The Value of Mediumship

I recently attended an event held by a medium, Sylvia Rossi, a new friend of mine.  She gave readings to her audience of roughly 50 people for an astounding five hours!  She was charming, sincere, humble and very thorough.  Some of her readings were startlingly accurate and others were more general.  She did not try to force the information for the sake of performance.  I liked that about her.

After she had given readings to almost everyone in the room, toward the end of the fifth hour, Sylvia said,  "I'm getting a Virginia? Vincent?  Uh.... Virgil?"   I raised my hand, a bit uncertainly.  The odds of picking the name "Virgil" while standing next to me were pretty slim.  Yes, I knew a Virgil who had passed into the Spirit World.  But he wasn't human.

"Yes," I said.  "He was my dog."

"I'm getting the sense he was a fun-loving kind of a dog, right? Very mischievous."

"Yes," I confirmed,  "Virgil was a goofball of a dog."

"I'm seeing him flying around with little wings.. like little angel wings!" 

I laughed skeptically.  "I doubt that!" I said.

Sylvia reconsidered. "Yes... perhaps due to his size.  Was he large?"

"Large" would have been an understatement.  Virgil was enormous!  He was perhaps the largest Irish Wolfhound who ever walked the planet!  Seriously!   People used to mistake him for a small horse.  I loved Virgil.  I was very sad when my ex-husband (who has since died and who apparently did not feel the need to communicate with me via Sylvia), who kept Virgil after the divorce, simply neglected him.  One day, Virgil just up and ran away and never came back.  That was the last we ever heard of him.  It was perhaps strange to be contacted by an animal from the Spirit World, but for me, it was perfect.  No other animals attempted to communicate that evening!  Do I believe animals have spirits?  Yes. I have seen the ghosts of animals before and was able to confirm their existence by objective means later.  Do they have "souls" like humans?  I believe animals have souls - I have seen how animals have the capacity to express love and that is the essence of soul.

Then Sylvia did another reading for a person in audiience and then asked, "Is there anyone here who had a college friend who passed away?"

No one raised their hand and so I realized this was probably for me.

I said, "Yes." 

Sylvia did not give much information on this reading.  She simply said, "Well, she wants you to know that she really appreciated what you did for her before she passed on."

These seemed awfully generic, but I have learned that even generic information in a psychic reading can mean something incredibly personal and promote healing!   As I have often said, information belongs to the listener, not the teller - one of those strange truths which rattle the nerves of scientists and empiricists.

One of my closest friends in college was an extraordinarily beautiful, exotic and intelligent woman named Susan Hurley.  Sue was truly brilliant.  I remember being mesmerized by her.  She graduated summa cum laude as the Salutatorian of her class, a year ahead of me, at Princeton University with a prize for best thesis in philosophy, and later went on to get her JD from Harvard Law School.  The New York Times later wrote an article about Sue when she became the first female fellow ever to be admitted at the All Souls College at Oxford University in England.  Clearly, she was a superstar on a pathway to international fame.  We lost touch with each other after college.

Roughly 30 years later, I decided to see if I could look her up and find out where she was in the world.  In May, 2007, as luck would have it, I found her living in England.  She was a professor of philosophy at Bristol University in England.  Sue had already made a reputation for herself in the academic world through her writings on the nature of Consciousness.  I sent her an email, hoping she would remember me.  We spent the next month catching up on 30 years worth of news.  But soon her emails stopped coming.  I received an email from her secretary one day who advised me that Sue was suffering from breast cancer and was too weak to respond to emails. 

In August, Sue died.  I had managed to contact her - after 30 years of silence - just 3 months before her death!  Life is sometimes very strange.  I wondered whether I had somehow been psychically prompted to get in touch with her for a final farewell before her death.  I saved various obituaries about her from the papers and tucked them away.  But I never cried. 

When Sylvia said that my friend had appreciated what I had "done for her" just prior to her passing, I did not believe her.  I knew I hadn't "done" anything for Sue!  I simply reached out to her just before her death and said hello.

But two days later, while driving on the highway, I suddenly burst into tears.  I realized that I was finally grieving for the loss of my college friend, Sue Hurley, who had so delighted and captivated me many, many years ago.  I couldn't believe she was dead - and at such a young age - whereas she would always remain young and beautiful in my mind like the last time I had seen her.  Perhaps, in spirit terms, I had actually "done" something for her after all, and managed to locate her - at the eleventh hour - so we could say our farewells to each other, and perhaps that created some sort of peace for her as a dying woman. 

So, Sylvia's words ended up meaning something very specific for me after all.  Even though I didn't get a message from my dead relatives, I got a message from my dead dog and dead college friend.  And so I ended up, like all those other teary-eyed people in the audience, weeping privately later for someone who was dear to me and came through, very unexpectedly, with a message I could never have anticipated...