When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [44]
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not really.”
He explained that he had fallen asleep on the couch one night, sheepishly adding that maybe he’d had one after-dinner brandy too many, when he thought he heard a voice calling from outside.
“It sounded like my mother,” he explained. “So I got up and went out into the night. I don’t know if I was sleepwalking or what, but I didn’t take a coat or a flashlight or anything. I just walked out the door and followed the sound of the voice toward the lake.”
He shook his head, as if still amazed at how foolish he had been.
“I don’t really remember walking out onto the ice at all. But I do remember the sound of the ice cracking and the water. I remember thinking that the water wasn’t as cold as I’d expected. That it would be all right to rest for a moment. It was like I went back to sleep.”
He looked at his children, who were sitting in silence waiting for me to continue. “Tell them I’m sorry. I would never have chosen to leave them and their mother.”
When I relayed this to his children, they looked relieved. But his daughter was still troubled. “Ask him if he’s happy,” she urged me. “Is he with Mom?”
The ghost shook his head, so I had my answer. Instead I asked him, “Why didn’t you cross over?”
“I never had the Last Rites,” he explained. “I didn’t want to go to hell. And I didn’t want to leave my family. It was really no choice: Go to hell? Or stay with my family?”
I asked the children if they wanted their father to cross over, and without hesitation, they all said they did. I told the ghost that he wasn’t going to go to hell. We all knew he hadn’t meant to kill himself, I said, and I could show him how to cross over. I made the white Light and told him to look into it.
“I can see my parents,” he exclaimed. “I can see my wife!”
After he crossed over, the children all thanked me, especially the woman who’d called me in. “Thank you,” she said. “Now all of us can be at peace.”
While many spirits are afraid of meeting the unknown in the Light, I have also encountered spirits who have remained earthbound because they knew exactly who they would come face-to-face with if they went into the Light.
I was called to the funeral of a man who had been a successful partner in a financial planning business. When I arrived at the viewing, I found his spirit to be very distressed. I asked him if he was ready to go into the Light.
“I’m not going there,” he said to me. “I can see him in there.”
I asked who he was: the other partner in the firm, it turned out, a much older man who had died several years earlier. I had been invited to his funeral, too, and knew that he had crossed over.
“Why don’t you want to see Joe?” I asked.
The ghost told me that just before he’d died, he had received a visit from Joe. Apparently, after his death Joe would come back from time to time to check on his old company. Since he had crossed over, he was able to come and go without causing any problems, and the living partner was never aware of these visits.
Unfortunately, the remaining partner, once he had the business to himself, began siphoning money away from the firm. This enraged Joe, who knew the money should have been going to his heirs. Joe’s spirit had managed to get into the dreams of his former partner. “I’ll get you for this,” he’d said. “I’ll get even with you when you die.”
“What’s he going to do to me if I go in there?” the ghost asked me, peering into the Light. I told him that what Joe was going to do was maybe the least of his problems. He had to have courage, I added, and be man enough to admit his mistakes. But this guy was a coward through and through. No matter what I said to him, he would not go into the Light at his funeral home. I know for a fact that he had no intention of crossing over at all.
Some spirits I’ve met act as though they don’t have a conscience and will trot right into the Light no matter how heinous their lives were. Others fear that one mortal sin is all it takes for them to end up punished for all eternity.