Death Poem

I wrote this for my mom and read it aloud as the family gathered to remember her.

Connection

I look out on the landscape of the world.

I search it with my heart, my spirit.

I strain to feel the invisible chain that bound us together,

even unwilling, even across the miles.

But it is gone.

Your end is empty.

I trail its links behind me like Marley’s ghost

and I grieve to feel the lightness left behind.

But perhaps, after all, it was not a chain.

Perhaps it was a tether.

And your spirit, like an impatient bright balloon,

has broken free and rushed into the sky.

I will search the sky for you sometimes and hope

to catch a glimpse of your color, dancing in the sun.

Last Day Thoughts

October 2011: My mother died early the next morning.

I’m sitting in my mother’s room at the nursing home. The breeze is cool for a San Diego afternoon and I hear buses go by outside. There is a background cacophony of electronic noises, from patient buzzers to monitoring machines to elevators to televisions. The squeak of rubber soled shoes on linoleum. The rattle of wheeled carts dispensing linens and food and medicine.

The hospice nurse sits beside Mom's bed and writes notes, her back to the window. She is large and beautiful and her compassion shines through dark eyes like a gentle fire. She has bathed and clothed and washed my mother this afternoon, spreading her two-toned hair (auburn and white, so long and silky now) on the pillow to dry.

Mom is less responsive than I’ve seen her so far. Her heart is beating rapidly but ineffectually. Her blood pressure is almost too low for the monitor to pick up. Her breath is shallow and, every now and then, she takes a deeper breath. There are involuntary tics in her neck and shoulders but her hands are relaxed against the pillows and sheets. She is clean now, clean and dressed. A big change from three weeks ago when she was lying in her own urine and stinking of it, wet and rebellious about wearing clothes or a diaper. Stuttering to form words or sentences, the meaning of them flying from her eyes like birds through a window. The confusion and doubt. The crossed wires in the brain. Now her eyes don’t even flutter, and her mouth hangs freely open, trying to pump a little air into her lungs. She’s on oxygen as well. She no longer urinates. Her legs are sticks and her arms are twigs. Like a tree. Her hair is not leaflike but rather a bird’s nest in the branches.

It is autumn now and winter approaches, the cold deep sleep beneath the snow and ice. Life and heartbeats slow...stop...sleep...

Watching this process, I am as much a spirit as she is, invisible to each other through the membrane of consciousness. I hold her hand and talk to her, but her ears are like thinly pressed shapes of pie dough, and I wonder if she hears me. I’ve tried to say what I think she needs to hear: I love you, we all love you, let go, they’re waiting.

But who is waiting, or where, I don’t really know.

Interview with my Mother

Jeffrey Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, an accomplished radio and television interviewer, and the author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, 'The Roots of Consciousness.' He hosted a television series called 'Thinking Allowed,' and interviewed my mother when she was living in the Washington, DC area in the 80s. I remember Jeffrey as a compassionate, highly intelligent, and (obviously) philosophical man. I know my mother respected and admired him, and valued their friendship. Below is the transcript of that 'Thinking Allowed' interview.

It's invaluable to me to have these words in her own voice...

TRAINING PSYCHIC INTUITION with KATHLYN RHEA

Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is training intuitive and psychic abilities, and with me is Kathlyn Rhea, the author of several books including The Psychic Is You and Mind Sense. Kay is known as an intuitive consultant in the Washington, D.C. area, and her reputation is particularly extraordinary in doing concrete, practical work with police departments, the medical profession, and in business consulting. Welcome, Kay.

Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Mishlove: It's a pleasure to have you here.

Kathlyn Rhea: It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeffrey Mishlove: You know, I might say at the outset that your reputation is most extraordinary in the law enforcement field. I've had the opportunity myself to interview law enforcement officials who have worked with you on cases where you've been able to locate missing bodies, for example, that had eluded them. You tend to view intuitive and psychic abilities in a concrete, practical way, not so much in the spiritual, mystical sense at all.

Kathlyn Rhea: I feel like if you can't use it, don't bother with it, and so it has to be practical for me. I think the law enforcement enabled me to sharpen my abilities, because when you're working with detectives, they want the facts, ma'am, and they don't want a lot of elusive things. So it really helped me sharpen my intuitive abilities over the years.

Jeffrey Mishlove: One of the interesting things about your view is you don't look at this so much as a gift from God, but as something that you work very hard to develop and to train, and something that's attainable by anyone who's willing to work for it.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. Let me explain how I see it. When you're born, if you're lucky enough to be a nice, healthy baby, you have the other five senses that we all accept. Now, you have eyes and the eyes can see, but the baby does not know what they see. So mother has to help teach them a visual vocabulary: "Baby, this is a cat. Baby, this is a chair. Baby, that's a man. Baby, that's a lady." So pretty soon the baby builds their visual vocabulary. And then the hearing. The baby had ears; they didn't know what they heard. So mother says, "The cat goes meow, meow; and the cow goes moo, moo," and pretty soon the baby develops a hearing vocabulary. The same thing with smelling the pretty flower, or "Eat your carrots, these are potatoes, this is lovely lemon custard;" the baby develops that taste vocabulary. So as the time goes by, it's nothing unusual that this child should identify things with their other five senses. Now, the intuitive sense is present too, but is not visual, so nobody exercises it for the baby. Nobody says that baby can sense whether they like that person or not; without any words or any vision, they can sense it. And so the poor intuitive sense just lies there and is ignored. If you develop it, I find that it's probably the most valuable source of information that you can plug in with your intellect, and it's only as good as your intellect. You go to the little lady along the road who has a palm on her sign, and she tells you something intuitive. Now, it'll be intuitive all right, but if she cannot interpret what she got intuitively she can't give you very good information. She'll give you something that you have to try to figure out what she meant by it. With me -- let's take a detective; he comes to me and he has a suspect he's looking for. Because I have been fortunate enough to travel most of the United States, I can say, "Well, he's left this state. Now he's gone to another state." And then my intellect takes over and says what I'm feeling is the same thing I'd feel if I were in the state of Arizona.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Oh really?

Kathlyn Rhea: Or I'm feeling the same thing as if I were by the Mississippi River. So my intellect has helped me identify what my intuition is telling me.

Jeffrey Mishlove: In other words, otherwise it would just sort of be a mass of amorphous sensations, but you've developed a very precise way of identifying, for example, how you would feel in Arizona.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. And by working with the detectives I got to where I could tell the difference if a body had been stabbed, in preference to a body being shot, or a body being strangled; whether the body's buried or not; whether the person's still alive or not. And assumption is a very dangerous thing, because in the beginning there were times when I would think, well, if the person hasn't come back, and I see them with blood around them, then they must be dead. But you must go further and totally finish looking at the picture and get all that information, and you may find that no, they're just not able to get back, and they're being held prisoner somewhere, and they're in very bad physical condition.

Jeffrey Mishlove: When you began in your adult life to train this ability, it took you a long time and a certain amount of perseverance, without any results, really, to get going at it, didn't it?

Kathlyn Rhea: The biggest thing I had to do was overcome the misinformation that was out there, Jeffrey, because there was nobody telling me what is intuition. It's a perfectly normal sense. So I went to all of the people in the field that I could find -- the crystal ball readers, the card readers, the palmists -- and they did not have the ability to tell you how they did it. Somebody realized they had an intuitive flash, and the next thing they knew they told them they were special, they were gifted, they were set apart from the rest of us, and so they would do it. And one of them would say, "Well, I can only do it on rainy days;" and another would say, "I can only do it if the moon is half full." They didn't know how they were doing it, and they did not know how to use it; they didn't know how to harness it, let me put it that way. We're all intuitive. I have yet to work with a child that's been murdered or is missing or had an untimely death, that they didn't try to tell the family that they had a fear of something that was about to happen to them. I have yet to see a child that's not intuitive.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I suppose in our culture one of the problems is that a child could have athletic ability or mathematical ability or artistic ability, and there's encouragement from the parents. But we don't encourage this intuitive ability in children.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right.

Jeffrey Mishlove: In fact we discourage it.

Kathlyn Rhea: Yes. So often their parent will say, "Oh, run along honey, that's just childish prattle." And they won't listen to what that child is saying to them intuitively, because they didn't read it in a book, a teacher didn't teach them, the parents didn't teach them this, so how can they know this? Well, you know; we all know. I find in my classes -- we have eighty to eighty-five percent professional businessmen. Now, why are they there? All they want to do is learn to plug intuition with their intellect in whichever profession they're in, so they make better decisions, because like Hilton said, "Bring me all the computer facts you want, but if the gut doesn't feel right about it, I won't go for the deal." Now, he's plugging his intuition in as the last decision, and it's the same thing with any business. A good surgeon will have intuition, not just the medical training, but intuition as to what he should do, and he'll perform that unusual surgery, and he stands out because of it. And many notable people in their fields who've stood out, have all acknowledged the fact their intuition helped them end up with what they came up with, in the way of helping humanity or the world.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, intuition is a funny word, and when we talk about a scientist using intuition, that seems very different from an individual such as yourself, who can close your eyes and begin describing information about a scene that took place perhaps thousands of miles away. RHEA: Well, I don't even close my eyes. Actually --

Jeffrey Mishlove: You have telescopes.

Kathlyn Rhea: As you say, there are some people who have more ability as an athlete, and some as a musician, and some as an artist. I happen to be very creative in my mind. Now, for the audience that is not creative in their thinking, they may only have feelings and never be able to take the feeling and develop a picture out of it. Because my major was art, I find it very easy for me to develop a picture from my feelings, and so that gives me some information to give to the law enforcement I'm working with. But remember this, most people who are great inventors and creators have always worked it out in the pictures in their mind. They don't realize it perhaps, but they've always seen it in their head before they did it. When I used to have a modeling school and I would put on big benefits, I would always have a theme, and I would sit down early in the morning when it was quiet, and I would suddenly start putting it together in my head, long before I put it on the paper, and I could see exactly what I wanted, and then I would do it. Now, I'm sure your great directors and your great artists, great musicians, all see it in their mind before they put it down. So my intuition helps me get a picture. Some people will not get pictures, and that's all right. They may just feel; it feels good or it doesn't feel good.

Jeffrey Mishlove: What you seem to be saying, though, is that where it starts is somehow in the body itself, that physiology picks it up. It's as if the body is somehow an antenna sensing information that the normal sensory organs don't get, and if you can learn how to translate that information that arrives in the body into something that you can grasp intellectually, that's how it works.

Kathlyn Rhea: Right. It'll start out with -- well, let's take people that are walking down a dark street, and somebody's going to ambush them. Seconds before it happens, they have a horrible feeling -- that they should either run, or turn around, or do something. Now, that was their intuition, before they knew it. When you almost have an accident, how do you intuitively sense what to do quickly? I mean, your intuition comes into play, and it comes right out of here. You know -- "It's that feeling I get in the pit of my stomach." Everybody describes that -- "I get a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach." Well, it really is, but it's not any good to you unless you bring it up to the intellect and say, "What does this feeling mean? How can I utilize this feeling? How does it become a piece of information?" So I have built a very large intuitive vocabulary for myself, so if somebody says, "We have a business deal. Do you think it's going to work, Kay?" I may have an uneasy feeling, but then I have to go further than that and say, "I feel uneasy about it, but now, why? I feel uneasy because I don't like the man you're doing business with. I feel uneasy because your contracts aren't signed well. I feel uneasy because the product isn't developed like it should be. I feel uneasy because you're not reaching the right market." See, there's many different uneasy feelings. So I have learned you don't just feel uneasy, you have specific uneasy feelings to go with specific things. That takes time. It's taken me twenty years to get to where I can do that. And twenty years, as you know, to describe a face of a suspect, of someone they don't even know who has committed the murder or the crime, and I can sit and describe the face to a police artist, and he can draw the face, and we now have had numerous ones match the mug shots when they finally solved the crime. This was something that I had no idea you could do with your intuition. Now, if I can do that, think of how many more things we might be able to do that we haven't even tried in this field yet.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, my sense is that part of your success, since you didn't have anybody to teach you, is your dogged determination. Something propelled you into it.

Kathlyn Rhea: My mother accused me of being a very stubborn little girl, and if I get hold of something I'm like a little terrier; I hold on till I get an answer. And so often I would say, "Well, now, why is it this way?" And then I'd go to a doctor and say, "Now, why do I see this in a body? What does that mean?" And they will give me a medical term that I can now use to go with that feeling. Or I'll go to a detective and say, "This is strange. Do people ever do this, what I'm getting right now? It's so unusual. It's not what I'm used to at all." They'll say, "Oh yes, we have people that do that." And so they will help it make sense to me. And so you just keep building as you go along.

Jeffrey Mishlove: In a sense you're really approaching this, if I can sort of stretch the use of the word a little bit, like a scientist. You're constantly operating out of the feedback that you get, developing hypotheses, testing your hypotheses against feedback from the next trial in the real world that comes up, and modifying and developing your theories and cognitive framework, as you go along.

Kathlyn Rhea: Right. And in fact without feedback I would not be anywhere at all. I have to have feedback. I remember a chief of police sending me one of these detectives with a picture of a skull they'd found, and I said, "Just don't bring the skull. It's OK. Come over and talk to me if you want." So they did, and I called the police artist in, and we drew the person as we thought the skull had been. They didn't know if it was male or female at the time, how old, or anything else. I described what this person had looked like. Later they had a well-known doctor of anthropology who reconstructed the skull, did a complete reconstruction of it, and it matched our drawing. Now, this feedback really helps me know that I'm on the right track, to be able to add this as a usable tool when nothing else works.

Jeffrey Mishlove: And if the feedback were to come back that you were off, then you would just discard that approach, I suppose.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. It's like anything else. If a scientist is working with something, if this formula doesn't work he discards it and he works on this one. So by having feedback, you say, well, I have to perfect this more, or I have to add or take away from this. And so you keep working forward with it. My biggest goal is to make people realize they're all intuitive. It is not a separate thing. It is part of every human being, and they can use it as a very practical tool.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Now, there's a lot of concern, a lot of talk, many approaches to developing these abilities that have to do with altered states of consciousness -- hypnosis, meditation, dreams, channeling. I gather that you are very matter-of-fact, wide awake, just like you might be right now, when you do this work -- that the altered state is not at all necessary for you.

Kathlyn Rhea: Of course that is because it's taken me so many years where I can stop and soft-pedal my other senses and that information, and be very aware of what my intuitive sense is telling me. It took some practice, though. I used to have to really work to get to that point, and I don't mind how people reach there -- whether it's through self-hypnosis, whether it's through standing on their head in the corner. I don't care. What they have to realize is if their mind is working too furiously, or if they are distracted by what they see, or if there's a lot of noise that's distracting them, they are not going to be aware of feelings, and it's the feeling you have to interpret. So these other senses come in and take precedence, and they really overpower that sensitive, sensitive feeling. What they have to do is learn to say, "I'm going to deliberately not be distracted by my vision or my hearing or my sense of smell or taste or touch. I'm going to really say to myself, what do I feel about this situation? How do I feel if I go into that business? How do I feel about this person I've just met?" Because we all feel. You've met strangers where you immediately like them. Now where did that come from? It wasn't what they had on. You've met people you've immediately disliked, and this poor soul, it wasn't what they were wearing, but there was something about them that your intuition told you was not pleasing or was pleasing to you.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I get the impression that in effect what you're doing is treating every moment as a kind of meditation.

Kathlyn Rhea: Well, you know, you don't even realize it any longer, and the word meditation to me means stilling the other senses and listening to the intuition. Now, some people think they have to sit for an hour and meditate. I used to, until I got to where I had it down pat, and now I can switch. If you were to ask me about a particular question right now, I could switch to that immediately and tell you what I feel, because I'm very aware of that inner feeling now, I'm very aware of what it's saying to me. So I have practiced it long enough to where I don't have to stop and go into any particular set steps or state; I can just say, "Hey, I don't feel good about that, Jeffrey, and I don't feel good because this is what's going to happen."

Jeffrey Mishlove: But isn't it tricky to distinguish between what's coming from some external source and what may be the result of what you ate for breakfast --

Kathlyn Rhea: Oh yes.

Jeffrey Mishlove: -- or the fact that maybe you had a fight with your husband or something?

Kathlyn Rhea: Or wishful thinking. One of my students was in commercial real estate, and she said, "How do I know whether I'm going to sell that property and make this big bonus, or is it because I hope I'm going to?" And I had to teach her steps. I said, "All right, wishful thinking of course is there. We all want to make a success of what we're doing. So what you do is look at the building, and then think about it a month from now. Does it look the same? Have the signs been changed? Any colors changed in the building? Who do you see walking out of the building? Does it look like the same people? Take a contract. Look at the contract. Do you see a signature on there? What type of signature is it? Is it a large flourishing one? Is it a little cramped one? Is it a man's hand that's writing the signature? Look and check and recheck your answers, to where you get rid of the wishful thinking and you get something you know for sure is a positive that will show you whether that building's changed hands or not."

Jeffrey Mishlove: It's sort of a delicate thing, because on the other hand we have the art of creative visualization, of visualizing it and then having it happen. And you're suggesting not that, but looking at it as it happens.

Kathlyn Rhea: Yes, yes. You see, here's present, and here's future, and here's what I call free will. What you must do is go past the free will and look and see what actually happens -- not what you want to have happen, but what really happened.

Jeffrey Mishlove: What really happened in the future.

Kathlyn Rhea: Yes, yes. Or the past. You know, I don't understand it totally in a scientific way, how can we do this, but I do it all the time, so we can do it. Doctors Puthoff and Targ can tell you how scientifically you do it; you can tell us how scientifically we do it. I can tell you how as a practitioner we do it, and that's why I wrote the new book.

Jeffrey Mishlove: That's the strongest statement of all -- I can tell you because I do it; you figure out how.

Kathlyn Rhea: I get so angry at the scientists who say, "You can't do this." Well, hey, come take a look at a picture, a mug shot of a crime that nobody witnessed but the person who was murdered, and I have drawn this for them on a piece of paper and told them everything about this person. Now, how did I do that if I didn't have intuition? I didn't just dream it up, you know. It had to be good proof.

Jeffrey Mishlove: And you're saying also that you're nobody special -- that this is an ability that other people can learn.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. I happen to be more sensitive, maybe; I have a creative mind that can help me. I use all my senses. It's been funny, because I'll even have the sense of smell. Now, when I'm doing, let's say, a crime scene, I'll deliberately see if I smell anything particular in that area. And I didn't realize either you could use these five senses with this intuitive sense, but now I do. One case, I said, "You know, there's the most acrid smell in the air in this area. It's strange. It's a real strange smell." The detective said when he arrived in that area, the first thing he smelled was that, and it was the burning off of the gas fields down there where these girls had been murdered. Or I will say, "Gee, I can feel the soil, and it's real dry soil, real clay soil, or, "It's rocky soil." So I'll use all five senses. Or I hear an accent that this person has, an accent that's not normal. Then I have to decide is this southern or northern or northeastern, or is it a foreign accent that we can tie into this person and give us one more piece of information. So I use all my other five senses in conjunction with it, and that's where the intellect helps me give more information than a person who's just saying, "Oh, I've got a native sense, and I'm special and different, and I don't have to work at it." So it's very interesting as you go along, because you find there's so many things you can do with it.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there seems to be a paradox in here. If you're able to look at the future and see a successful or an unsuccessful business deal, in a way it almost negates free will in some sense.

Kathlyn Rhea: Oh, I don't think so, because I've had people come to me that will ask me about something, and I will tell them what I feel about it, and they will still use their free will and go against what they were told, and come back later and say, "Boy, were you right. Many thousand dollars later we found out you were right." I say, "Well, that's all right. That's your free will. You should exercise that." What I normally try to do is use it as a positive direction for them to head in; they still have to do the work. The detectives, I don't do their job for them. I give them information. They must then go out and do their job as a detective. I don't replace them. I don't replace the businessman who's going to start a new company. I give him guidelines that I see. I give him steps that he can take that he can bypass a mistake. But I don't try to say, "Hey, this is all me doing it for you." I say, "This is your life, I'm only going to give you a little information to help you."

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, one of the feedback systems that you have used in training your own abilities, and which is now widely available for people, are lotteries, gambling. I think you went to the dog races yourself in Florida.

Kathlyn Rhea: Yes.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Do you think that this is a method that people can actually reliably use for gambling?

Kathlyn Rhea: Oh yes, definitely, definitely. In fact, the commodity market is a great one. I've twice had a very strong feeling about it and done very nicely. You know, people say, "Well, if you can do this, why don't you just make lots of money and don't work?" I'm too interested in the field of educating this sense, to just stop and see how much money I can make in a lottery. But if I suddenly have a feeling about something, then I will probably go and make some dollars on it. But that's not what my goal is. My goal is to educate the public that from birth you have and intuitive sense to go with your other senses, and it is a practical, usable tool, and let's quit ignoring it. I speak to teachers' groups, and they all agree that the children in their class are intuitive, but they don't exercise it for them.

Jeffrey Mishlove: It sounds like what you're saying, though, and part of the application of intuition, then, is to look at the attitude with which we approach these things. That is, if you were to approach the lottery with the attitude, "OK, I'm going to use my intuition to make money," that might not be the attitude that would work for you.

Kathlyn Rhea: That's right, or you could get so greedy that you wouldn't really have a pure sense of what your intuition is. Again, you would have your wishful thinking, and you'd think, "Oh, I'm going to make this money." Then your other senses are going to overpower that very delicate intuitive sense. So I don't see that it should be used that way. I think it has been used and made very wonderful business deals and made people millionaires. I'm not against that, because it's like using your eyes to read a good contract that makes you a lot of money, using your ears to listen to a good idea that makes you money. So it's not that you're going against God or yourself by making money with it, but I feel that you need to use it to where greed doesn't come in and overpower all discretion with it, where you're not really reading your intuition right.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Ultimately, I suppose, the finest use of intuition for a person is to look at what is my direction in life.

Kathlyn Rhea: Right, right. And because it's a personal thing, we can make our mistakes in those too. You know, one of the good examples is one day I was to go in and have my hair done, and I was going to have some new things done, and the night before I thought, "I don't want to go." And I thought, "No, it's too late, I can't call this man and tell him I'm not going to be there. I'm his first client in the morning. He marked off three hours, and it's going to be a lot of money for him." The next morning, brushing my hair, I had the strong feeling, "I don't want to go." I went ahead and went against it. I went down and he put things on my head so I became totally bald on the top of my head for a few months, and still have indentations where the burning went into the skin of my head.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Oh my goodness.

Kathlyn Rhea: Now, that was my intuition, very accurate, and my saying I can't be impolite and not go. So I went right against it. So I can make as many mistakes as you, if I don't stop and look at it properly. 

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there seem to be numerous cases -- we hear of people who wanted not to go on an airplane, and the plane might crash.

Kathlyn Rhea: Well, that last big crash we had from up north was that. A young college student told his friend, "I don't want to go. We're going to be killed. It's going to crash." And his friend said, "Aw, come on, there's nothing valid to that. You can't see it, hear it, taste it, or touch it." So he went aboard and died. And that type of thing happens all the time. If people would stop and pay attention to that, they would avoid an untimely death.

MISHLOVE: I know for myself, every time I'm about to go on a trip I have that feeling; I don't want to go.

Kathlyn Rhea: Well, that's when you could stop and play it in your mind. You really can stop and see yourself get aboard the plane, make the plane trip, get off at the other end, and what do you do? What happens at the other end, and what are the results there? Get back on the plane, fly back, and you see yourself in the future in your home, doing some other things. Then you can say, "Hey, I can quit worrying, it's OK." I had one detective say -- he was also a pilot, and he was going to fly me to a scene -- he said, "I told my wife this morning that if you didn't get aboard, I wasn't going." I said, "I wouldn't be out here if I didn't think I could get aboard this airplane." It's a fun tool. It's one that you can have a lot of enjoyment out of, as well as a very serious tool, and if we could just teach the educational department: exercise their bodies, exercise their minds, their reading, writing, and arithmetic, but exercise their intuition. That's their creative flow. Exercise that.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, Kathlyn Rhea, it's been a pleasure having you here with me. You're really an individual who embodies exactly what you're talking about in a very concrete, down-to-earth manner. It's quite refreshing.

Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you, Jeffrey. Just everybody keep using your intuition.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Thank you so much for being with me.

Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you.

The Body Finder

That's what the press dubbed my mom in the late 70s, when she helped police discover the body of a missing 78-year-old man named Russell Drummond. He and his wife were camping in Calaveras County, California, when he left their campsite to use the latrine; he never returned. Frantic, his wife reported him missing to the local county sheriff's office and they organized a search party of some 300 persons. But after an intensive two-week exploration of the gold country foothills, the search was called off. The sheriff concluded that Drummond must have been taken from the county or left of his own accord.

Unfortunately, without proof of his death, Mrs. Drummond could not collect his pension or his life insurance. Six months after his disappearance, she decided to consult my mom.

I don't know how my mom got the clinical detachment to work police cases. This was one of her first, and the one that hit the papers big-time. But at this point, she'd been honing her intuitive abilities for over ten years, often on a daily basis with clients, and she'd developed a methodology, including charts, photographs from the client, and a tape recorder. Personal counseling sessions typically ran an hour, but cases might run an hour and a half or more per session. She'd look at photos, hold a personal object belonging to the victim, scribble on special charts, and dictate her impressions into the tape recorder. She usually made two copies of the taping, one for the client and one for herself.

Some critics said my mom shouldn't charge for these cases. I can tell you that, over the years, hundreds of hours of her work went without pay, especially if a police department had no budget or belief in her abilities. If a family member came to her as a client, she charged them her normal fee. I mean, lawyers deal with pitiful cases all the time, and so do doctors. Is it wrong that they are paid? Why should my mother's time and skill cost nothing? She made a living this way, she had bills to pay, kids to raise, and a roof to keep over her head. This reproach from self-appointed critics was annoying and unrealistic, but it cropped up quite often as she became more well-known.

She also did not seek out cases to work on, ever; she always had to be approached by a relative, friend, or detective connected to the case. More on that in another blog.

Mom told Mrs. Drummond that Russell was dead. He'd suffered a stroke prior to their camping trip, and she felt a similar disorientation as he wandered from the site in an easterly direction. She described a gravel path near a small cottage-like building amid trees and brush. She felt him suffering another stroke and falling beneath a madrone, a stubby, brush-like tree with reddish bark that is common to the Sierra foothills.

Surprisingly, she felt that his body was still intact—an anomaly for any flesh in an environment that included opportunistic carnivores like coyotes.

Mrs. Drummond took her tape to the (new) Calaveras county sheriff, Claude Ballard. Ballard listened to my mom's descriptions of the area and decided to have a look. If he could pin down enough of her details, then he'd consider organizing a new search party. He took his skeptical undersheriff, Fred Kern, with him. As it turned out, the description fell into place so well that Ballard was able to walk immediately to Drummond's body and find it without a search party. Fred Kern said the taped details were 99% accurate.

This story hit the news like a lit match to an oil drum, and Mom was splashed all over the newspapers as "The Body Finder." Her career went to a new level. She was romanced by various PR agencies. The phone rang off the hook, and from then on, her work included a large dose of police investigations.

It was a long way from "psyching out" greyhounds on the Florida dog track when I was a teen. Like any celebrity, her success was viewed as overnight and somewhat miraculous but she was quick to point out that she'd been sharpening her intuition for a number of years. Many called it a "gift," a term she dismissed out of hand.

"We all possess this ability, it's not a gift," she'd say. "It's like playing the piano: anyone can pick out a tune but not everyone is going to be a concert pianist. Still, if you played piano every day for years, I bet you'd get pretty good at it! That's what I've done. Practiced on my 'instrument'—my intuition—for more than a decade."

Mom tried hard to be called a parapsychologist instead of a psychic. Sometimes, this seemed to be an unnecessary distinction, and a bit snooty, but I understood her motivation. Psychics were stereotyped as crystal ball readers, palmists along the beach roads, spooky hoo-doo charlatans; my mother prided herself on being down-to-earth, conscious, and detail-oriented. She was as far from hoo-doo as she possibly could make herself and if semantics helped market that difference, she would use them.

Raise A Glass

As part of an ongoing effort to downsize the number of my possessions, I went through my glassware cupboard today. It was a modest effort, but my kitchen cupboards are small—so the extra room will be welcome—and every little bit helps in the long run. The piano's next!

Packing up glassware was a somewhat nostalgic process. There was a set of eight coffee mugs that match my current dinnerware but which I never ever use because they don't hold enough coffee. There were assorted novelty mugs: Homer Simpson, Garden of the Gods in Colorado, an historic general store in Bedford, VA, Mickey Mouse, and a couple of whatevers—none of which passed the capacity test and were also no longer used.

There was a set of cool cocktail glasses that I'd held onto because of their design, but which I finally admitted were obsolete since I don't throw dinner parties anymore. If I ever do, I won't be serving cocktails in retro glasses.

Finally, there were a few small, bowl-shaped crystal champagne glasses, inherited from my mom's cast-off stemware years ago; they still made a sweet ting! when I bumped two of them together.

The whole shebang fit into a cardboard box, swathed haphazardly with packing paper; I didn't do my usual mover's quality level of wrapping, because they were being donated to Goodwill and would only get unwrapped at that end and put on shelves. At least, that was the theory.

I remember my mother's glass-fronted credenzas, changing in furniture style over the years, but always glittering with stemware and treasured objects. Her wine glasses were transparent bubbles in the proper shape and size for white or red wines. Like my champagne glasses, all were made of crystal that sang when you removed a cluster carefully from the cabinet. She also had crystal cocktail glasses, tall and short, for mixed drinks. Then there were the liqueur glasses: fragile schooners for sherry or port, and snifters for after-dinner brandy.

Mom also kept an array of pewter steins for beer, many of which she picked up in the UK on her travels or ordered from Colonial Williamsburg. She also had silver or pewter baby cups, a kind of throwback to our childhood years that continued as a family tradition when grandchildren arrived. We seldom, if ever, drank out of these but they were all engraved with our birth dates and names.

Lead crystal was looked down upon by my mother, except in flower vases—which she also had in abundance, in a variety of shapes.

Unlike me, my mother used her good stemware all the time. She was a great giver of parties and a prolific Mad Men drinker, always keeping a well-stocked bar and hiring a bartender (or press-ganging one of my brothers) to mix and serve up libations at her events. We all knew how to mix a basic drink long before we were of legal age to imbibe. Bartending had its own issues, since my brothers would sometimes surreptitiously empty the guests' discarded glasses into their own gullets and end up sacrificing to the porcelain god after everyone left.

Mom's parties were always sparkling, noisy, and enthusiastic. So it's no surprise that many lovely goblets and glasses met their tinkling deaths in the melée. She replaced them periodically with different sets, evolving as tastes evolved (hence my too-tiny champagne stems). One set of champs flutes were airy as foam and carved with fine vertical furrows; another was oblong and stemless, with deep green crystal bases.

I don't know where those fragile mementos ended up; as her hey-day waned, Mom switched to more prosaic and sturdy cocktail glasses. The stemware broke or went into my siblings' home bars (I lived too far away to want to ship any to my house).

Today, I let the last of mine go. Pulled their dusty forms from the cupboard, washed and rinsed them carefully, and set them down in the box with my other cast-offs. The glasses themselves had little meaning for me, but the memories they evoked were rich and pleasant. I kept a tiny espresso cup and saucer that belonged to my grandmother, hand painted and made in Japan; I never use it, either, but perhaps my granddaughter will find a place for it in her make-believe tea parties.

When I got to Goodwill, I told the donation guy that my box was full of glassware. The lid wasn't even closed on it, and glasses were peeking out from their paper wrappings.

"It's very fragile," I said. "So you probably shouldn't put anything on top of this box."

"Okay, thanks a lot for bringing it in," he said, plopping down my paper bag full of t-shirts on top of the box and swinging the lot up and out of my car.

I started to caution him but he turned away, so I slid into the front seat. As I did, I heard—and I'm not making this up—a tinkling crash echo through the warehouse. I didn't turn around, I couldn't look. It didn't sound as if the box dropped to the floor, more as if it was plunked down hard on top of something else.

As I drove away, I consoled myself with the thought that at least they weren't cluttering up my cupboard anymore. Maybe those stems have joined their many former companions at some great cosmic cocktail party in the sky. It might even be one of my mother's!