by Sukey Forbes
Before we’d left for Bogotá we had deputized Maria to fly to D.C. to pick up our new Jack Russells. I had chosen one dog, and, typically, Michael had said, “Let’s get two.” So when we came back from South America we were greeted by Bandina, about six months, and Lindy Loo, who’d been born just around the time of Charlotte’s death.
Jack Russells are definitely not for everyone. A cross between a beagle and a fox terrier, this breed is adorable and very smart, which is why they’re used so much on TV and in the movies. But they have a mind of their own, which makes them very difficult. I love the way they tilt their heads and cock their ears as if they’re really processing what you say and want to give you a thoughtful response, then toss their head and strut away. But here as in so many undertakings during this time, we overestimated the amount of energy and focus we would have available for training the animals. In fact, we had none, so these dogs remained completely out of control.
Shortly after our new pets arrived, my Saltonstall grandmother died. Everyone was afraid to tell me, but in fact I couldn’t have been happier for her. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s, so the grandmother I knew had faded away ten years earlier. Up until then she’d enjoyed a healthy and enviable life, and the service at the assisted-living facility she’d shared with my grandfather was truly a celebration of that life. I felt closer to her that day than I had in years.
The Saltonstalls had always appeared more austere and dour than the Forbes clan, but they were actually much warmer beneath the surface. Many of my Saltonstall relatives were teachers and headmasters, and I think, as a group, they pretty much embodied all the virtues like “truth” and “fidelity” that you see on school crests. In the Forbes family, it was more typical for the “deep” ones to become artists or join an ashram. The rest simply went into banking.
Charlotte’s middle name was Saltonstall, so I thought it was very important that she learn something about this family. She was only about three years old when I first brought her back from California to meet Grancy and Grampa Salt. They took us up to Salem, where the old family manse is located, and where the Peabody Essex Museum contains rooms full of Saltonstall furnishings and artwork. I have photographs of my austere, six-foot-four grandfather Robert Saltonstall, proudly holding the hand of my little two-foot-tall Charlotte, showing her around while showing her off.
• • •
This first winter after Charlotte’s death the snow cover stuck around until March, and as a family we took a ski vacation in Utah. A good friend owns the resort at Snowbird, and every year he invites a big group of friends for a long weekend. This had become a family tradition for us while we lived in California, and I guess we wanted to present an image of getting back to normal, even if we weren’t even close.
Out west that year the snowfall was the heaviest on record, and we were in a lodge at the base of the mountain that was built like a bunker to withstand avalanches. I was with people I cared about, and the layers of clothing and the goggles and helmets we all wore added to my feeling of being armored and insulated and very safe. The snow kept falling, and each morning our friend the owner would open up the mountain early so that we could have fresh tracks on the exquisite powder. The physical activity was just what I needed. I was ensconced in a group but alone when I needed to be, so it was the perfect combination of isolation and togetherness, with plenty of exertion to simply wear myself out.
On the gondola rides up the mountain I stared at the trees, wondering what it must feel like to be a limb weighed down with so much snow and ice all winter. Was it comforting? Did it start out like a sweater and gradually build to the point of unbearable heaviness? Was it a huge relief when spring came and the snow dropped off? What about when the branch just broke?
Our room back at the lodge was like a womb, with big windows looking out on the floodlit snow, which kept on falling, so much so that the lifts closed several times. But I never felt cut off or claustrophobic. I felt safe and warm, with each snowflake adding to my protective blanket. When we’d come back, Michael would take the kids to the heated outdoor pool, but I couldn’t do swimming pools—Charlotte had loved them too much. I’d lie in the room and watch the people skiing down on their last runs of the day.
On the third night I lay in bed watching the snow drift down and I felt a huge sob catch in my throat. I needed to get rid of this knot, so I forced it out, and suddenly the floodgates just blew open and the tears came and once they came they would not stop. I sobbed so hard for so long that my abdominal muscles got sore. My whole body was shaking so much that I got out of bed and went to sit on the couch. Even so, there was enough commotion to wake up Michael, and he came over and sat with me. I found his presence alone comforting, but when he cradled me in his arms I came unglued. The renewed strength he found to be there for me was the final element I needed. It now felt safe for me to completely fall apart.
I cried for hours while he held me and silently rocked me back and forth. Usually I don’t like to be held when I’m really troubled—I’m more like a wounded dog who simply wants to skulk off alone. But that night I relished it. I was astonished by my own vulnerability. I kept saying, “I can’t stop crying.” Then near dawn I asked him to do the “snug as a bug” thing we often did for our children and I recall my mother doing for me when I was small. So he wrapped me up in my blanket and carried me to bed, swaddling all the covers around me and tucking them in under my feet.
When the sun came up, my eyes were swollen shut. I had cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I had reached the bottom, so now it was time to begin working my way back up.
8
Angel Day
When I told my new friend Stephanie about how I’d finally melted down in Utah, I think she saw this as the sign she’d been waiting for. In her eyes, I was now ready to join her on what she called “our side of the fence.”
Stephanie and I had been getting together for lunch for some time, and she’d been very open about her own experience of being stripped down psychologically to the bare bone. She’d been far more reticent, however, about sharing with me how she’d managed to move on from that very dark place.
Sitting in a café in Brookline, she began to open up a bit more, telling me about an experience she’d had shortly after her son’s death.
“This was in ’91,” she said. “The summer. I was lying down, in this sort of middle state between waking and sleeping, and I felt his hand.”
She stopped to look at me for a moment. It was as if she were gauging my reaction, but I wasn’t judging. I was simply listening, completely there with her.
“I thought I’d squeeze back as sort of a test,” she went on.
I smiled and nodded.
“His hand stayed in my hand. Then I felt a kiss on the cheek.” My own eyes welled up with tears as I thought about my own moments of sensing Charlotte’s presence. Just a few months before this meeting with Stephanie I’d had a powerful dream that I had not shared with anyone. We’d been gathered on the steps in the house of my childhood, 610 Harland Street, for our annual family portrait, only this time it was my nuclear family with Michael rather than my siblings and parents. We were all posed on the landing and Charlotte was sitting next to me. I had my arm around her, and I could feel the warmth of her body next to mine and the softness of her cheek pressed into mine. In my dream I began to question if in fact I was actually dreaming or if this was a visit from Charlotte. I decided to press my cheek harder into hers to see what happened. She pushed back. I woke up immediately, beaming and utterly convinced that for that one moment I had in fact regained physical contact with my daughter.
I took Stephanie’s hand, and said, “You know, I’m not really religious in a traditional sense. But there just has to be more, right? Something more than when you die you’re dead.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then she said, “There’s a woman I think you ought to see.”
“Who? Tell me.”
Stephanie still seemed a bit hesitant. “I usually wait a long time before mentioning this. People think it’s weird.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I’m ready for anything.”
She took a deep breath, and then she began telling me how she’d been part of a group gathered at the Arlington Street Church in Boston to meet with a medium. The woman who invited her had lost her husband on Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that had been blown apart by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Stephanie was one of hundreds of people in the church auditorium, and the medium came right up to her and said, “You’ve lost a child.” Stephanie was flabbergasted, especially when the medium began to offer familiar descriptions of her son Max, as well as fragmented impressions of how he’d died. “He’s doing well,” the medium told Stephanie. “He loves you.”
Understandably, my friend became hooked on the possibility of being able to communicate with the dead. Shortly afterward she was in London, where a cousin of hers directed her to the College of Psychics. This led to an encounter with a fairly inept psychic-in-training who had her lie down surrounded by candles. She said it was all very depressing and not helpful. Then, back in the States, she followed one lead after another and had various encounters with what she described as a variety of charlatans and cranks. Eventually she discovered the woman she now wanted me to meet.
“She’s the real deal,” Stephanie told me.
Their first encounter had been over the phone, and when Stephanie arranged the conversation she’d made sure that the medium knew nothing about her, and certainly nothing about the fact that her son had died. Stephanie used a fake name, and when she got on the line she let the medium have the first word. “Are you the person who lost a child?” the woman began. It was a good place to start.
“I see your son,” she went on. “He liked woodworking. He’s holding up a wooden sign with a wavy bottom.”
“That’s when the tears came,” Stephanie told me. She knew the sign immediately. Max had made it in woodshop at school. It said, “Shhh! Sleeping.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” Stephanie had said. “But the bottom’s straight.”
“No,” the medium had insisted. “You check it out.”
She was right.
Stephanie was still running her support group back then, and she was so excited about her new discovery that she wanted to invite the medium to talk to the group at Dana-Farber, but the hospital said no. Instead, the social workers who supervised the group arranged for them to meet at a nearby Unitarian church.
“Hundreds of people showed up,” Stephanie said. “She made all these eerily accurate connections. She was utterly convincing.”
But I didn’t need to be convinced; I was ready to open up to a different set of perceptions and ideas. I’d begun haunting bookstores, and reading even more widely. What I appreciated most were the matter-of-fact accounts that dispensed with gauzy theory, or any hard sell, and simply gave reasonable, sane-sounding reports of experiences beyond the conventional. The words of one psychic, Suzane Northrop, resonated most: “If you come to believe that death is not the end, you will release a limited potential in yourself. You will also have conquered your greatest fear.” This is exactly what I found I wanted to do.
I was amazed by my own eagerness to meet Stephanie’s medium, but equally surprised that when I told Michael what I was up to, he didn’t respond as if I’d gone nuts. Michael is a very data-driven kind of man, wedded to spreadsheets and the facts and figures therein. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have my own doubts, of course.
When I bought the ticket to hear her speak I paid in cash rather than with a credit card. If this woman was a fake, I didn’t want to make it too easy for her to come up with “messages” by providing any more information than I needed.
Was I worried about what my friends or family would think? There was enough eccentric behavior in Forbes family history that the only thing my loopy aristocratic clan could object to in my meeting was the setting: a big auditorium at a Holiday Inn in Worcester, Massachusetts.
About an hour west of Boston, Worcester is a city with little to recommend it but the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross, alma mater of Clarence Thomas, and Clark University, the venue, oddly enough, for the only lecture Sigmund Freud ever gave in the United States.
There were about five hundred people in the audience when the medium—I’ll call her Margaret—came onstage. My first thought was how very untheatrical the whole scene was. I guess my only exposure to spiritualism was from watching old movies where overdressed ladies sat at tables in Victorian drawing rooms and heard lots of tapping. But there were no candles here, no celestial-sounding music, just this rather small woman stepping out and beginning to talk—fast—with a strong New York accent. In those first moments this encounter seemed about as spiritual as a real estate seminar.
But then I began to wonder if there was something wrong with my eyes, or maybe I had a migraine coming on. I blinked, but I kept seeing a wavy outline around her body that moved with her as she moved back and forth across the speaking platform, and which then began to undulate like a lava lamp. Stage lighting? I looked around and all the way up to the ceiling, and the only illumination was of the hideous, bright-as-day conference room type. Eventually I said to myself, “Okay. She’s surrounded by an aura. That’s what’s happening. This is an aura. Either that, or I really am losing it.”
She began by laying out the ground rules for the session. She then led us into a guided meditation, asking everyone to imagine taking an elevator up and up, then stepping out into an open field. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. After a bit I saw myself in a setting like the opening shot from The Sound of Music—Julie Andrews surrounded by jagged mountains, a beautiful meadow, and red and yellow flowers. I was just settling into the sensations, seeing the colors, smelling the fresh grassy smells, when in the distance I saw Charlotte. All of a sudden she was in my face wagging her head side to side as she often did—my little girl saying, “Hi, Mummy! Hi, Mummy!”
I didn’t shriek with joy. I wasn’t overcome. I simply smiled.
“I’ve heard of this,” I said to myself. “Wow. I can access it. This is great.”
And that’s when the first wave of overwhelming relief washed over me. My little girl running up to me was happy, grinning ear to ear. She was safe. She was healthy. Wherever she was, and however much she’d left behind, she looked like she was having a grand old time.
“Now I’ll take messages,” Margaret said. “I never know what’s going to come through, but if it sounds like I’m talking about somebody you know, put your hand up. I’ll just keep talking. It usually becomes obvious who I’m talking about.”
She began to wander through the audience, keeping up her rapid-fire patter. “It’s someone over here . . . ,” she’d say, and then she’d amble in that direction. “It’s a man. Fifty-six years old and he had a heart condition.”
“Pretty broad brush, Margaret,” the skeptic in me kept saying. “No points for that one.”
But then she’d drill down. “He has three daughters . . . There’s a real issue with the son.” Three hands went up, all seated next to one another.
Then she came through with the zinger. “Why am I seeing a remote control? It looks to me like a remote control in his casket.”
“Omigod!” one of the girls said. “We buried Daddy with the remote!”
Pretty cute. But how could I know these three girls hadn’t been planted in the audience? The shill in the audience—Carnival Huckster 101.
“Okay, I’m getting something—I’m getting a young child.” She began to look in my direction. “I’m getting a girl. She’s about seven years old. She died very suddenly. She has other siblings. I’m getting a hot fever.”
I put my hand up and she came over.
She began talking abo
ut the two other children, a boy and a girl. Skeptical or not, I began to shake. Then she said the thing that changed my entire view of life, the universe, everything.
“She wants to acknowledge something you carry in your pocket all the time. It’s sort of white and sparkly.”
I burst into tears. I was so overcome that the woman seated next to me reached over to make sure I didn’t fall out of my chair.
Then I reached into my pocket and pulled out the angel I’d found on the shelf in the linen closet in Charlotte’s room.
“She said she put it on a shelf for you to find,” Margaret said.
I had known that in my heart. Now it was confirmed. This one detail also confirmed—at least to any level of proof I might require—that this woman really was in touch with Charlotte.
I was still crying, still trembling, as Margaret went on. “She also wants to acknowledge something your neighbors did to honor her. It’s bright pink. I see electricity . . . in a tree.”
She began to describe the split-rail fence along Orchard Avenue, the rolling field, and the big oak tree where our neighbors had put the big star with pink lights just before Christmas. I had no way to account for this. It made no sense according to any of the rules of the universe as I understood them. And yet it simply was.
This complete stranger then went on to talk about Michael, and about the kids, and even about certain specifics of Charlotte’s death. As the tears streamed down my face, the logical, Episcopalian part of me kept struggling, still resisting the idea and wondering if I was being hoodwinked. Later, I rehearsed the arguments for and against: I’d learned of this session only twelve hours before it took place, paid cash, and never given my name or any identifying information. When Charlotte died, there had been nothing in the papers, not even an obituary. If Margaret had known my real name, if she’d had a team of investigators with computers and several days to prepare, she might have dug up some of this information. But as for the angel—I’d never even told Michael about it. I hadn’t told the kids. No one on the planet knew about that angel I carried in my pocket but me . . . and Charlotte.