Lovelorn

The phone rang in our house all the time, day and night. This is why shrinks use an answering service—or maybe, in this day of cell phones, their voicemail—so clients can't reach them directly. Because everyone thinks their problem is the big problem and time is no object.

Initially, to protect Mom during business hours, I answered the phone calls. Yep, that was before answering machines and voicemail. Hard to believe we lived like that, but once technology offered a solution, I was off the hook (haha). Mom preferred an answering machine long after voicemail was commonplace. When times were flush and her career at a high point, she had a secretary with her own office space to take care of calls. But most of her life, she worked from home and on her own.

My mother's most loyal clients were people that needed frequent hand holding. They'd come for a counseling, get the information, go home, and then call her again. What was it she said? What were they supposed to do? Was it really going to be like she said? Did he/she/they really feel that way?

There is nothing in this world more painful than love gone bad. No one more emotionally desperate than a person who still loves someone and cannot have them. When you feel that isolated, cut loose from your illusion of happiness and control, you will grab at anything to stop the freefall. Lots of us find self-help books or therapists or good friends or family to support us through this time. But how much more seductive and hopeful is it to have a psychic that can predict what will happen, who will tell you that it's all going to be okay, that he/she will come back and give you a happy ending after all?

Which brings me to the dilemma my mother often faced: that of telling someone it wasn't going to work out or that the beloved was not their soulmate, or even their final relationship in this life. It was amazing to see how clients could twist or ignore what Mom actually said and create a consoling alternate version that fit their desires. When their delusion met reality, of course, there was serious crash and burn and they'd be back for another counseling.

"I told you he wasn't going to agree to that," she might say. "He's already moving on without you. I'm so sorry, but I can only tell you what I see—I can't make things happen."

Bingo. That's the crux of the issue. Being a psychic isn't being a wizard, there isn't magic involved nor any spell casting or love potions that will force a fading love affair to rejuvenate. But we want it so badly, we're deaf to good intentions and solid advice and blind to all but our heart's pain-wracked whimpering. We'll try any kind of mumbo-jumbo, believe in any sort of arcanery, if it will just give us hope for a while longer. Most of us see the truth in time.

Do we have free will? Can we change the future? If I knew, I'd tell you. As I've mentioned before, my mother was good at comparing possible paths and their likely outcomes, as she saw them. But she couldn't do anything to change what she saw.

"If I tell you that, should you turn left, you will be in a car accident...then you can choose to turn right and avoid it," she'd say. That would indicate a lack of predestination, a situation where free will trumps fate. But if you want to make yourself crazy, you could say that coming to her and receiving that advice was also predestined, thus avoiding the car accident because you were fated to avoid it. We used to have these circular conversations, but I'm not sure there were any hard conclusions. Who knows? (Only The Shadow knows, would be Mom's response. That's a generational reference, look it up if you don't get it.)

On the other hand, Mom was convinced that people go out of their ways to meet their deaths. She "saw" time and again how someone would defy the odds to be in a certain place at a certain time to make that happen. So are our lives really fluid, but our deaths set in stone?

Even the clients who got good news about their romances would return frequently for reassurance. Sometimes the outcome was way down the road, and they just needed to make sure it was still coming. It was always gratifying to hear from a client when things turned out well, as predicted; all of us enjoy a little appreciation of our work, and a psychic really lays it on the line to make these kinds of forecasts. I couldn't do it, it freaks me out. But Mom could.

Once in a great while, she would scold a client for not listening. She would reiterate her advice and tell them to pay attention or stop wasting her time. She would endure their crying and complaining and desperate phone calls—and then she would say, "I'm done. I can't do any more for you." My mom was ethical about these situations. She needed an income like anyone else, but she wasn't going to soak a client who wasn't getting any benefit out of her insights.

If there's an irony to this situation, it's that my mother was as fallible as her clients. Especially with one relationship, which she clung to long after it was obvious to all of us that it was over and done. As her daughter, she pulled on me to counsel her, read her cards, tell her what was going to happen. And, like her clients, she brushed aside what I had to say and kept hoping.

We're just not ready for the destination until we've completed the journey. Even then, it can really suck.