Do Dead People Watch You Shower? (14 page)

I can speak
only for myself here because I don’t know what relationship other mediums have with spirits on the Other Side. My own personal feeling and experience is that as long as I’m using my ability for good They will help me. If I’d try to use it for selfish or greedy reasons, I do think They’d leave me. I think that the Other Side is aware that here on the material side of things it’s necessary to make a living and I don’t feel They begrudge me that. But I also try to find a balance. I try to give back. It’s not about a quid pro quo, like, “I’ll give back if you help me out.” It’s what I feel is the right thing to do. I enjoy a very blessed life and I don’t like to take advantage. Could another medium use her or his ability to take advantage or do something that is not for good? I don’t know. I can only speak for myself.

Nearly every reading,
the spirit or spirits I connect with will be sending messages of love. Whether or not they were able to express it on this side, that is what they feel for us. Frequently they will wish someone a happy birthday, they’ll show me that there has just been a birthday or there is one just coming up. They might express how proud they are of someone—a son, daughter, or grandchild—who has done very well at something, whether it’s school, a job, or just being a wonderful person. They are proud of us when we take care of one another and are kind to others, try to help out in some way. They watch the progress we are making, the lives we are altering.

Sometimes there also are warnings. I’ve had many souls tell me to tell a family member, “Don’t smoke!” or they might feel that the family is being too hard on a child because they don’t really understand the child and they are worried about it. They’ll say, “Let the kid alone,” or “It’s not what you think.” Things like that.

In some cases, people on this side cannot seem to get over the loss of a loved one. They’re just refusing to heal. It’s really a choice they are making, but maybe they aren’t aware of that. They’re refusing to choose life. What many of these people think is that if they choose to go on living and be happy they are insulting the dead. This is not at all what our deceased loved ones want for us! We can love and remember them and still go on living and experiencing joy on this side. That’s what They want for us—They get no benefit out of our being miserable and They will definitely communicate that.

Mostly They just want their loved ones here to know how much they still are loved by those who have crossed over.

To be honest,
I’d have to say, not always. But it really depends on what questions the client brings to me. Sometimes—very often—the client just wants to make a connection. But others might want to know, am I going to get married? Will I have a baby? Those kinds of predictions are very common and often are offered by the spirit even if they aren’t asked. They’ll also say things like that my client is in good health and will live a long life—a more general prediction, but certainly valuable to know. Or they’ll know that my client is going on a trip somewhere and they’ll tell them that they will be safe while traveling. It can get rid of a lot of worry. Or they might say, “You’re going to have twins” and I guess that could
cause
some worries!

Let me put
it this way: I believe that circumstances always exist for the predictions to come true, but we also have free will. If a spirit tells us that we will be getting married, you can bet that there is someone waiting in the wings for us. But we humans are very capable of messing things up for ourselves—even things we want very badly. And also we can make the mistake of thinking something that has been predicted is going to look a certain way. Maybe a young woman is going out with a guy for a long time and she asks me to ask her dead grandmother if she’s going to get married. I tell her, “Granny says yes.” But then she and her boyfriend (or fiancé) break up. So she thinks, “I guess Concetta Bertoldi is just full of it!” But then she meets another guy and he sweeps her off her feet and next thing you know, they’re at the altar. Granny is validated, I’m validated. Score! Score! Score!

There is simply
no one answer to this. Sometimes a prediction happens right away and sometimes it takes years. The pieces are all there but we need to be ready. We need to be careful not to self-sabotage. We need to have an open mind and not try too hard to do our own engineering, which can often be off track. No pun intended.

Bear in mind that time has no meaning on the Other Side. On this side, we’re only constrained by the length of our earthly life or the capabilities of the human body. If the prediction is that you are going to have a child, if you’re a woman, this will normally have to happen before you’re too old, but what that means is changing, given our medical advancements in fertility. If the prediction is that we will fall in love and get married,
that
could happen when we’re singing around a piano in an old folks’ home. Though usually, it does happen sooner than that!

No, I never
do. First of all, I’m in a subconscious state so after the fact, it’s more like a dream that you had that didn’t really make any sense to you so you can’t remember it. Or maybe an even better way to describe it would be like when you overhear part of a conversation. In the moment you’re hearing it, you might be amused by it, or a little curious about it, but you soon forget it completely because you don’t know the people and it doesn’t belong to you. We really retain only the things that belong to us in some way. What does happen frequently is that someone I’ve given a reading to will remind me of what I said. I’ve gotten a lot of good stories that way! Sometimes they’ll tell me things right at the appointment, after the reading, when I’m in normal consciousness again, or often I’ll get letters from people I’ve done a reading for. So that way, the message more “belongs to me” in that the person has basically handed it to me, rather than it just being something I heard in passing.

Well I have,
but it’s really hard on me. They’re really hard on me. I don’t like seeing dead bodies. I know this may offend some people, but to me a body in a box is just rotting meat. That’s not the person, the soul that was the person is gone. Also, funerals are very loud for me. A lot of relatives hover around the ceremony because basically their whole family is there—for them it’s just like going to a backyard barbecue or any other family gathering. But for me, all those spirits are just overwhelming.

Sure they do.
But it’s not to check on who shows up and who doesn’t or to be sure that nice things are said about them. They just want to be around family. One of the first things we are told when we cross is
we’ll never be taken from those we love
. Never. We will always have the ability to be with our loved ones, literally, in spirit. Any family gathering, they are there. It’s irrelevant that it’s a funeral. They are there only because they love to be with us.

No, they are
not. See the previous question. The dead are not sitting up on a cloud looking down and judging us—“Well. I guess I see
now
how she
really
felt about me.” Or “Boy, he sure got over me fast!” They want us to be happy. I can’t say for sure that if someone’s widower showed up at her funeral with his secret girlfriend on his arm it would actually be
appreciated
, I don’t know if that guy could actually say, “This is what my wife would have
wanted
,” but even something like that, the dead would understand—they’d know all the whys about their own marriage and what that new relationship was for, too, karmically speaking. But no, tears are not a requisite. In fact, the opposite. They much prefer smiles and laughter.

Yes, in fact,
there is. They wish we’d get back to smiling as soon as possible. They want to be remembered with happiness. They really hate to be responsible for anyone’s sadness. A cheerful send-off, I’m sure, would please them very much. Look at Tammy Faye Bakker—she got it! She was a good woman who had done the best she knew how and she knew where she was going. She didn’t want anyone to be sad: she wanted a celebration. She told her husband she wanted balloons, and her husband filled the church with balloons! However, I’m human. I understand that is not always easy.

Not completely; I’m
always with them. But it’s a bit like riding on a bus where there are people all around you in the other seats, but maybe they’re not talking all the time. I just don’t have a lot of control over when a conversation may start. I’ve always walked through life feeling like I know a secret that nobody else knows. Now that I think of it, I wonder if that’s sort of what it’s like to be pregnant and have another person always with you, communicating with you.

In any case, many a night I have been woken up by a dead person, or persons—sometimes it’s like a whole party going on. One time I was supposed to do a reading for a man the next day (he was a skeptic, but not an obnoxious one) and I guess his father wanted to get a jump on things. He came to me that night and introduced himself to me. But it didn’t end there. He had a group of buddies he wanted me to meet and he introduced
all
of them to me. Then he said, “When you talk with my son, mention the glasses. He’ll know what you mean.” With all the people he wanted me to meet, I hardly slept that night. The next day when his son had his reading I said, “Your father kept me up all night last night. He wanted me to meet all his friends. Did he have a group of really good friends?” The guy was amazed. He confirmed that his dad had this lifelong pack of buddies, nearly all of them on the Other Side now. They got together regularly to play cards or whatever. I said, “Well, your father hasn’t changed much and you’ll be glad to know the party is still going on.” Then I said, “He told me to mention the glasses to you. Do you know what he’s talking about?” The guy said, “Oh my God. I found a pair of old glasses at a flea market some years ago that were exactly like the ones my father used to wear. I had them fitted with my prescription and I wore them for years. Finally they broke and I threw them in a drawer. Just days ago, I came across them in the drawer and I pulled them out and said to my wife, “I’d love to have glasses like this again, but I’m sure I’ll never find these same frames twice.” I don’t believe this man was skeptical anymore.

I also see ghosts from time to time and I can tell you, if you want to have a heart attack there is nothing quite like waking up and seeing someone in your bedroom who doesn’t belong there. Of course, every time
I
woke up, I’d wake
John
up and want him to go check on whoever it was this time in the closet or out in the hall. Which was ridiculous because John doesn’t see spirits and he didn’t appreciate losing sleep over something that, for him, doesn’t even exist. He finally got fed up and decided to put in a very serious security system at our house. We always turn it on when we go to bed so if I wake up and see someone in my room, but the alarm has not gone off, I know it’s a dead person and I just roll over and go back to sleep.

I guess I’m
just used to them. They can be annoying but I’m not afraid of them, even though sometimes they might make me jump or even scream if they startle me. Or, like before we had the alarm, if I don’t know for sure it’s a dead person I might be scared. But speaking of sleeping, I have no idea whether they just have no sense of time or whether they have an exceptionally weird sense of humor, but they seem to delight in keeping me from sleeping. Even in hot weather I always need to have some kind of cover over me because they like to tap or touch me. One night there was a spirit that kept messing with my feet, kept pinching my toes. I got really aggravated and pulled the sheet over my feet and said,
“Would you knock it off?”
After that I didn’t feel anything and I was able to sleep. But they weren’t quite through with me….

I’m a pretty neat person and I am completely conscientious about certain things. For example: my bedroom slippers. I always take them off and leave them beside my bed, together, pointing out so that when I get up I can just slip my feet into them and go. Well, the next morning I got up and my slippers were not where I’d left them. On occasion, maybe John will be walking in the room and inadvertently kick one of them and it might not be perfectly in its place, but in this case both slippers were simply gone. I looked everywhere, high and low. Finally, I spotted them—behind my bedside table. There was absolutely no way the slippers could have gotten there accidentally. The table is so large and heavy that I had to pull it several feet away from the wall in order to get behind it to retrieve them. And both slippers were neatly placed, side by side, perfectly parallel to the wall. As I wrestled the table to get my slippers I’m amazed I didn’t hear some spirit laughing!