Ghosts Among Us - James Van Praagh [18]
Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills is close by Universal Studios, where The Ghost Whisperer is filmed. I had some time off one day, so I decided to pay my respects to a very good friend who had recently passed over and was buried at Forest Lawn. As I walked back to my car, I noticed a woman sitting at a grave site brushing away leaves on the gravestone. As I drew near her, she looked up at me, and our eyes met.
“Hello,” I said to her. I pointed to the picture of the soldier on the headstone that was engraved with the words LOVING SON.
“Was he a tragedy of the war?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “A tragedy of life.”
I knew that she needed some consoling, so I sat down and spoke with her. I didn’t want to tell her what I did. I was there to listen to what she had to say.
“My name is Janice. This is my son Peter.”
The following is the gist of what Janice told me about Peter.
Peter had everything he could want in life. He was an intelligent young man. His loving parents, Janice and Mike, and devoted siblings, Jake and Susan, doted on him. They all thought the world of him. Peter had been an honor student and a leader, and he had just entered his senior year of high school. Apparently, that is when everything changed for the worse. Some of Peter’s schoolmates introduced him to a girl named Stacey, and the two of them became very close. Unfortunately, Stacey was not the wholesome type, and Janice and Mike didn’t like Peter going out with her. “We thought she was a very bad influence on him,” Janice candidly remarked.
Soon Peter’s grades dropped, and he often missed classes and sometimes a day or two of school at a time. Janice and Mike noticed that Peter’s old friends no longer came by. “When he began staying out later and later, we had our suspicions. Then again, we thought he might just be going through a phase,” Janice continued. However, Janice’s suspicions were confirmed when her daughter, Susan, found a hypodermic needle in Peter’s laundry bag. Jake and Susan had also noticed a change in their big brother’s behavior. The person they could always count on was never around anymore to help with homework or to take them to the movies.
Janice tried a variety of things to help her son. She attempted to homeschool him, but Peter resented it. “You’ve made me the way I am,” Peter told her. “I’m not the perfect son you want.” Janice said that his words stabbed her in her heart. “I never had any sort of expectation of Peter. I was merely a proud mother.”
After Peter barely graduated from high school, Janice learned about tough love and wanted so much for her son to straighten out. “I had a brother in Minnesota who had a farm, and he agreed to take in Peter and Jake and have them work the farm for the summer.” Janice gave Peter an ultimatum. “I told him that it was either the job or the street.” She and Mike had to make the decision not to put up with Peter’s disrespectful behavior anymore. At that point, Peter realized that he had no alternative. He resented his parents, but went to the farm anyway. After the first month, the old Peter seemed to have come back to life. He was happy and playful and back to his old self. Janice thought that Peter had turned a corner, but she was wrong. Her brother called to tell her that Peter had left the farm and he had no idea where the young man had gone.
Not knowing what to do, Janice called the police and listed Peter as a missing person. A month later, Peter was found living with Stacey in a tenement on the edge of town. By then, he was a full-fledged junkie. Once again, Peter blamed his mother. “It’s all your fault. You were never happy with