When we begin to awaken, everything changes.
Ah, everything changes. I didn’t know this, going on fourteen years ago, when I picked up a phone in order to talk to my father. We hadn’t savored a conversation in seventeen years. We hadn’t shared a laugh in all that time either. I still missed him. I wanted to know if he was okay. I’d come across a feature in MPR’s “MN Monthly Magazine” about several local psychics and intuited that I needed to schedule a phone session with one, specifically Suzanne Krupp who had generously helped families of victims in the aftermath of 9/11, the article revealed.
So I made the call which initially took my dad by surprise. Oh, he knew somehow that the 90-minute session itself was coming and involved him. He was right on time. But the reality that we’d actually be having an honest-to-God dialogue, rather than his showing up in a dream or my speaking to empty space without any discernible response? This amazing development temporarily threw him for a loop. I felt a bit dazed myself.
I was sitting with a phone to my ear and, several miles away, a psychic medium was, too. Clairvoyant, this stranger could 
describe what appeared before her—my dad looking decades younger and dressed to the nines in a ‘40s-style suit, for example— and would serve as a transmitter/translator of his telepathic messages. He was hesitant, wondering about protocol, when a man dressed in tennis whites stepped out in front of him. Suzanne’s description made it clear to me that this was my late father-in-law, an avid tennis player during his lifetime.
“If he’s not going to say anything, I’ll take the opportunity to talk,” he declared, but Suzanne told him it was important that my dad and I get a chance to communicate.
Stepping up now, my father, who had always felt self-conscious in any pants that exposed his lily-white legs, quipped, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those shorts.”
Suzanne and I laughed. This broke the ice. We were off to the races, my dad eager, first of all, to correct my assumptions about the restorative time he’d spent following his passing. He showed Suzanne a symbol of a cocoon to suggest the transformative process; a different medium had seen him asleep in a kind of oxygen tent, surrounded by angelic presences. Different images for the same experience. But he was quick to point out that it hadn’t been the pain he’d endured at the end that had necessitated the otherworldly time-out. It was instead his fear of the unknown and the sense that he hadn’t completed all that he’d come to earth to do. He emphasized that he needn’t have let either fear or regret blind him to the loving “reception committee,” including relatives, waiting for him on the Other Side. “Know,” he reiterated, “that there is nothing to fear.”
Obviously aware that I have the inclination to be a doubting Thomasina, he dazzled me with one validation after another. He was the one who brought up my mother’s upcoming move to Minnesota, a health challenge of my brother’s, even the sweet disposition of the aging pooch curled up beside me on the sofa. He alerted me to a mold issue in the garage. He assured me that my mother had a good number of years left here (she lived a decade longer until the age of 90). He offered advice and affirmation. He made me laugh. This loved one was way more than “okay.” And, challenging conventional “wisdom,” he was definitely not “dead and gone.” Why the wait all those years for such an amazing reunion?
At last, I’d exercised my free will to move past any fear, doubt and disbelief to make a connection that brought deep peace. But I was soon to recognize the loving intervention of a higher consciousness in how things then played out. Looking back, I’m awed by the perfectly timed and elegant unfolding. About this, next time…
