Do Dead People Watch You Shower? (13 page)

Usually when we
incarnate it is to learn something. But I believe in these cases it is to teach something. Without a doubt, a mission like that would not be given to anyone other than a very advanced or Master spirit. I can’t really speak to motivation. I have to assume that a soul who has evolved to that point has a much larger understanding than we have, and the importance would not have to be explained to it.

The main way
I know that what I’ve told a person is accurate is if that person is able to validate it. It really is up to the client because I don’t know the soul I’m getting the message from so it might not make sense to me: I just repeat what I hear. There are times, however, when I
feel
the message and know that it is extremely accurate. In a case like that, I’ll stand behind it. Even if the person I’m doing the reading for can’t validate it, I’ll tell her to just “put it down,” make a note, and think about it later. Often when someone is having a reading it’s like her brain freezes and she can’t think right away, even of someone she knows very well. For most people, getting a reading is not an everyday occurrence, so maybe she’s nervous.

I’d be pretty
narcissistic if I said that I never get anything wrong. I’m not hearing a voice or words; I hear
thoughts
. Sometimes a thought is clear and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I get a name, sometimes just a letter. Only God is perfect.

I understand when
people are skeptical. I don’t care if people don’t believe me, but it pisses me off if they don’t respect me as a person.

Early on, I remember this one man I’ll call George who was both skeptical and disrespectful. He really annoyed me. He walked in and said, “This is crap, but my daughters made me come.” He sat down and I proceeded to connect with his wife and his mother. I gave him their names, details of their lives, and so forth. He said, “Oh, anyone could get that. This is crap.” Today I probably would say, Okay, thanks for coming. But I was young and I wanted to prove to this man that I was actually connecting with his wife and his mother, so I asked him what I could tell him that would impress him. He said, “Tell me what I do for a living.” I asked his wife and said, “Your wife tells me that you race horses, but have always wanted to sell cars.” And he snapped, “No, I sell cars, but have always wanted to race horses.” I got the two switched. So I said, Okay, but don’t you see that the answer was there? He refused to be impressed and still claimed that it was all crap. I remember wanting to punch him, but now I think it was one of my favorite readings. It taught me that there are always going to be skeptical people. I could have given George the combination to the safe and he still would not have believed me. Sometimes you have to learn to say “screw it” and move on.

In another case, a woman who had lost her husband was having a lot of trouble getting past her grief. Her daughter, trying to help her, made her an appointment for a reading with me. But she didn’t believe in psychics. She didn’t believe in the Other Side. She just thought her husband was gone from her for good. She told her daughter that she didn’t want to go. Her daughter was smart; she didn’t pressure her. She said, “That’s all right, Ma. You don’t have to decide now. You have a year and a half to decide if you want to go or not.” (My private readings are booked up literally years in advance now.) Every now and then, the daughter would ask her mother if she’d changed her mind, and every time her mother said no she didn’t want to go. Then a week before her scheduled appointment, she was at work, alone, having coffee in the lunchroom. The room had just a table and chairs and some newspapers and magazines that people had brought in and left for others to read. There were no windows, nothing that could create a breeze. Suddenly behind her she heard a loud smack. She turned around and saw that a pile of magazines had fallen—for no apparent reason—to the floor. She went over to pick them up and saw that the top magazine, which happened to be an issue of
New Jersey Life
, had fallen open to an article titled, “Concetta Bertoldi: The Lady in the Woods.” Coincidence? I think not. That skeptic became a big-time believer in that moment! Needless to say, she did show up for her appointment and was, I believe, very comforted to know that her husband was still nearby (close enough to make a mess with the magazines!).

People’s belief systems are difficult to change. I do not want to change anyone’s belief system, at least not just so they will like or believe in me! I simply want to help people expand their knowledge to include the reality of life after death. There are skeptics who seem to enjoy debating this topic and they have helped me become more tolerant and understanding. Eventually, the skeptics will cross to the Other Side and then all things will be revealed to them. Then they will no longer be able to deny the truth. When I first started doing readings I was afraid of people not believing me or putting me down. But now I’m confident enough that it doesn’t bother me.

Well, some do.
The trouble is the timing. We just can’t be exact about that because it’s so different on the Other Side where that information is coming from. We can’t make an
exact
prediction of when, and even
what
is going to happen can be open for debate.

I don’t really
get too many negative messages. Unless someone is critically ill or very old, this kind of message is just not typical. Sometimes people who are sick or dying come to me and I’ll know it. I’d never say it, but sometimes they’ll ask me, “How long do I have?” And I will tell them the truth. I might say, “They’re telling me it’s not that long. You should go do what you want to do.” On occasion someone will say they’ve been told by a doctor that they have three months and I might hear differently, and I’ll say, “Uh-uh. You’ve got longer than that. At least that’s what They are telling me.” I try to put it in a way that will be as easy as possible for the person to hear, but I always tell the truth of what I’m hearing. I owe that to my clients.

People do ask
me that kind of thing. Like “I’m gonna fly, I haven’t flown in a few years, is the plane gonna crash?” Or they’ll say, “Is there anything I should know? Is anything bad going to happen to me? What do they know?” That’s not the kind of thing They’ll tell me because there are things we are not supposed to know. Some things They can divulge, some They can’t. It’s very individual, I believe it has to do with our soul purpose, and also our free will. If you’re given the answer to your test, you learn nothing. Sometimes I can “sense” safety and then I will say, “They’re telling me that you will be safe, so go, enjoy!”

Very early on I realized you have to be careful how you tell people things. Once I had a woman who came for a reading and she asked, “Are my children safe?” I saw fire. I said, “I don’t see a house, but I do see a little flame and They’re telling me to watch your daughter.” She became very upset, like how
dare
I tell her this? How could she protect her daughter if she didn’t know what exactly was going to happen or when? I mean, she asked me—how was I supposed to know she didn’t really want to know? I guess along with talking to dead people I’m also supposed to be a mind reader. But the following summer she wrote me a letter to say that her family was having a barbecue, her husband was manning the grill and talking not watching, and their little girl was next to him and the grill burst into flames—big flames shooting up. She yelled, “Tony!” and he turned and knocked the little girl out of the way. She said she was so sorry for the way she had treated me. This made me feel better, but still, I’d learned my lesson. At all times, I bear in mind that I’m not God. It’s too much pressure.

I think warnings are the easiest kind of message to screw up. I do hear warnings for myself and I know that I’ve been kept out of some bad spots by paying attention to them. But John has had a harder time listening to help from over there. One day when he was going to work I had a vision of him having brake trouble and I asked him not to drive his truck. He argued with me, saying he didn’t want to hear stuff like that. He actually had new brakes on his truck, but didn’t mention that this was part of why he didn’t believe what I was telling him. If he had, I might have rethought what the vision meant. That evening he came home from work white as a sheet. He said, “Why didn’t you tell me not to drive my
brother’s
truck?” Turns out that even though he’d argued with me, he’d still thought about what I’d said and taken it seriously. He’d decided to leave his truck in the yard and instead drove his brother’s truck to work. Sure enough, the brakes went out. Thank God he wasn’t hurt.

I think you
have to judge each situation case by case. I would never recommend telling a nervous person something you know will upset them. What’s the point of that? If you feel you can communicate a message to someone in a way that they’ll be able to accept and appreciate, then by all means, tell them. But the spirits aren’t in the game for shock value. Even though they want to be close to us, they understand when the very fact of them, as spirits, is something that someone here isn’t capable of getting his head around. Their messages are intended to comfort and reassure us. The only time they might give us news that could be looked at as slightly negative is if they want to warn us about a situation, or sometimes if someone is in a relationship that is spiraling out of control, they might acknowledge that, but it’s only to offer support in a difficult time that they know that person already knows about.

I don’t want
to freak anyone out, but yes, to some degree I can read minds. But if you think about it, you probably can, too, to some extent. Yes, sometimes the dead do whisper in my ear, but we
all
have a built-in bullshit detector. It’s just more sensitive with some people. I mean seriously, can’t you tell when someone is saying, “You’re looking very well!” and you haven’t slept all night, you’ve been sick for a week, you’re maybe wearing jeans and a pajama top, and you really look like you’ve been dragged by your hair, through a hedge, backward, that they might be feeding you a line? For me, I prefer honesty: “Concetta, you’re having a bad hair day, girl!”

Or haven’t you ever gotten a bad feeling about someone, that you just didn’t trust them, no matter how much they smiled in your face? Maybe for no apparent reason they just make the hair go up on the back of your neck. Or maybe you’re sitting around with your boyfriend or girlfriend and one of you says something and the other says, “I was just thinking that!” These are all very common examples of “mind reading,” and we all do it. That said, I know that I do have this developed way beyond the average person. It comes with the package—I have an amazing depth of sensitivity about what someone is feeling about me, among other things. I can be deadly accurate!

For example, I can think of one time when John and I had just moved into our home in Boonton. I was doing some readings at the time, but I wasn’t public yet so I didn’t have an office and I wasn’t having people come to the house on a regular basis. We were just in the process of fixing the place up, making some changes to things we didn’t really like about the house when we bought it. There was a fireplace insert that we weren’t crazy about; we put an ad in the paper to sell it and shortly thereafter a guy dropped by the house to look at it and he said he would take it, but had to come back the next day with a truck.

This guy creeped me out. There was just something about him that was making all my alarms go off. He told me that he’d call the next morning around 9 a.m. and that he’d probably show up with the truck around 10:30. I knew John had to go to work in the morning, but I told him that this guy made me really uneasy and so John said not to worry, he’d come home from work around 10:30 and take care of the hand-off of this fireplace insert.

That night, John and I had something we had to go to and we didn’t get home until late. I was still in bed a little after eight the next morning when I heard a very loud
crack
, like something being slammed down on my bed table. Then I heard my brother Harold’s voice saying,
“Get up. Get up.”
I jumped out of bed and looked out the window and I see this guy, showing up more than two hours early; I’m home alone, still in my pajamas. I thought, “Oh my God. Now what am I going to do?” But just then, John pulls up in his truck and intercepts the guy and deals with the hand-off, and sends him on his way. In this case, all of us were working together: my sixth sense; John’s intuition to come home earlier than we’d agreed to; and Harold on the Other Side, waking me up. I suppose you could say that the evidence against this guy was all circumstantial, but I don’t tend to wait for proof when I get a feeling like that.