Didn't See It Coming

In this sloppy, complex, crowded world, people get away with murder all the time.  Perfect (and less than perfect) crimes go unpunished every day. The police do the best they can, and so did my mother. She tried her hardest when assisting a police investigation because there was always the chance that something would shake loose as a result of her impressions. Sometimes it did, which led to her being a sort of subculture celebrity. She appeared on Merv Griffin's show back in the day, on Arsenio Hall, on Psychic Detectives, on Japanese television, and in various newspapers and local news shows.

She never stuck her nose into a police case unless she was asked. She often did them for free. The one time she was accused of publicity-seeking (more in another blog), she was deeply hurt and offended and for good reason. She might share her psychic feelings with me while watching the news, but she never called up and volunteered. She didn't need to. The families of victims were quick to find her and she had a network of police detectives that believed in her, though sometimes their bosses were harder to convince. Ironically, despite the many personal and professional confirmations of her ability, and our close connection, she didn't see a really bad thing coming in my life; something that still can make me shudder and see darkness. October 1984 was a time of celebration for me. I had been a contributing writer/editor on an elaborate dessert cookbook, and this night the author was giving an elegant launch party in her beautiful Palo Alto home. The food was (of course) delicious, the evening was mild, the people were congratulatory and I hummed with a sense of accomplishment. I needed that feeling just then. I had recently separated from my second husband and moved into a cheap apartment on the border of East Palo Alto. The dwelling itself wasn’t too bad, although I couldn’t get over seeing cockroaches lined up around the cat’s dish like kids waiting around a swimming hole. The last tenant had not been fastidious, and the building was old. I had done my best to decorate it, and its interior was cozy and pleasant. The problem was the neighborhood.

In that particular part of the San Francisco Bay area, upper-class mansions (like the one I was partying in) stood only a stone’s throw across a dry creek bed from a pocket of low-income dwellings. The worst 'hoods were on the east side of Hwy 101; I was (barely) on the west side. Although most of the people in my building were students or young professionals, many of the complexes surrounding us were inhabited by individuals whose idea of a good time was screaming and breaking bottles over each other’s heads at 3:00 in the morning. In the three months since I’d moved there, I had called the police several times in an effort to prevent what sounded just like a murder. (Also known as "a domestic disturbance", a term that didn't do these hair-raising howls justice!

After the book launch party, I went back to the apartment with my friends Kristee and Richard. (Kristee had done the illustrations for the cookbook.) Mother was there, visiting from Maryland, where she’d recently moved after marrying her fourth husband.  We talked for a while, then I took my border collie, Dulcie, for a short walk and left Mom to visit with my friends.

Rounding a corner after Dulcie had completed her duties, I had a clear feeling to turn around and go back. The feeling was like running into an invisible membrane that resisted my forward progress. But full of wine and compliments as I was after the party, I ignored that resistance and decided to go a little further. I wasn’t afraid, I told myself.  It was a pleasant evening, and only 8:00. People laughed in the distance; someone jogged by; a bicyclist passed.

The worst moment of any life is when it suddenly flips from good to bad and you realize you're in trouble. A minute ago, everything was fine. Now, you are going to be terribly hurt or die. In my case, I went from innocent dog-walker to a victim of violence. For a second, I felt stupid and vulnerable — how could I let this happen?  After that, it was just a struggle for survival.

The slender young black man who approached and threatened me was well-dressed and neatly groomed.  He told me that he had a knife, though I never saw it. He asked me to be quiet, and given my ignorance of his weapon’s location, I agreed. I put my hands up, palms forward, in what I hoped was a placating motion and told him it was cool. His eyes never stopped moving in his head; his left hand never let go of a small brown paper bag. From these indications, I figured he was on drugs.  Right across the street was a row of small houses; right behind me was a street light. Right next to me was a silent but curious dog, but he was undaunted by any of these. He turned me to face the steep banks of the dry creek bed, and demanded that I follow him down.

And that's where he made his mistake.

I do not do "down" well. I'm afraid of steep slopes, I can’t do gymnastics, I would never attempt skiing, and I hesitate at down escalators. I can climb upwards like a mountain goat, but once the angle of the land beneath me reaches a certain acuteness, I break into a sweat and become immobile. I need the hand of someone I trust to help me traverse the terrain.

So at that moment, I was willing to die rather than descend that creek bed. (Looking at it in the daylight later, it was obvious that I would have died either way, it was that steep.)

My body became a lead weight; I fell to my knees. Impatient, the man pulled on the bulky fisherman’s sweater I'd changed into after the party.  I shrugged my shoulders, lowered my neck, and let the sweater slide over my head. In a fraction of a second, we were far enough apart that I was out of range from his knife.

“Fetch him off, Dulcie,” I said.

My border collie was 10 years old at the time, and only 35 lbs., but she was the quickest, smartest dog I have ever known. I'd bought her in Cornwall when my first husband and I lived there, and both her parents were working dogs on neighboring farms.

Her bewildered brain had just been waiting for my orders to clarify this confusing situation. When I gave her the command, she launched herself at my attacker; he startled and moved away; I filled my lungs (and I’ve got real good ones) and screamed loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. Then I scrambled to my feet and headed in the opposite direction, calling Dulcie as I ran; she was down the street, still leaping and snarling at the guy and I was afraid he’d turn his knife on her, but he never stopped running. Dulcie turned and joined me and we fled home.

The whole incident, from beginning to end, probably took about five minutes. It seemed like hours. People talk about time stretching in certain instances, and this was one of them. Perhaps because you are so present, moment to moment.

I didn’t feel any pain but as I ran I noticed that the last two fingers on my left hand wouldn’t bend when I told them to. There was a slash across the top part of my palm. When I'd held up my hands to placate my attacker, he'd sliced me.

Later, Mother told me she'd felt uneasy all day. She’d called Maryland, but everything there was okay. I seemed to be fine, what with the book party and everything. My brothers were fine. Since she couldn’t place the problem, she let it go. Our day had been filled with shopping, visiting friends, and spending time in my new apartment before the book launch. She wasn’t crazy about the neighborhood and said so, but (and she’s regretted this since) she never sat and tracked down just what was bugging her. If she had, I might not have gone out on that walk by myself.

As it was, even I had felt uneasy about wearing my jewelry that night, and had taken it all off when I changed my clothes. But I didn’t put it together. And neither did she.

Naturally, it was a great shock when I threw open the front door and stood there, blood splattered all over my white sweater and tennis shoes from the cut in my hand. Fifteen minutes later I was in the emergency room of Stanford Hospital.

I won’t go into the details of hospital procedure, the delay, the pain, the lack of medication until a doctor and a policeman could get through with me. Stanford was wonderful, and—over the next eighteen months—I endured three hand surgeries trying to restore functionality to the tendons that drugged-up son of a bitch severed that night. They were 85% successful. I can’t play piano well with my left hand, and the fingers will never be completely straight, but they do just about everything else well enough. Even now, small pills tend to drop out of my fisted left hand, but oh well. Thank god for the miracle of microsurgery! I was also incredibly fortunate to qualify for a fund created for victims of violent crime, a fund that was later dropped from the state budget. Without it, I would have been poor for a very long time.

After I was admitted that night, Mother went into action immediately. She tore a new one on the cynical interviewing detective who tried to insinuate that I'd provoked the attack (possibly by dressing in that alluring fisherman’s sweater and blue jeans?). She called up her contacts in local law enforcement and rang a police artist she'd worked with on many cases. She started pouring out her intuitions about my attacker before I was asleep in my hospital room. Her information, as it always is in these cases, was detailed and specific. She told them what this guy was like, what part of the neighborhood he lived in, what sort of life he led.

“There’s a garage where he lives. It has an engine taken apart in it, with oil standing in containers and oily rags on the floor. The building is three-story, it’s cinder block, it’s on the left side of road beginning with an “L.” He has a girlfriend who he fights with a lot of the time. She doesn’t like what he’s into. He’s done this sort of thing before. If you don’t catch him, he will again.”

After my surgery the next day, I went to stay with Kristee and Richard at their house. The police artist came over and made a sketch; unlike most police composite drawings, his portrait was frighteningly lifelike. Despite this, when I looked at albums of mug shots later on, I couldn’t pick out my attacker; as a result, the police didn’t do a line-up. Maybe if they had, I would have been more certain, because I struggled to connect the living person I had experienced with a set of frozen, inexpressive polaroids. On the other hand, maybe he wasn't in them!

Mother had to return to Maryland eventually, but she continued to work on the case. But they never caught the man.

The reality is, the police have more than they can ever handle. They are busy picking up the guys they know are guilty, the ones who are identified or caught red-handed. Even if my mother’s information matched a known bad guy, unless they could find proof of the man’s crime—even if I could identify him—it would be a hard, long, legal haul. And more often than you'd like to think, the result was they had to let the guy go.

One of Mom's detective friends told me that, from a certain standpoint, it was probably better for my peace of mind to go on with my life and try to heal and be spared the ordeal. Luckily, he said, I wasn’t raped or murdered. I had a bad hand, but it was being fixed. I’d lived in a bad neighborhood, but I’d since moved. Better not to face the guy in a criminal court, relive the details ad nauseum, and end up knowing that he knew who I was and vice versa. If that happened, I might live in fear the rest of my life.

This pragmatism enraged my mother, because she wanted revenge for her injured child. I would feel the same if it was my child. I felt like a failure when I couldn't identify him, but the detective's advice consoled me.

I also told him I felt stupid for being caught out, and so inadequate...to be so passive and quiet in the face of potential death instead of fighting hard. It's not how I expected myself to react. He pushed my opinion aside and said, "You did exactly the right things. How do I know? Because you're here. You survived. So don't second-guess yourself anymore." That was immensely comforting. I'll always be grateful to him for his perspective.

As it was, I had enough to deal with in the years to come: like flinching when any man walked toward me, being afraid on nature trails, reliving the incident at unexpected moments, finding raised voices unendurable, being nervous that I would experience that horrible "turning on a dime" situation again, where life went from good to bad. Sometimes, even a sunny day went black for me.

I never blamed my mother for anything connected to my event, of course—but I did ponder how bizarre it was to have a psychic as a mom who didn't foresee the worst thing I ever experienced. Perhaps it's a natural blind spot re: the ones we love. Who wants to see trouble for them? Or maybe we have no choice about certain nexus events in our time stream, to be real sci-fi about it. Maybe there was a cosmic reason, though I'm not a big believer in those. What I do know is what I felt: that membrane of resistance. Something was trying to warn me; from that moment on, I've tried to sense that warning and pay attention to it. Fortunately, it has been very rare.

I moved to Washington, DC a couple of years after the attack. I couldn't bear driving past the neighborhood where it happened, even on the freeway. In one sense, this may not have been the wisest decision because the African-American population in DC is vastly more than it is in California. Every day I was confronted with dark-skinned men on my way to work, some of them with chips on their shoulders. I was pushed on a sidewalk by a man who uttered "bitch" under his breath. Groped on the Metro by a well-dressed professional while I was dozing in my seat. For someone already jumpy about men—and yes, let's be honest, especially black men—this was not conducive to my recovery. But in all other aspects, the move was a very good thing and I look back on those years with happiness.

My own trauma was relatively minor and mercifully brief, compared to the horrific attacks that other women endured. I spoke with some of them. Their endurance and struggle to find peace in the aftermath deeply inspired me. If they could savor life again, what excuse did I have not to?

If there was one moment of recovery I can point to, it happened back in California as I walked a trail on Stanford land. I'd climbed a hill and was among gnarled old live oak trees. I've always loved trees, they are as essential to my happiness as air. So I wrapped my arms around this massive old oak and leaned my cheek against its rough bark. I felt the sap of life running beneath its surface, feeding all the branches and leaves, digging deep into the soil with its roots. It seemed to flow onto me as well, filling me with a calm energy, a shared life force. The message I received was one of permanence, of endurance, of life before and after this one incident in my history. Of oneness between living entities on this earth. And it lifted my spirits. I saw light instead of darkness.

I held onto that moment whenever the shadows started creeping in, and it really helped.

Connections

I loved England as a new bride, but it was a big adjustment. Although I had moved many times in my life, I'd always had my family core around me. This time I was alone in a new culture, in a new marriage with someone I didn’t know a lot about. Ours had been a long distance courtship, with lots of letters but not a lot of actual time together. There were a million little things to learn about each other.

Then there were the contrasts in culture — my American background of big stores, big appliances, big central heating bills, against England’s tradition of small shops, miniature washing machines, no dryers and “a wee fire in the sitting room.” In addition, my husband was from New Zealand, not England, making him a sort of cultural double whammy.

We lived in the country, and I had no car, so my weekdays were spent rattling around the house or going for long walks along narrow lanes and open fields. There were many times in that first year when I felt very alone—except for my mother.

I found, to my surprise, that the miles didn’t diminish our psychic connection. (Which was lucky, because she was always a terrible correspondent.) If I needed her, if things looked grey and depressing, the phone would ring. If she needed me, if there were troubles brewing on the home front, I would call her. Of course, sometimes I cheated. I would want to have a chat, but not pay for it; so I’d concentrate hard on her calling me—and she always did.

“What’s going on?” she’d ask. ”You’ve been on my mind all morning, so what is it?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to use your dime.”

“You little witch.” (I think it was “witch.”)

Sometimes the messages were hard to decipher. I’d feel unhappy for no apparent reason, dragging around in the dumps — or worse, biting R’s head off, with no biological cycle to justify my behavior. It might take a day or two for me to realize that these weren’t my own emotions. When I did, and called or wrote Mother (I was a good correspondent!), I’d find out what was going on during that time period. Usually, it was coming from her or one of my brothers.

Just before my first wedding anniversary, Mother developed severe physical symptoms, and ended up being scheduled for exploratory surgery. Fares to the States were cheap through the RAF, so I flew home in time to be with her in the hospital. (It later turned out that she was "picking up" her husband’s physical condition, according to her; she herself was fine and the surgery—which found nothing—was considered unnecessary. Or at least, that's the family mythology. Frankly, I am a bit skeptical of superimposing such severe symptoms on herself, but I'm also at a loss as to how to explain it. My mom was a hyperchondriac in some ways, but surgery seems extreme. Was it a deeply neurotic, unconscious, need to gather her family around her, even from across the sea? To remind them that all attention needed to be on her? Or a way to punish her husband for their tempestuous, vindictive, relationship? Or was she really so sensitive she would manifest the illness of another as her own?)

What's undeniable is that we're all connected to our loved ones. The closer the relationship, the easier it is for us to sense that connection. "I knew that was you calling!" is a pretty common occurrence. "You've been on my mind." "I had a feeling there was trouble." "I had to call you, are you ok?" Most of us have had some or all of these experiences.

As I sat in the hospital waiting room, a friend taught me how to use the Tarot cards. My affinity for the cards has remained with me through the years, even though I rarely use them anymore; I find them a wonderful trigger for meditation, self-reflection, sensing patterns. Back then, I read only for myself or close family and friends, for I never overcame the fear of being wrong or my resistance to being a psychic problem-solver. The cards gave me certain material points to steer by; I enlarged and expanded on these via my own intuition. I have always been more adept at psychological insight, ruminating on how and why people behave as they do. As a result, I've frequently been called upon by friends for non-psychic advice (though, of course, I can never divorce my intuition from what I tell people). But I have no formal training. It's just a part of how I'm wired and, given that Mother was also a counselor, in her way, perhaps it's an inherited trait.

*       *       *

In England, I experienced an apparition.

My husband had gone to Poole for a two-day training course, leaving in the early morning darkness of winter. I was sound asleep, still snuggled in the covers of our farmhouse bed. All at once, I knew there was someone in the room. I felt my consciousness being pulled to the surface, like a diver coming out of deep waters. My heart pounded. My hands sweated. There, in the far corner of the dark room, was an old man. I had a distinct impression of an aged, crooked body, a white beard, a woolen tam on his head, a Scottish feel to his clothes. He wasn’t solid, like a real person. He also wasn’t ethereal, like a cinematic ghost. He was that combination of spirit and psychic impression that gives you remarkable details about a person without really seeing them.

I didn’t know what he wanted, but the implication of trouble was clear. I looked over at the clock: it was 7:15 a.m. Half an hour later, R. rang. He had been in a car accident. The treacherous fog of southern England had tricked his eyes into thinking he was following a car, when the car was actually parked with its tail lights on. He had swerved to avoid hitting it, gone through a hedgrow, and flipped over. Fortunately, he wasn’t seriously hurt; the worst injury was to his head, when he tried to get the hood of the car to stay open and it banged him one. A farmer pulled the car out of the field and he was going to a garage to get it repaired. 

When I asked him what time the accident happened, he told me 7:15—the exact time that I had looked at the clock after being "warned" by my apparition. Who the Scottish gentlemen was, I’ll never know. But my ancestors on my mother’s side were Campbells. Could one of them been looking out for us? Or did he come from my husband's family tree? I only know I didn't make him up, he was there.

I have my theories, and they're unprovable, and they've evolved over the years. We're connected. All of us. We are an ecosystem in an ecosystem. Everything is energy, molecules rubbing up and overlapping. We live in a planet that has a massive and diverse ecosystem. We can grasp that, mostly. We're part of that system, so why is it hard to suppose that we're all connected as well? To animals, to insects, to trees, to every organic thing on our world. We feel these connections strongest with our loved ones, our friends. But I believe they exist with every being. And so, when we corrupt and destroy those Others by violence, pollution, indifference, war...we are ravaging our own larger Being.

Someday, I hope we'll all understand this. But it appears to still be one helluva long ways off.

Mortality and TMI

Sometimes, you should just keep things to yourself. I think this is an enormous responsibility for people who are psychics and deal with clients. Death, failure, sickness, loss...life holds these for every one of us. Just because you see it doesn't mean you have to tell it, unless there is a really valid reason, a helpful reason, for giving your client that information.

I think my mom was, in general, very perceptive about these areas. She was sensitive in how she approached them, thoughtful in when she applied them. But not always.

Her marriage to my stepfather went sour early on. Our relationship to him as teenagers went from cordial to combative, more because we were used as pawns and forced to take our mother's side in everything than from us confronting him. They fought a lot and bickered constantly. Maybe he did start it by being jealous and suspicious (well, he married someone that he couldn't control—a factor that strongly attracted him before marriage, but infuriated him afterwards); maybe he was the first to break the sanctity and have an affair (more on that in a minute). But instead of being adults and seeking help and trying to work things out, they just went nuclear and—boom!—it was like living in a Nevada atom bomb test facility.

One of my mother's very first psychic experiences happened when my stepfather was at sea. They'd been married about 2 1/2 years, and she was missing him. But as she looked at his photo, she heard the word, "Maria." Loud and clear. It intrigued her, but it also enraged her. She was sure her husband was cheating on her. So the next time she wrote, she added, "Give my regards to Maria." Just that. Wow.

I can't recall what, if anything, he said in his letter back to her. But when he returned, he denied everything. Told mom she was crazy and all this psychic stuff was bullshit and corrupting. She almost bought it...until she found a photograph of him standing next to a lovely young woman, a priest, and some older people. Until he took her aside in the base chapel and confessed to her that he'd caught an STD. Then he had to own up that Maria was real, her brother a priest, and the photo her family members—who'd all enjoyed his company while he was in port.

Nothing was the same after that, of course. Lots of opportunities for Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff drinking and backbiting.

Okay, but here's where the TMI stuff starts to come in. A psychic told my mom that her husband was going to die in a car crash. He was sporting a lovely little Austin Healey in those days, and drove like an Earhardt. The atmosphere at home was corrosive, and all of us walked around on eggshells a lot of the time. When we heard that sports car's engine purring as it entered the garage, our butts clenched shut. We kids scattered like rabbits. Mom sharpened her nails for the evening bout.

After this prediction, mom (and I'm ashamed to say, myself) started hoping we wouldn't hear that engine anymore. Every evening for a while, we waited for him NOT to come home. For him to crash and burn somewhere. For him to die. And every time we DID hear the Healey in the drive, our hearts sank. This went on for some time.

And it was so ghoulish, so morally wrong. To hope for someone's death. Even though it's understandable that people in abusive situations might do so. We didn't hope for our mom's death, just his. Because then it would all stop. But what a stupid way to stop it.

I understand why we took that stance, mother and me. We were both passive-aggressive, feeling helpless and somewhat hopeless in the face of a volatile situation; we couldn't see any way out. My mother's method was always to look for another man to bail her from one situation to the next. She was incredibly capable of some things—she'd had her own local news column, radio show, modeling and charm school (yeah, it was the South, they still had charm schools in the 60s); she organized fashion shows, charity balls, her own kids, her own home. But when it came to men and marriage, she absolutely wanted to be Rescued, princess-like, and sheltered and pampered. For ever after. She never thought of stepping out on her own two feet.

And guess what? At that point in my life, neither did I. I was deep into the Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel psychology, and I felt—in the face of my mother, her marriage, and my ability to earn a living—weak, helpless, unskilled, miserable, and deeply desperate. For someone with half a college education and no trained skills, there was only one goal: get married and have kids. Artistic talent wasn't going to cut it. It's what my mother expected, it's what I expected. The sooner, the better.

But still...that psychic, whoever she/he was, had a lot of nerve to make that prediction and share it with my mother. It just innervated her further.

###

Ironically, my mother did something similar to me years later. My first marriage had ended and I was in love with—well, let's call him Mark. I'd met him through my mother and we'd started dating hot on the heels of my crumbling marriage. Still on the SB/R track, I was leaping into another relationship so I didn't have to be out in the cold world of the un-Rescued for more than 5 minutes. After Mark and I had been together for a year, we decided to get married. I was crazy about him, he had some lovely qualities: charm, intelligence, and the ability to listen and converse about feelings and emotions that was rare in a guy. We could talk for hours. We could sort out why I felt the way I did and what to do about it. We read books together, loved art cinema, sci-fi and fantasy, animals...He was 10 years older than me, fiercely independent, and a real mentor. He also fancied himself a bit of a bad boy, a hint of danger, and I was stuck on him big time. 

My mother, always quick to smell a threat, went off him pretty quickly. Maybe being a bit of a flim-flam charmer herself, she knew one when she saw one. In addition, she saw someone who was teaching me to be OK with telling her "no" when she made selfish, unreasonable, demands. Or tried to drag me into her dramatic chaos. So, by the time we announced our wedding plans, maybe she just couldn't keep it to herself.

I went to her for a career reading. I was doing temp secretarial work all over Silicon Valley, and I wanted to know if I was going to settle into something more permanent. Money was tight in my new relationship, and I was hoping for better. Instead, my mother told me, in no uncertain terms, that my new marriage was going to be a bust. She said Mark (who, when I met him, was in a lucrative job but soon quit it to become an entrepreneur) would never succeed. That I would never have the kind of home I dreamed of, surrounded by plush furnishings and antique pieces, or a comfortable lifestyle. Not with him. That I would be scrabbling for money, that he would prove not to be my Prince, and that the marriage would not last.

Stupidly, I went home and told Mark what she said. I demanded that he help prove her wrong. And it changed our relationship. Over the next four years, I watched every move he made. I was often his critic instead of his supporter. When I saw him waver and lose interest in a project, I harangued him about commitment. When he moved on to something else, I bullied him about not taking a power position. When the bills piled up, I nagged him about responsibility.

I was afraid, so afraid of losing the dream I had about our life together. And I wanted Mom to be wrong.

But underneath the yummy romantic aspects of our relationship, and the warm, comforting mentorship, Mark and I wanted two really different things out of life. He wanted to be free, a high-flyer, someone who struck it lucky, made it big, and then parlayed that into something else. He wanted to start it, get it running, then sell it and retire with tons of cash. He was, at heart, a gambler. But like all addicts, it was always the "next one" that would help him strike it rich. It wasn't about buckling down and working hard to make "this one" succeed and endure.

And emotionally, he was no Rescuing Prince; he was Peter Pan—immature, irresponsible, careless, in the moment. And I was, at my core, desperate for security, stability, shelter. Like Wendy, I was sometimes shocked at how he could forget about me or anything that he'd promised. After five years, I realized I was already standing on my own two feet, doing everything that needed doing, without his help. He had mentored me well, I had drawn strength from it, and I believed I could do it myself. With a lot less stress! I hated the nagging bitch I had become, pushing him. We went to counseling, but the conclusion was inevitable. We were done.

So, in the end, my mother's prediction came true. But it was still terribly wrong of her to tell me. It influenced me, it hampered me; maybe the outcome would have been the same, but would the journey?

I've only had one other example of this kind of TMI predicting: while I was married to Mark, his brother dragged a self-professed psychic to our house one evening. She had the brass to tell me that I would die in my 50's of drowning in a sailing accident. Just like that! I was floored and more than a little shocked at this information. I admit that I looked at sailing—which I've done maybe a handful of times in my whole life—with less appetite than before. And the thought of drowning, for someone who grew up around the beach, makes me shudder even now. 

As it turns out, she was full of shit. But just like my mom, she had no damn business telling me such a thing. Why? Because we all have to walk our paths in this world. Death, failure, sickness, loss...they are with us, they are certain to be a part of our lives. Whether we know about them in advance or not, we have to make the journey, with enough burdens on our backs. We can't live each day steeped in our mortality and we can't make a marriage knowing it's doomed. We have to push those fears away and find the joy in our days. We need hopes and dreams right down to the last second.

Some people might say that only God knows the moment of our death. Well, the good news about God is that he keeps his mouth shut. Psychics should take a lesson from that.