the Army Corps of Engineers, were best friends. “They went to oldies concerts together,” Pat said. “He did everything for his father. Mike said that if he could grow up to be a quarter of the man his father was, he would be happy. My son had very high moral values, and religion meant a lot to him. He felt he got this from us. It never embarrassed him to show his love for his parents. When he was on the swim team in high school, he would come out of the pool and kiss us both. I would tell him, ‘Mike, they’re going to rank on you,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ Even at the firehouse, he would call his father every day. He would call us and say
, ‘I just called to say I love you.’ And you know that’s all they have to hear from a probie, calling on the phone and saying, ‘Ma, I love you.’ But he didn’t care.”
Mike was also devoted to his two younger sisters, Lauren and Kerri. “He was the protective brother from the time they were little,” Pat said. “He was the best big brother any two girls could have.” Mike and Jamie, meanwhile, weren’t officially engaged, but they planned to get married.
On Saturday night, September 8, 2001, Pat and Bud Kiefer went out, and when they came home, they found a card on the table from Mike. “I’m writing this card just to let you know how much I love you and that you are my best friends,” he wrote. Two days later, on Monday morning, Mike was at the gym working out when he started talking to his good friend Doug about how much he loved his job. “I’m not afraid to die,” he told his friend. “But whenever it happens, I hope it’s fast. The only thing I worry about is my family and Jamie.”
When Doug later told Mike’s parents about the conversation, Pat remembered that her son told her more than once that if anything happened to him on the job, she should remember that being a firefighter was all he ever wanted to do, and that he loved it. “I used to tease him,” Pat said, “‘Oh, that’ll make me feel better.’”
Later that Monday, Mike went to work to start a 24-hour shift at the firehouse in Brooklyn—6 p.m. Monday to 6 p.m. Tuesday. Here is Pat Kiefer’s account of that tragic day and its aftermath:
That Tuesday morning, I woke up at 5:45 a.m., and I didn’t feel well. Not sick-sick, just funny in my stomach. I got up and remembered I had a dream that someone was coming after my husband and me with machine guns. I drove my husband to the train at 6:15. He works on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, just two or three blocks from the World Trade Center. I looked at him and said, “Do you think Mike’s okay?” He asked me why I was asking that, and I told him about my dream. It was just a weird feeling. Bud got out of the car, and I’ve been driving him to the train for 30 years, and I said to him, “Be careful,” which I’ve never said to him.