Do Dead People Watch You Shower? (19 page)

Yes, we all
have this ability. I just like to say my volume is turned up higher than most. I am not fully tuned to this side, so that lets me be more in tune with the Other Side. From birth, I have not been able to hear out of my left ear. I have been told that this is one of the reasons why my volume to the Other Side is tuned so high. Most people do not hear the dead as loudly and clearly as I do, but I assure you, everybody does hear them. Do you know when something pops into your head or you think you may have heard a whisper? More often than not, that is the dead speaking to you.

The best thing
I can tell you is you have to be open to it, have to stop saying things are coincidence, stop disbelieving that it’s possible. It does take practice, like anything else. We’re living in an “instant society,” we’re very impatient. We expect love to come to us in our early twenties and have all our relationship issues for our lifetime magically taken care of when we’re still nearly a child. If we start a diet, we give it up after a week because the pounds aren’t melting magically away. I don’t know why this is. We don’t expect to take up an instrument and play perfectly from the first note, or to be able to run a marathon just because we’ve managed to get our sneakers tied. What I can tell you is that if you open a window, fresh air will come in. You can open the window a little or a lot. If you open it wide and leave it open you’ll get your house aired out and also have a clearer view. Same with connecting with the Other Side. You need to open the window and you need to leave it open.

I suggest that you begin to talk with them and then listen for any reply. You can ask for a signal of some kind. Ask for evidence. Say to the spirit you want to reach, “I want to see you!” But when they deliver the evidence, you can’t say, “Oh, it’s just a coincidence.” Also, you need to be patient. It’s small steps. With practice you’ll get better.

For some reason
this seems to confuse people. There are two different things: dreams and visits. Both happen when we’re sleeping, but a dream is usually convoluted and often has a psychological root. Generally, a dream needs to be interpreted before we can get any message from it. A visit is very straightforward. It’s usually short and sweet. We will see our loved ones, and we can “hear” them, we’ll hear their actual voice, but the communication is really telepathic. We won’t see their lips moving because they are communicating with their minds. Our subconscious mind will remember the visit, and the message will be clear. Unlike a dream, it won’t need any interpretation.

They definitely do.
One man in his early forties, who I was doing a reading for, told me that he missed his mother a lot. He said that on his last birthday he could not stop thinking about her, wondering how she was, whether she ever thought of him on the Other Side. He did believe in the spiritual world, but he didn’t feel he had any access to it and he felt frustrated and sad. He decided to go for a walk to try to make himself feel better and along his walk he saw one of those silver mylar balloons. It had lost all the gas that makes it float and it was lying flat on the ground. He saw that the picture on it was of Strawberry Shortcake. He picked it up to throw it in the next trash can he saw, and just happened to turn it over. On the other side it said, “Happy Birthday.” He asked me, “Concetta, do you think that was a message from my mother?” Do I
think
it was? I
know
it was!

It’s a wonderful
thing for our loved ones to be able to still be in touch with us. They love it that we remember them. They want to be acknowledged and to let us know they are still present. Even on the Other Side, They don’t want to be ignored, dismissed, or forgotten.

What? Are you
joking? Of course. As for walls, spirits are energy forms. Nothing is solid to Them. And kicking a can is no big deal for a spirit. They can use their energy to do all sorts of things—move things around, knock things over. They can start a stopped clock or make the hands go faster, make lights flicker, turn the water on. They never are trying to frighten us when They do these things. They just want to let us know that They’re there. On occasion, They’re trying to be funny, but mostly it’s just to say, “hello.”

There is a
limit, I believe, to what they can do. Like they can’t actually write you a letter, but they can push things around energetically, using small electrical charges. I’ve had them turn the lights off or on, or turn water on in the bathroom—to be honest, I’m not sure how they do that. The only way I know for the spirit world to affect the material world is energetically, and it seems it would take a good bit of force, if not a firm grasp, to turn those handles, but somehow they manage. Sometimes they’ll arrange for us to hear a particular song on the radio. It may be a combination of things how this is arranged. Maybe they are able to subconsciously urge that the song be included in the playlist, and then maybe they subconsciously nudge us to tune in at the right moment. Or maybe they just know when a song will be playing and the first step isn’t necessary. I’m not sure. I think they will basically use any means at their disposal to make themselves known.

Sometimes the information
we’re given unfolds. Sometimes it takes a while for a person to understand the message. Its meaning will come to them later—sometimes much later. Sometimes it’s like what I mentioned before, having a reading is such an out-of-the-ordinary experience that while they are with me their brain locks up and they just can’t think, but maybe driving home it’ll suddenly come to them what the message was about. Or it might take years, depending on what the message was. It’s very individual. It’s not up to me—I just tell the person what I hear and see. I do the best I can to give them any details clearly.

It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve also had the experience of two or more people coming for a reading and one of them denying that something I told them was true. Then later they call me and say that the message really
was
true—they just didn’t want their friend to know that thing, whatever it was. In any case, I’m just the messenger. Don’t shoot me!

Oh my God!
Don’t you know there is no such thing as a coincidence? What we notice as a “coincidence” is really just the instances when the Other Side has worked with us so seamlessly that it’s like pieces of a puzzle coming together in our lives in a perfect way. Often it’s a case of providing us with something we are desperate for right in that moment.

Cristina, who has a very popular talk show for the Spanish-speaking community, had invited me to be part of a special show devoted to Talina Fernández. It was one of those “this is your life” type things, and she’d invited Talina’s mother, sister, husband, and granddaughter, and
me
, so I could not help feeling like family. I was very honored to be there. John came down with me and we were staying at the Coconut Grove and would have been having a wonderful time, except that I had a
terrible
headache. We were in a restaurant and I was digging through my purse even though I knew I didn’t have any aspirin in there. And then I begged a waiter—I know they aren’t allowed to give customers any drugs, but I thought maybe he’d see how desperate I was and take pity and smuggle me one. But of course he couldn’t risk his job to do that and I really didn’t blame him. I was about ready to stand up in the restaurant and scream,
“Does anybody here have a freakin’ aspirin???”
and I had just said to John, “I would
kill
for an aspirin,” when two ladies sat down at the table next to us. The waiter handed them menus and one asked for a glass of water. She opened her purse and took out a bottle of aspirin. I wasn’t shy about asking for one, even though their English was not so hot and my Spanish was worse! And nobody will convince me that that bottle of aspirin was a coincidence.

This same phenomenon is in operation when you are working on a project and you maybe hit a wall with part of it, you can’t find the answer you need or the piece you need and then you’re going somewhere on a bus and you “happen” to sit down next to someone talking on his cell phone about the very thing you needed to know. Even though I think it’s very rude for people to talk away on their cell phones on the bus, still you get your answer and it wasn’t any accident or coincidence, either. They’re over there pulling strings, greasing wheels, and directing traffic to get you what you need.

Well, rather than
“coincidences,” I think of them as validations because they validate the near-perfection of the Other Side. I’ve heard so many stories of things coming together in ways that seem really impossible with our limited way of understanding.

I did a reading for a woman and the person who came through was her sister. Her sister was showing me a ring and she was saying to tell my client, “with all my love,” which is something that happens frequently—I’ll be shown an object that has meaning between the client and the individual who has passed on and is communicating from the Other Side. My client acknowledged that she knew what the ring meant and I continued with the reading. I didn’t stop and ask her what the ring meant—I didn’t want to know. I try not to let people tell me things while I’m doing the reading because I don’t want to lose the thread of what is going on with the communication, and I also don’t want information that may color what I’m hearing from the Other Side. So I only asked her, “Do you know what ring she is talking about?” and my client said, yes, she did.

Afterward, though, she said to me, “Concetta, I want to tell you a story.”

Boy, if I had a dime for every time someone I’m doing a reading for has said that, I’d have four million dollars by now! But here’s what she told me:

When her sister died, my client had wanted to have some keepsake of hers and what she chose was a ring that her sister had worn. The ring was not very valuable, but it was precious to her because of its significance, so she didn’t want to wear it and possibly lose it. She kept it in a jewelry box. One day, she’s looking in the box and notices that the ring isn’t there. She gets very upset, doesn’t know where the ring could have gone. She mentions to her family that the ring is missing, and her teenage daughter sadly confesses that she took the ring. Unfortunately, she wore it when she went out with friends and somewhere along the way she lost it. She had no idea where—they’d been to the movies, the mall, McDonald’s. It could have been lost anywhere, and frankly, losing it in any of those places, they knew they’d never see the ring again.

A year and a half goes by. One day, my client’s son comes home from seeing a movie with his friends. He says, “Mom, look what I found.” He shows her a ring. It’s her sister’s ring! She said, “Where on earth did you find it?” He said, “I bought some popcorn, and when I got to the bottom of the bag, there it was.”

What an amazing thing! Some would say, “What a coincidence.”

Now, as I’ve said, in my worldview there is no such thing as a coincidence. You can say whatever you want about how the ring got into the popcorn. You can make up a whole logical story: The daughter loses the ring in the theater. Maybe somebody has the job of cleaning up and he finds the ring. He thinks, “Oh, it’s a girl’s ring. I’ll just give it to so-and-so,” a coworker. So maybe this girl now wears the ring and one night she’s working the popcorn machine and as she scoops out popcorn, the ring falls into the bag without her noticing it. The customer who bought the popcorn finds the ring. It just happens to be the son of the woman to whom the ring belonged.

It
could
happen that way, sure. But I don’t think you could even calculate the odds of the customer buying the popcorn and finding the ring being the brother of the girl who lost the ring a year and a half earlier. In my world, the only possible way this could happen is with some help from the one to whom this outcome is most important—my client’s sister on the Other Side.