Wednesday, October 26, 2016 marked the 10th anniversary of my best friend Adam’s suicide.
Stories about Ouija boards have been going around on social media because there’s a new movie out, and it occurred to me while wasting a few minutes on Snapchat with one of these articles that perhaps I could hold a seance in honor of the 10th anniversary of Adam’s death, for his mother and his two brothers and me.
I called them all up and asked if they would be interested. It’s kind of a sensitive subject — “Do you want to try and communicate with your dead family member that we don’t really talk about that much, because it’s kind of morbid, but I am pretty sure you all think about him about as much as I do, which is all the effing time?”
Prologue: Evil spirits and the subconscious
I grew up in an Evangelical, Southern Baptist home, and in the 1990s, the Satanic Panic was in full swing. Ouija boards were absolutely off-limits; even movies about Ouija boards or demonic possession were verboten in my house. You just weren’t supposed to mess with the spirit world at all, because you never knew which spirits you could be inviting in. This gave tarot cards, Ouija boards, and those silly games kids like to play at sleepovers like “Bloody Mary” a lot more credit than they may have deserved in terms of what kinds of havoc they could wreak.
But even now, having spent more than half of my life as an atheist, I still have trouble with the idea of using a Ouija board. Even though I don’t believe in the spirit world at all, the warnings that you don’t know what spirit you’ll be inviting in still ring in my ears. I have a certain reverence for the sacred in spite of my disbelief in it. For instance, I won’t sing hymns at churches because I refuse to invoke spirits I don’t believe in. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife, I don’t demean people who do or try to imitate their practices for fun.
Suffice it to say, holding a seance is out of character for someone like me.
When someone asks me what I believe in, I say psychology. I read tarot for fun at parties, with a lot of side eye from my mom, but I always make sure folks know that the cards will never tell you anything you don’t already know. I think these games are more about dipping into your subconscious than communicating with the dead or the spirit world. And what I really hope to achieve with the seance is just that — remembering things about Adam that may have been buried in the 10 years since he died.
Adam’s mom is a lot more whimsical about those things than my parents ever were, and she thought it sounded like fun. “I’ve been trying to think of what to do for about the past year,” she told me, “and this sounds like a great idea!” His brothers gave the okay as well, so I set about putting together my first seance.
Step One: Finding a medium
After getting the go-ahead from my partners in sudden spiritualism, I started googling “psychic mediums in Albuquerque”. There’s a big sign on I-25 for Psychic Ana, and I thought maybe she’d be a good idea to tap, just for the sort of fame factor. (I confess: part of my desire to go through with this seance was the great blog post I knew I’d get out the whole ordeal. “Psychic Ana was a lot smaller in person,” sounds like such a great starting line.) I started reading reviews on Google of a few women who do psychic readings. (Interesting note: no male mediums came up in my search.) None of them really has a storefront style Website or much more than two or three Google reviews. Absolutely no one advertised the ability to do a seance. Most of the reviews are about spiritual coaching or healing, and how it was possible to have a reading done over the phone. People trust their psychics even more than I trust my therapist to provide solace and peace. This is no surprise, of course. A psychic medium who doesn’t provide peace would be absolutely worthless to most people.
Eventually I saw a listing for a metaphysical shop, so I figured someone there would probably have a recommendation.
I called the number and said, “Hi, my name is Kat, and I am looking to hold a seance this week. I was wondering if you have any mediums you would recommend?”
I would like to note, for the record, that for an atheist who grew up in a Southern Baptist home, that is not a sentence I thought I would ever say in my lifetime, and I felt more than just a bit ridiculous.
The person on the other end of the line apparently thought it was a completely viable request. He asked if I could hold for a minute and went in search of someone who knew the answer to my question.
Unfortunately, the person who eventually picked up said that all of the mediums he would recommend were out of town. He apologized for making me wait but told me I should try Abitha’s Apothecary and see if they knew anyone.
So I called Abitha’s Apothecary. I had no idea there were this many reputable spiritual shops in Albuquerque. A young-sounding man named Josh answered. I told him my situation again and he said he knew someone. He’d give her a call and see if she was game, and then call me back.
A few minutes later, he called me back with a name and number: “Sam, or Samantha.” I thanked him and went to give her a call.
She didn’t answer, so I left a message. I was planning on going on a bike ride, so I was a little miffed that I couldn’t get all the planning out of the way at once. But she called back in a reasonable time frame.
“So what kind of seance do you want?” she asked me, once we’d established that neither of us cared if you wanted to call us by our full names or our nicknames. (This is an important courtesy question for any professional woman who goes by a three-letter version of her full name in her personal life.)
“Well, it’s the 10-year anniversary of my best friend’s death,” I started, “so I was thinking we could do this to mark his passing and-”
She cut me off.
“I don’t need the whole story,” she said curtly, “just what kind of seance do you want.” It sounded like she was walking around or getting into a car.
“Well,” I said, taken aback, “I’ve never done this before, so I don’t really know. What do you recommend?”
“Okay,” she said, sounding a bit impatient. She took a deep breath and maybe sat down. “So a Ouija board is really the only way to do it.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, then why didn’t you just say that?
She told me she could bring everything I’d need, and it’d cost $70 because of all the materials she’d have to get (which didn’t actually sound like that much money). I asked if she’d take a check.
“Cash or card,” she said, “I have a Square reader.”
She told me I needed to sage my house (another thing I’ve never done, although I’ve seen it done and have some idea of what this entails), and that I needed to get Dead Sea salt and put it at each window and around my house.
“Where do I get Dead Sea salt?” I asked, furiously taking notes in my journal.
“At, like, Wal Mart,” she said. “It should be on the bottom shelf with the rest of the salt. And it doesn’t have to be Dead Sea salt, it can just be sea salt.”
It occurred to me that she probably dealt with people who did not regularly use sea salt in their cooking — I have two bottles of it sitting on my spice shelf right now, next to the black truffle salt and the pink Himalayan salt in a grinder. I even have a bag of Romanian sea salt in huge chunks that someone brought back from a trip that I’ve never used which would probably be just about right for this project.
She explained that the salt would keep other unwanted spirits from entering the house and that I didn’t need to use much of it. She was very clear that I needed to make an outline of my house in the salt, though.
We finished up on the details regarding when and where (my house, this Wednesday, 7:30pm).
I was surprised by her bedside manner and it didn’t give me a lot of confidence in her performance abilities. But I decided to go through with it anyway. She texted me to look up her reviews on Facebook under “Sakrid Haven”, which I did. She’d received all five-star reviews from people who said she’d given a great reading, whether in person or over the phone. It just highlighted to me that I had no idea what I was looking for or getting into, or what to expect.
When I told a few friends that I’d gotten a medium, they were surprised. “I want at least one person there to believe it’s real,” I explained.
Step 2: Prepping the house
My Wednesday filled up with straight meetings running from 7am until 7pm, so I jumped to get into house prep on Tuesday afternoon as quickly as I could.
I had some sage in a planter out front, so I picked it and put it in the oven to dry (250 degrees for 10 minutes did the trick!). I dug the Romanian sea salt out of the cabinet where I keep it.
I put the sage in a crystal bowl and lit it to get some smoke going. It may not have been all that dry, or perhaps that’s just what sage does, but it didn’t stay lit very long. I went throughout the house and urged the smoke into the corners, relighting the sage as I entered every room and trying to be mindful of my intention and at least give the benefit of the doubt to the burning herb’s ability to cleanse any bad juju from the house. I tried to get rid of the horrible rushed feeling I had as well, remembering I was doing all this in honor of my friend Adam. I wafted the smoke into the corners of each room and paused to think of what could have transpired there in the past, as I’ve only owned the home for 10 months.
My dog followed me around warily.
I put the crystal dish on the front porch once I’d hit every room with the smoke to let it smolder out. I wondered what I should do with the sacred object now. Do I throw the sage away in the trash? Is that too profane? Or do I bury it? Or build a shrine with it? I’ll have to Google the answer at some point.
Then I set to work putting salt in the windows and around the house. I don’t actually have that many windows, and they all have pretty pronounced sills, so that was easy. Then I went out around the house to encircle the building with the salt. My dog followed me out to the front of the house, which is gated. I had to leave him in the gated section for a bit to salt around the garage and side yard.
When I came back he was eating some of the burnt sage. I tried to take it away from him. He was pretty intent on swallowing it, because he’s a Lab mix, and they have pits for stomachs. A quick Google search revealed it’s not poisonous for dogs, so whatever floats his boat, I guess. I now had a cleansed house and a cleansed dog. The sage smoke definitely gave me a headache.
Step 3: The day of
My day started at 5:30 am, getting up at my boyfriend’s house and rushing home to get ready for a 7 am conference call and a 7:30 am breakfast meeting. I tried to clean the house a bit as I went, putting things away and washing dishes.
During the economic forum breakfast I found my mind drifting away to the seance, but also to Adam. I’d been trying to think of questions to ask “him” during the seance. It’s hard to think of any, because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t want to ask where he is, heaven or hell, or if it’s lonely there — questions my boyfriend suggested.
But there are things I’ve always wondered about his death that have bothered me extensively.
Did he know he was schizophrenic? If so, how long did he know? Was he hiding it from me? Why didn’t he write a note before he died? Why didn’t he call or text me or anyone else the moments before he did it? (Or did he call someone? Did he call his girlfriend? Did he text his parents or one of his coworkers? Did he write a note to someone else and I just never knew?) Was he planning it for a long time, or was it spur of the moment, like I assume it was? Was he lucid when he went? Did he understand that his obsession with working out and aversion to alcohol was part of self-treatment against a disease he couldn’t manage on his own? Was he afraid?
Did the parallel between his on-again off-again girlfriend in New York sleeping with someone else and his father’s infidelities cause a rupture in him somehow? Did knowledge of my own infidelities at the time strike a resemblance to his father’s, which had caused such distress in him when we were teenagers? Did he hate me for that? Was he hiding OCD from us all? Did he know, based on his extensive studies of psychology, exactly what was happening? Did he hang himself out of fear of the police, as we all have thought, or because he knew this was an unending illness that could never be fully managed with modern technology and medication? Did he know he would be a burden to his family for the rest of his life? Did he know that wouldn’t have mattered to them, or me, or any of us at all?
Did he think of me at all before he did it? Did he consider at all what this would do to me?
Did he know he was my boyfriend’s favorite? Did he know how much we loved him? Did he love us as much, at all?
I keep thinking of things he loved when I knew him:
Coffee and the way it looks when cream is added to it, before you stir. “It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” he told me once.
“Bittersweet Symphony” being the song that played in his head when he walked.
The Beck album he lent me — Sea Change — that I lost. I still don’t know where it is. He had my Elliott Smith album. His brother handed it back to me.
Kurt Vonnegut. Shakespeare. Ballet. Dante’s Inferno. Hunter S. Thompson. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. California. His cat Juice, the orange tabby with no tail, and the gray kitten Peanut, who was originally named Gin, but he wasn’t cool enough to keep that name. Sometimes Adam would call Peanut “Hitler” because he was such a mean cat. His bird Bella. The library. Starbucks, all the different ones in town, where he’d date one of the baristas and then have to go to another one after things soured. Village Inn — “the six”, as he called it. Denny’s. Anyplace that was open 24 hours and had free coffee refills where he could sit and write me a letter or work on his homework. Greek philosophy. History.
But is that just me projecting those things because I remember them? Who was he, really?
Step 4: Medium prep
Aaron, Adam’s middle brother and the one I’m closer to, came over a bit early. I had made a cabbage soup with pork chops (which meant my house smelled like farts, but oh well), so we had some of that and chatted a bit about what we expected.
It was scary, we decided.
Samantha had a bit of trouble finding my house — she had to call to ask where it was. I guided her in and helped her get her stuff inside. She carried a big trunk full of the spiritual items, I assumed, plus a couple of plastic bags of candles. I noticed in her front seat she had stacked some make up and false eyelashes. So there was SOME showmanship involved.
She started to set up while Aaron and I were finishing dinner. Since we were eating on my big dining room table, we decided to use my smaller breakfast room table, which had belonged to my great grandparents. Aaron and I pulled it into the middle of the living room and finished eating while Samantha spread a velvet cloth pocked with candle wax stains over the table and unfolded it to reveal the Ouija board.
My dog followed her around, sniffing every item she brought out. She asked if he would be okay with candles. “Yeah,” I said, “he should be.” He has eaten a tea candle or two in his time, but I kept that to myself.
She set out a tiny brazier to burn herbs in, apologizing for the smoke. “It smells real bad at the start,” she explained, as I watched her toss pinches of spices from plastic baggies onto the tiny smoldering flame. I asked her what each was for. “Garlic to keep out vampiric energy,” she explained, among a few others. “Cherry oil is really good for attracting spirits. Also it smells good.” I lost track of all the pinches of spices she’d had — basil? Rose hips? Parsley? There were quite a few.
The smoke was there to open a portal, she explained to us. “I’ll have to sage everyone as they come in,” she said, “to clear the energy.”
Spirits hang around for lots of reasons, she explained to us. Usually it’s because mourners hold onto them too tightly and they can’t leave.
Aaron’s mom, Tina, texted to us to say she was going to be late by about 15 minutes. “Bill Time?” I asked, referring to their last name. “Adam was always, always late,” I told Aaron.
“I’m the only one in this family who isn’t!” he agreed.
Sam asked me what my sign was.
“Taurus,” I said.
Since I was an earth sign, I’d sit to the north. Aaron, a Libra, was an air sign and would sit to the east. Tina and Cameron, our late counterparts, both proved to be Capricorns.
“More earth signs,” Sam said. “They can sit to the south since earth signs are strong enough.”
“Adam was a Leo,” I mused. “What’s Leo?”
“A fire sign,” she said. “Do we have a Leo coming?”
I glanced at Aaron. “If we do this right,” I said.
“They can sit to the south then,” Sam said, still setting things up. Aaron and I made a face at each other. “We like water signs to be to the west. I can sit there.”
She continued explaining what she was doing, and how she grew up around this sort of stuff. “I’ve always been a medium,” she told us. Her whole family played around with this sort of spiritualism. She set four white candles at each of the cardinal directions and four red candles at the intercardinal directions. She didn’t light them. She advised that we would need a note taker, because you forget things when you’re talking to a medium. I volunteered readily and went to get my journal and a pen. I chose a pen from the high school Adam and I had gone to, even though it had previously been a bit spotty in terms of ink output. I tested it, though, and it seemed fine.
“There are already three or four spirits here,” Sam told us. “Not just your brother. Someone for your mom. Not your brother but with him. They’re waiting for your mom.”
Aaron and I looked at each other. Neither of us said anything, but we knew exactly what the other was thinking.
“Can you tell what they look like?” I asked. “Do they look human?”
“Of course,” Sam said. “They pick a time in their lives when they were happy. And that’s how they appear.”
“When would you pick?” Aaron asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe my happiest age hasn’t happened yet.”
Cameron and Tina appeared. We moved chairs around the table and Sam assigned us seats. In the end, Tina sat at the head of the north side, Cameron sat to the west, Aaron sat to the east, Samantha sat to the south, and I sat halfway between Aaron and Tina with my notebook.
“Now that everyone knows where they’re seated, I can sage everyone at the threshold,” Sam told us.
We lined up in my hallway leading up to the backroom where the table was set and Sam lit up a smudge stick. Tina went first.
“You’ve got messages,” Sam told her.
She wafted smoke over us, including the soles of our feet, one at a time, and then let us enter. I went last. I asked if my dog needed to be saged.
“No,” she said, “he’s fine. He’s pure light.”
Pure light and all stomach, I thought. But he trotted around us, happy to have guests to look at.
We sat in our spots and Sam began the prayers. She read them haltingly from blue card stock, which gave this less of a show feeling and more of an eighth-grade book report feeling. She read a Bible verse from the Corinthians about Satan having no power over us, and then the 23rd Psalm. I was thrown out of things entirely when she read, “Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” because it’s “Yea”, and it’s always pronounced “yay”, but whatever.
She lit the candles, explaining to us that the white candles were there to invite spirits in, but the red ones were there to keep bad spirits out. There are spirits other than ghosts around. She continued with the protective prayers. I tried to write down what she was doing but, of course, my pen ran out of ink. I waited until the candles were lit and the prayers were done to ask if I could go grab another one and she told me sure. I wondered if I’d need to be re-saged, but apparently not. I dimmed the lights.
Step 5: Talking to spirits
Sam asked who of us wanted to hold the Ouija shuttle. She instructed that you had to place your fingers on it very lightly. No one wanted to volunteer, but Tina eventually said she would. It was clear she would be taking the spiritual lead from the civilian side. Cameron eventually agreed to put his fingers on the shuttle as well.
“First, we spell out the alphabet to teach the spirits how to do it,” Sam said, and the three of them went through the alphabet, the numerals at the bottom, and the yes and the no. And then we waited.
We didn’t have to wait long. The shuttle moved and I wrote down the letters as Sam and Cameron called them out.
IAMSORRYMOMICAUSEDALLTHISPAINTOYOUALL
(There was an errant Q in the midst of this, but it got sorted out.)
At this point, all of us had tears in our eyes.
Sam explained that the spirit was saying he’d let each of us down. He was frustrated by how long it took him to spell out the words.
“He was a man of words,” Sam said. We all nodded. “He wanted me to just tell you what he meant.”
“Can I talk?” Tina asked.
“Of course,” Sam said.
“Can you tell me why you did it, Ad?”
The shuttle moved again, spelling STUPI — “Stupid,” I said.
“I think he was trying to say stupidity,” Sam offered.
The shuttle went on.
I DID A LOT TO MYSELF
“He doesn’t know how to fix what he left behind,” Sam said.
“Are you happy? Are you comfortable?” Tina asked.
The shuttle moved between yes and no.
“I think he’s trying to say that he’s free from the pain, but he lingers because of your pain,” Sam explained. “He’s at your house a lot.”
Tina looked at Cameron. “That light over the table,” she said.
There’s a light in a fan that goes on and off at will, she explained. Cameron nodded.
“Are you with your dad?”
The shuttle moved to yes.
“Tell him I said hello and I love him.”
I L…
“So this is like when you hand a grandpa a cell phone and tell them to text,” Sam explained. “Whoever just took over has no idea how to use this. I think he’s trying to say, ‘I love you too, dear.’”
Then the shuttle spelled out some more letters.
WEIRDTOBEABLETOTALKTOYOUNOW
“We are able to talk to you now?” I said.
“I think ‘weird to be able to talk to you now,’” Samantha corrected me.
HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE
The spirit appeared amazed that he could communicate with us, according to Sam.
“Adam, do you know about your nephew Michael?” Tina asked.
The shuttle went straight to yes.
“He was like, ‘duh,’” Samantha said. The spirits are with us all the time and know everything we do, she explained.
“Your cousin Kristy says hi,” Tina said. “And your auntie Susan, too.”
MISS ALL
When I would interrupt the spelling to say what I assumed the spirit meant, the shuttle would go to “yes”.
“Do you have the dogs there with you?” Tina asked.
The shuttle went to no.
DO NOT KNOW WHERE
“Well, that’s too bad,” Tina said. “They moved on just like you did.”
The shuttle went to no.
I assumed the inference is that dogs are “pure light”, like Sam had said before, and don’t go the same place as other spirits. But we moved on.
“Adam, Derek, do you have anything to say to the boys?” Tina asked.
HEAL
STOP LETTING MY ABSENCE DO DAMAGE
Aaron was visibly uncomfortable by this. Samantha explained that Adam knew that Aaron was angry about his death. Neither boy could let it go, but Aaron had things to say he just wasn’t willing to say.
“You have to just put it out there,” she told him. “The best thing you can do is write him a letter and then burn it. He’ll be there when you’re writing the letter, but when you burn it the ashes will go directly to him.”
“Do you have any questions for us?” Tina asked.
The shuttle went to no.
“They already know everything,” Sam reiterated.
I asked a question. “Is there anyone else there?”
The answer was yes.
“Is it anyone we know?”
No was the answer. This was disheartening for me to some extent.
Then the shuttle moved.
Step 6: Things get weird
WHEN R U GOING TO ACCEPT UR GIFT KA
“When are you going to accept your gift, Kat?” I said. The shuttle moved to yes.
I laughed. “Okay,” I said. “I guess this one is for me, then. What gift?”
INTUI-
“Intuition?” I said. Another yes.
Samantha explained that a more advanced spirit had taken over. She could tell because they break up words and use abbreviations more often.
This spirit, according to Samantha, was an older spirit. A female guide who gives me guidance and protection. She says that she wants me to quit over analyzing and go with my gut. The spirit had a positive vibe.
We asked for her name.
BELLADONNA
“Ooh, Italian,” I said.
I WAS UR SISTER
1807
IM ALWAYS WITH YOU
Samantha said, “You talked to her more when you were little.”
I didn’t have imaginary friends as a kid, except a made-up little boy named Danny that I beat at races and other games, because I was a little feminist and didn’t think boys were ever better than girls. But that was it. I didn’t “talk” to anyone imaginary. Not that I remember, anyway.
“Where are you from?” we asked.
BARCELONA
“She’s Spanish,” Tina and I said.
The shuttle moved to no.
MOVED
PARENTS GAVE BIRTH IN BARCELONA
WE LIVED IN VENICE
We all agreed that now I had something to Google. We talked a bit about it. I wasn’t particularly comfortable.
“Adam, do you want us to visit you again like this?” Tina asked.
The shuttle moved to yes.
“Can you show me you’re there sometimes?”
Samantha laughed. “He says he’s going to start messing with the cupboards at your house.”
“Adam, is Chris there?” I asked. The shuttle moved to no. I wasn’t expecting him to be, of course. But I thought I’d ask.
“Is there anyone else there who wants to talk?”
The shuttle moved again.
FELT GOOD
“Adam is saying it felt good to talk to you,” Samantha explained.
“Mom, are you there?” Tina asked.
The shuttle moved to no. Samantha explained that her mother’s spirit was weaker feeling. “Maybe she didn’t get the invite.”
“Dad, are you there?” Tina asked.
MOM JUST US
We laughed at this.
“Any other instructions for us?”
The shuttle moved to no.
“Are you going to take a nap now?” I asked.
The shuttle moved to yes.
“I love you,” Tina said.
ME TOO
We decided it was time to say goodbye to the board and moved the shuttle to goodbye.
Step 6: Wrapping up
Samantha said some closing prayers and blew out the candles. Everyone was dazed and tired, like you feel after a long cry, which was basically what we’d just been through.
I asked if anyone wanted some wine. Sam said most of the time when she does this with her family, everyone just wants to go home and go to bed.
I was actually pretty full of adrenaline. I paid Sam using her Square app and my credit card (so modern!) and she gave everyone her card in case we wanted to do this again.
After she left, I did open a bottle of wine for Tina and me, and Aaron took a couple of fingers of bourbon. We laughed a bit about the experience. Sam had kept her phone on the table during the reading and responded to it, and she even got a phone call in the middle. This and her other missteps, like not being great at reading the prayers, actually made the reading feel a bit more real, because it was just like a normal part of an evening rather than a show. But I had kind of wanted a show.
I asked if Cameron and Tina had felt like the shuttle was moving on its own. We were all under the impression that Sam had been moving the shuttle for the Oujia board. At one point she had pushed a bit too hard and had tipped the shuttle toward her, raising its other end off the board entirely.
I tried to remember how much I’d told her about Adam’s death — if she’d known it was a suicide. We all wondered if she’d been able to Google us beforehand, but I didn’t think I’d given her enough information to know about Aaron or Cameron or Tina. She had my name and my phone number, which makes me really easy to find on Facebook. But my information there is set to private. Still, you could probably find stuff out about me online.
Aaron and I agreed that it had struck us when she had said that there were two connected spirits, men, with things to say to Tina. Sam hadn’t known about Derek, their dad, dying.
Her statements had been pretty general, though. It’s pretty easy to assume that if people are having a seance for the 10th anniversary of someone’s death, they’re probably having a hard time getting over it.
I was sad that Adam hadn’t had anything to say to me. I hadn’t been very pushy in asking, because it seemed like Tina was the center of the show here.
We talked about Adam and Derek and shared a few memories, which was really what I’d wanted. In that sense, it felt like he was there.
Tina thought maybe she’d do this again with a different medium, to see what kind of reading she got.
After everyone left, and two glasses of wine, I was still sad and adrenaline-filled. My boyfriend tried to cuddle with me to calm me down. We talked about a lot of things. I got up and took a sleeping pill eventually, which weirdly and uncharacteristically did nothing for me. I had a rough night trying to sleep.
Conclusion: Spirits
I still don’t believe in the afterlife or ghosts. I get spooked out by the idea of it all, but this didn’t do anything to sway me over. I kind of felt like Sam wanted to convince me I have “a gift” like a medium so she could try and sell me coaching services. She didn’t offer. It’s nice to have someone tell you that you have a gift, though. The idea that I have a spirit guide named Belladonna is fun to play around with, and might inspire some writing.
When I told her about holding the seance, my therapist told me I needed to prioritize having my needs met unapologetically. I think I didn’t apologize, but I don’t feel like my needs were met per se.
I felt like if I took a bit more charge of the situation and actually talked to “the people” I still have trouble letting go of, I could find some peace from the process. I think the seance was good for Tina, and maybe Adam and Cameron. It felt good to mark how much I still care about Adam. It does feel a bit like I spoke to him, or saw him briefly. I don’t feel like there are any lingering spirits anywhere. I don’t feel closer to the spirit world than I did before. But maybe I feel a bit more at peace.
Mostly the seance did what I wanted it to do. I’d consider going to another one sometime, maybe not as the note taker (although I *do* take stellar notes). At least I can cross this off my bucket list.