by Sukey Forbes
I walked out of the auditorium weak-kneed and trembling, but also on a cushion of air. I was thinking, “Okay, my daughter has come through and she’s okay. She’s more than okay. She’s been dead for seven months, and I think I just had a conversation with her!”
I made a beeline for a woman seated at a registration table in the foyer. When she looked up I said, “I would like to book a private session.”
I made the appointment, but this time it would have to include Michael as well. He had to experience this. But even in my excitement, my old-school skepticism had not entirely dissipated. I booked this second session using the credit card one of my employees uses and that carries her name, not mine.
There was a reception for the attendees, but I had to get out of the Holiday Inn and decompress. I went out to the parking lot and for the next two hours simply sat in my car. In part, I sat there because I was shaking so much I wasn’t sure I could drive. For a while there I thought I might have to get a room. But more than my temporary inability to operate heavy machinery, I simply wanted to savor every second of this experience. This was the first real joy I’d felt in half a year, and Charlotte had been at the very center of it. She’d shared it with me!
After I’d calmed down a bit, I called Michael to tell him about Margaret and what she’d said and what I’d experienced, and I was so surprised by how receptive he was that I broke down crying all over again. Whatever private misgivings he might have had about consulting a medium, he could hear that I’d gone from despair to elation in just a few hours. No fool, he—he wanted some of that for himself. He was very much on board with the idea of the private session I’d just booked for the two of us in June.
I was so desperate to keep this connection alive that for the next several nights I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just that Charlotte had appeared to me and given me messages. It was that she seemed so very, very happy. It no longer seemed as if she’d been erased or had dropped into the abyss. It felt as if all three of my children could be part of my life again. Cabot and Beatrice still need lots of attention, but my Charlotte—she’s fine. I had to make sure she was in good hands, as if I’d left her with a sitter. She’d gone away, but now the absence was more like having a son or daughter who’s gone off to camp or to college. And because I’d seen her thriving in her new space, a lot of my anxiety dissipated. I could picture her now, running through vast fields filled with fragrant flowers. She was so joyous that she would leap and jump. The setting in my imagination was not unlike the wide-open fields and gently sloping hills of Naushon, only with more color, and a crystal clear blue sky, and always plenty of sunshine and warmth.
I no longer had to deal with her missing out on life, or the tragedy of her dying young, but simply my missing her. It even crossed my mind that it was selfish of me to want to cling to her when obviously she was now in such a good place.
After that one life-changing moment with Margaret, I felt hope for the first time in almost a year. In the weeks and months to come, I couldn’t always hold to that, but it set a new tone for a healthier way of grieving—and, indeed, of living. I moved in and out of that healthier register, but when I was there I got a glimmer of how it might be possible to reconnect with life, and that life could be worth living again, despite our loss. Charlotte was living life. Some kind of different life, but it was good and she was happy and well cared for. That knowledge allowed me to renew my commitment to living my life as well.
• • •
A few weeks later, of course, the misery and the pain were back in full swing. My arms ached at the elbows where I’d held Charlotte as a baby, and my breasts felt full the way they used to while nursing. Full, ready to let down and feed the baby. But there was no baby. I had weaned my last child over a year prior to Charlotte’s death.
“Let’s have another baby,” I told Michael. A cousin of mine had lost a child to SIDS and then went on to have another. I admired the way he and his wife had seemingly bore their grief yet managed to keep their family healthy, intact, and growing.
Michael said, “Okay.”
I still needed to be surrounded by new life—any life, for that matter. Part of that desire was acted out with the silly dogs, our new Jack Russells. The breeder had gotten things off to a bad start by dressing up Lindy like a baby. When the dogs came to us, Beatrice began to dress her up in doll clothing. I couldn’t help myself and bought both dogs yellow rain slickers and navy blue woolen peacoats with red collars and brass buttons. I alternated between being embarrassed and entertained by the whole spectacle. My relatives, of course, couldn’t bear to think about anything so Legally Blonde as dressing up cute little dogs in funny clothes.
We took the animals to Naushon with us, and that spring on opening weekend we had a young couple as guests, along with their three-year-old daughter, Lizzie. On Saturday morning some of my cousins rode behind the house on horseback and Lindy Loo ran straight across their path, causing the horse to rear up and kick her in the head in the process. My brother came running up to the house saying, “Lindy Loo’s dead,” and somehow Karen heard it as “Lizzie’s dead” and let out a loud and bloodcurdling wail. That instant of terror took me back to that first moment when I had to accept that my own child was gone, and I began to cry as well. We quickly sorted it all out, and by the time we got out to the road Lindy was conscious. We took her down to the stable, where the stable manager bandaged her up, and she was fine.
• • •
When we showed up in June for our session with Margaret, once again at the very unmystical Holiday Inn, we introduced ourselves simply as Michael and Sukey.
“Sukey’s not your given name,” Margaret said. I nodded politely at what was hardly a rock ’em, sock ’em insight from beyond the grave. Not too many “Sukeys” appear on official birth certificates.
“Well, it’s very important to this person coming through that you acknowledge your formal name,” she said.
Michael and I looked at each other. We had come to hear from Charlotte, but then I remembered what Margaret had said about having no control over who spoke to her or what they wanted to convey.
After a moment I realized she was talking about my grandfather, David Cabot Forbes. He always called me Suzannah—never Sukey. He’d always been very concerned about certain proprieties. Then again, he was also the one who loved to sail nude, the ringleader for Naushon’s multigenerational skinny dips on Silver Beach. We stumbled through various other voices with other bizarre, seemingly trivial concerns.
“What is this thing with horses?” she asked.
“Horses?”
“You have horses in the family? I gotta tell you somewhere in your family somebody lost horses because I’ve got two horses coming through.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t help thinking it’s a grandfather on your side, Sukey.”
“That makes sense. My grandfather was fond of horses.”
“Yeah. I know there was one who passed who he must have been quite fond of because the horse comes through with him. Was that horse almost palomino looking?”
“I don’t recall his ever having had a palomino.”
“You know, he’s buried behind your house.”
“No way.”
“You check into this.” She was confident that she was correct, I had to give her that.
Later, I did, and found out that my skinny-dipping grandfather’s favorite horse had been a palomino named Spider that he buried in the field just behind Mansion House.
This whole thing was just too strange. It got even more strange when she started hearing from Michael’s two dead uncles, one who’d died from a brain tumor, the other who’d died in a fire. Margaret had it right about both of them.
And then she said, “There’s a young child coming through.” Once again I felt as if I were lifting off the ground.
We’d said nothing about havin
g lost a child. Then again, anybody could have guessed that one. What’s the most likely reason a youngish couple would go to see a medium? But then she veered off to talk about my son, Cabot. “He planted something in the garden,” she said. “In honor of your daughter. It looks like a little flower. It looks like a cluster of daisies. They’re plastic and they’re white with a yellow center and they’re planted in your garden.”
Another electric charge went through my body. “Yes, that’s true,” I said, trying to hold steady. “But they’re blue with a yellow center.”
She said, “I’m getting that they’re white.”
“No,” I said, “they’re blue.”
When I went home and checked I saw that they were white. I’d misremembered. Margaret—or maybe I should say Charlotte—had it right.
Then it got eerier still. Margaret went on and on about how someone had known there was something wrong with Charlotte, someone who knew that she was not going to have a long life.
“Who’s Anne . . . maybe Annie?” she said. And it just kept going. She seemed to be describing Sarah and her husband, George. Then both Max and Wyatt came through, even though Sarah and Stephanie had never met, and Charlotte had never been with Max. There was some confusion when Margaret began to talk about the “Sarah” figure struggling with the loss of a child. Of course she was, but Wyatt had died long before. “No, this is newer, a more recent struggle.” Later, I checked with Sarah and found out that she’d just had a miscarriage. She hadn’t told me for fear of upsetting me.
I began to understand what it meant that this process of Margaret’s was neither linear nor rational, but as free-form as a dream.
She then described an arched lattice with trellises and said the little girl was showing this to her. “That’s where we lived,” I said. Margaret looked at me and asked, “Now would that be called a ranch?” I was a WASP from Boston with an Irish Catholic husband from Maryland. We’d said nothing about having lived in California. We’d certainly never said anything about owning forty acres up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And for sure, in Margaret’s presence, we’d never referred to the place, as we always did among ourselves, as “the ranch.”
Then she described the hawk, the beautiful, fierce bird that had shown up at our home in Weston the day Charlotte died. I had been intrigued when it perched on our gatepost, then flew up into a tree, where it stayed for several days watching us. Even more so when it made intense, protracted eye contact with me and Michael. On two occasions it held me in its gaze for a good ten minutes. I’d thought at the time that it might be Charlotte’s spirit in some way, come back to watch over us.
• • •
After my first session with Margaret I’d been in a pleasant state of shock. Now I was euphoric.
Michael looked happier than I’d seen him in months, but I could already see him beginning to do the “spreadsheet” for this experience in his head, trying to reconcile these new revelations with his existing belief system. With Michael, everything ultimately came down to analytics. He and a friend used to pose philosophical questions and then try to answer them with equations. But as Emerson wrote, “Nature does not love a calculator.”
We were both still mired in grief, but at least for me the nature of grieving had fundamentally changed. It was a “felt” experience, and because of that I had a fundamental attitude shift, or at least the beginning of one. Knowing where Charlotte was and that she was happy and well meant that I could miss her without worrying about her, a reassurance that allowed me to focus on coming back to life myself.
Ultimately, though, I think Michael’s Catholic belief system and his analytical way of looking at things created much more interference. These messages coming in from another realm required a shift in worldview that may have been more far-reaching than he could manage. Complicating the issue was his self-image as a can-do, in-control person. He simply wasn’t ready to surrender his entire way of looking at the world. He needed to manage his world, not surrender to it, and a big part of that effort was bound up with the idea of an all-knowing and all-powerful God who was accessible to him and always on his side. But it was his belief that this was the way the world was supposed to work that also fueled his anger. After all, he’d done everything “right.” He’d been a good husband and father, he’d made a lot of money and given some to charity, gone to church and said all the prayers, and yet he’d still lost Charlotte, which left him, deep down, I believe, like some character out of a Russian novel, wanting to rail against God. On the other hand, his strong Catholic faith created huge conflicts for him about what to do with all that rage.
William James said that an emotion is a physical response to a stimulus, whether or not it enters into our awareness. (Our awareness of the body’s response is called a feeling.) I’ve always been sensitive to the physical nature of my emotions, and I was desperate to purge the negative ones, so I began to spend a lot of time running. I felt that I had to get my heart rate up just to feel alive, so I was like Forrest Gump, running everywhere. But it was also an immersion, a moving meditation. The full emotions were now flowing through me but I still felt most safe to express those feelings when I was alone. The natural world welcomed me with her open arms and it was there that I would do my work. While having company was pleasurable, it did not allow me the same gift of expression. I had to be alone. I would follow the same paths all the time, both in the conservation land around Weston and on Naushon, and whenever I broke through the pain, its absence made me realize how much pain I’d been in. I found that counting my breaths gave me comfort, reminding me not only that I was alive, but that time was moving forward. Recovering alcoholics use the expression “One day at a time.” I began to tell myself, “One breath at a time. Just keep breathing.”
Breathing is the key to life, of course. You stop, you die. But try as I might I still couldn’t take a full deep breath. Often the air would catch in the back of my throat and I would have to consciously pull it in. Then I would feel it entering my lungs, but in staccato fashion. I was desperate to peel back the layers of scar tissue that seemed to be binding my lungs and making this natural process forced, artificial, and restricted.
Awareness of the breath is also an essential part of yoga, so I went back to my practice, determined to breathe in the air I needed to heal myself, and to breathe out the pain of the grief that had buried itself in every cell of my body. I imagined the air coming in and encircling the pain, and then like a wave slowly eroding a sand castle, swirling back around with the exhalation, retracing its steps but taking some of the pain with it and slowly easing open those doors that had slammed shut inside of me so soon after Charlotte’s death.
Through yoga I was uniting the mind and body in the same meditation, and more than one time I found myself weeping through an entire flow class, a full hour with eyes closed, envisioning Charlotte. Sometimes in shavasana, the period of quiet rest at the end of each session, I could feel her lie on top of me and comfort me. It was as if the warm blanket of her soul would wrap me up and soothe me in those cherished moments of blurred floating between my world and hers.
I even went on to take a chakra-cleansing class. According to various Eastern healing traditions, chakras are energy centers within the body, sometimes thought to be aligned with the endocrine system. All I know is that emotional pain manifests itself in physical pain, and I needed to attack it from all sides. I found a great instructor, and with her soothing voice to guide me I could feel the energy shifting through my body.
With my newfound access to Charlotte, I started talking to her out loud, a lot, and sometimes the topic of our conversation would be utterly ridiculous, like asking her to help me find a parking spot. I was no longer talking to my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter but to a spirit guide. Her incarnation as my daughter had come to an end. She was now a spirit guide and a special soul. She contained the essence of Charlotte but no longer the little girl. The littl
e girl part of her lifetime remained inside of me as memory and experience, but we had begun to redefine our relationship. There were and are many times that I ached for that six-and-a-half-year-old little girl who was my daughter in this lifetime, but more and more I came to realize that those yearnings were about me and not about her. Charlotte was on her very own and very wonderful path. She was well cared for. She was looking out for us. We were learning to bridge the gap.
I began to have vivid dreams in which her physical presence was absolutely real. It was like the sensation you have when someone is behind you, but then you look and no one’s there.
More and more I saw my Charlotte as an ageless soul—a wisdom being—who knows things that I don’t and who looks out for Cabot and Beatrice, Michael, and me.
Michael, it seemed to me, continued to think of her only as his lost six-year-old daughter, the loss heavily tainted by anger and resentment, as well as a sense of an absolute boundary having descended between where she had gone and where we remained. It became clear to me that we were processing our grief in very different ways.
However, as much as I craved the kind of contact Margaret had provided, I no longer felt the need to reach out that way. She had opened the door and shown me what was possible. The experience had made me a profoundly different person, suspending skepticism, opening myself up to a much wider range of beliefs and possibilities. I even wondered if I could develop the kind of intuitive powers that Margaret had.