Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (21 page)

Here’s one of
the advantages the dead guys have—from their bird’s-eye view of all that’s going on, they can see the real truth of the saying, “What goes around, comes around.” They understand karma, and they understand the beauty of a good turn or just simply being a nice person, respectful of others’ feelings and rights, appreciating what we have and not trashing stuff thoughtlessly. But we don’t have to cross over to grasp this! We just need to open our eyes, wake up! I have to say, it may not be my business to be so, but I am really the Bad Behavior Police. Any chance I get, I’m going to use my voice to tell people,
You gotta try harder! You gotta get it together
,
baby!
I can’t stand when people are inconsiderate of others or of our planet. Every day you see people who have no patience with overworked service personnel in restaurants or stores, drivers who don’t use their blinkers, the person at the end of the line who sees a new cashier opening up and rushes to claim the quick check-out that somebody else has waited a long time for, people who can’t seem to manage the words “thank you,” folks who throw their candy wrappers and empty cardboard coffee cups down like they think maid service is gonna be by right behind them, r people who park so close to someone else’s driveway that they can’t get their car in their own garage, or park in front of their door so they can’t get out. To them I say, “Look around! Pay attention, make the world a better place.” I have a big mouth. I see some kids with dirty hands running behind their mother in a Target store, pulling clothes off the racks, and I tell them that’s not a nice thing to do. Don’t you know, their mother turns around and instead of asking her children to pick up and put back what they’ve pulled down, she tells me, “Don’t tell my children what to do!” To which I reply, “These children have very bad behavior, and now I know where they get it.” Okay, I don’t make a friend every time I open my mouth. But maybe those kids will think about this, even if it’s lost on their mother. Maybe those kids will see other examples, besides what they experience at home, and realize it’s up to them, it’s up to each of us, to make the world a better place.

I’ll get off my soap box—I realize it’s not my place to be the judge. But like I’m always saying, I’m not perfect. We can all stand a little improvement. I personally try to be open to constructive criticism. It all depends on how it’s given—I prefer calmly and lovingly, without yelling, swearing, or physical violence. If it’s really intended to help me, I can take it. I’ve got my big-girl underpants on.

It’s crazy—we all
are making judgments every day, but we’re really only judging ourselves, and the only real judge is God. I know how
I’d
like things to be, you know how
you’d
like things to be. We both know your opinion and mine aren’t going to jive 100 percent of the time. Bottom line, things are gonna be the way each of us makes them. And we each have to make our own mistakes. If I learn from seeing someone else’s mistake so I don’t have to do that one, I’m still going to make a different one—there are plenty to go around, plenty of lessons for each of us. Coming back from doing a TV taping I was talking with the driver—actually, I was venting about some dumb thing that someone had done—a woman acted all nice as pie on air, but made mean remarks when the camera was not on her—and he said something that I thought was really wise. He said, “Concetta, never judge your own intelligence against other people. There will always be people who are smarter than you and there will always be people who just don’t get it—no matter what the subject. Using yourself as a measure to judge others’ intelligence will only lead to disappointment.” Good lesson.

I’ve mentioned a number of times in this book that I know I’m not supposed to judge, or that I try not to judge. It’s one of those things that I know intellectually, but still struggle with. I think a lot of us do.

A friend of mine took up running at a later age. She likes to mull over all kinds of stuff when she runs and one thing she told me that I liked was something that came to her while doing laps around the reservoir in Central Park. When she first started running she used to get annoyed with herself if someone passed her and a little gleeful when she passed someone else. She finally realized that neither passing nor being passed was a knowable measure of anything. Why should she feel happy if she passed someone who looked twenty years younger than she? They may be just getting back at their running after a serious injury. Why should she feel bad if someone passed her on her third lap—it might be only their first. She rarely knew when and where another person came onto the track and could not know how far they had run to get to the track or what heavy baggage they brought with them onto the track. Any judgments made about another runner and how she compared to them in the moment of passing or being passed were meaningless. Instead, she realized, the fact that they were on the track at all meant that they were showing up, just as she was, to make an effort.

It’s the same in life. We’re out here playing the game as best we can. If we happen to see someone dropping the ball, it doesn’t mean they’re a consistently bad player. Maybe they just twisted their ankle and deserve our sympathy, not our judgment. The only one who knows our whole journey is God. The only one who knows what is in our heart of hearts is God. The only one who gets to judge us is God.

Oh, yeah! The
Dead get a kick out of us. We’re like television to them. They love watching their kids, the grandkids. They love seeing us try new things, working out our problems, falling in love, playing. When I’m doing a reading, they tell me all kinds of things that they love. Like, a grandfather told me he likes to stand behind his little granddaughter when she’s practicing the piano. He likes to try to get her to play in the old-time style that he loved when he was here. Or they’ll observe how much they appreciate that something of theirs has been saved and is being used. A grandmother might notice that her stitchings have been saved, all the little table drapes or towels she stitched. They may have a gravy stain or two, but that doesn’t matter. She made ’em, you saved ’em; she loves that. These seem like little things, but they mean a lot to them. They love when we continue to get use from things they’ve left or to remember traditions that were cherished by them in life. You can’t take it with you, but observed traditions or things that a soul loved in life and are held dear by a descendant have transcendent meaning.

Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. It’s like any kid who goes to school to learn something specific that will help them to get a better job or have greater opportunities. Once they have that diploma, they think about all the hard work they put in to earn it. It’s meaningful to them, a real source of pride. They made the effort; they will have the reward. Our accomplishments here, whatever they consist of—whether it is raising a good kid, or writing a Broadway musical, or doing the research that leads to the cure of a disease, or building a home, or whatever—there is some result that the individual is proud of, but even that is just the outward, visible part of all that went into it. Countless thoughts and countless actions. It’s all meaningful; it’s all important. And yet, as meaningful as those things are, the true accomplishments are soul accomplishments, the different ways the person has grown spiritually through all of it. And those accomplishments are between the individual and God.

They certainly can
and often do. I recently received an e-mail from a woman who said the night before her last birthday she was depressed. It wasn’t one of those landmark birthdays, like the big 3-0 or the big 5-0, that we think of as being traumatic; it’s just that she noticed age was creeping up on her and she wished she had her mother with her. That night she dreamed that her mother was spending her summer in Portugal as she used always to do. In the dream, the phone rang and she recognized her mother’s voice. Excitedly, she said, “Mommy, you remembered me!” and her mother replied that she would never forget her. When she was living, she always called the children on their birthdays.

The brevity and
clarity of the incident I just described suggests strongly to me that it was an actual visit. If your dream is convoluted with a lot of confusing scenes or moves from one setting to another, or if it contains bizarre elements like a pink elephant or a movie star on a Ferris wheel, then more likely than not this is “just” a dream. Psychologists will tell you that you are everyone in the dream or that everyone in the dream represents some aspect of you—this is how we sort out our day’s stresses; our subconscious produces these scenes to flush out things that are bothering us. Often, they don’t make any sense to us on the surface and need to be interpreted before they are of any value to us. It’s pretty easy to tell this kind of scenario from a true visitation. A visit from the Other Side will be striking and obvious, short and sweet. You see a real person who you recognize. They may say something, but these messages are never long or complicated. You may not even be able to hear what they say—maybe you just see them moving their mouth and you can’t make out the words. Or you may even just see them waving. No pink elephants. No movie stars. No interpretation necessary.

An example that comes to mind is a client of mine who told me that when she was in college, just before leaving for Christmas vacation, she had a dream that her grandmother came to her to say that she wouldn’t be with the family at Christmas, but that my client shouldn’t worry, her grandmother would be okay. Just that. A simple, clear message. When she arrived home, her family told her that her grandmother had died the previous week. They hadn’t wanted to upset her while she was taking her final exams before the holiday so had not told her that her grandmother had passed away.

Near the time
of death it’s not uncommon for the spirit to separate from the body and visit a loved one, and this may transpire while their loved one is in a dream state. One of my clients told me about how one night her husband was working and she knew he wouldn’t be home right away, so she went on to bed without him. She was sleeping when she dreamed she heard a knock at the door. In the dream, she got up and went downstairs to the door and opened it and saw her husband standing there wearing a hospital gown. As she stared at him he said, “Honey, I’m going to go home now,” and he disappeared. The dream was so vivid and startling that she woke up and got out of bed. She got dressed even though she didn’t really know what she was going to do. She went downstairs and was sitting in the living room when there was another knock at the door, and this time when she answered it, there was a policeman standing there. He told her that her husband had been in an accident and he would bring her to the hospital where her husband had been taken. When she got to the hospital, there was her husband, dressed in a hospital gown, just like she’d seen him when he came to the door. Five minutes later, he died. Just like he’d told her, he went home.

I would say,
no. Inside all of us we all know the truth about God and the Other Side. All religions are structures that can help to bring the truth to the surface and make it conscious. Throughout history, truth has been distorted. Spirituality is the pathway that connects the heart and the soul to the essence of God. Through that relationship, the truth will come out.

While we are
in the body, our focus is here in the material world, where our senses rule. We’re focused on what we can taste, feel, buy, and sell. Our challenge is to remember the spiritual, even when it is hidden by all the glitter of the world. It’s not impossible, but it does take effort. Realize that God and his angels and all his miracles did not leave us and never will. Many have just stopped making them a priority. It’s up to us to refocus and re-claim our connection.