What It Means to Speak With the Dead

I’m thinking of Kara and Dan as Lawrence begins the session. First he prays, his eyes closed; the prayer moves quickly, I don’t retain it. Then he looks up, fixing his gaze somewhere behind my left shoulder. “Okay,” he says, “I’m seeing a gentleman there.” He starts describing the spirit and immediately it’s clear that it’s Dan. Or that it could be, if I want it to. As Lawrence starts relaying Dan’s messages, I wonder if this is what it means to speak with the dead: You make a familiar shape and fill it with what you need. I don’t know if Dan came of his own accord or if I conjured him by laying my expectation over Lawrence’s vision.

I’ve never had a session with a medium before, so I don’t know if Lawrence is a good one. I do think he’s a good performer, though—he moves like a skilled improviser, gently and swiftly adapting to my responses. As I’m listening, it occurs to me that performance is the closest thing in my life to Spiritualism. It baffles me in the same ways: Weird circulations of energy weaken the rational’s firm grasp, and you end up having to resort to a haphazard explanation of how the process could work, and what it might do—but it does do something, and it does work somehow. I don’t know, for instance, how Lawrence discerns that Dan took his own life. Did he glean that from my responses, or did Dan tell him? My mind spends the rest of our conversation riding the thin edge between analysis and belief, as Lawrence relays some information from Dan on the other side: He’s writing under a tree; he gets to learn from those who crossed over long before; he spends time wandering; he’s worried about being forgotten. Mysteriously, Lawrence tells me that spirits who’ve crossed like to gather in Rome.

After 45 minutes—including an impassioned aside about the importance of keeping photographs of the dead and a quote from The Matrix—the session ends. I go for a walk to smoke a few cigarettes and assess how I feel. No revelation, no huge sense of relief, no sudden assertion of previously repressed grief. It’s just a sunny day, and I talked for a bit with a ghost. If I’d wanted something from the experience, it doesn’t seem to have come.

When I get Jen on the phone the next morning, I don’t know how or whether to bring up my meeting with Lawrence. After a little chitchat, I ask, “Have you ever had a session with a medium?” There’s a pause. “It’s so funny you say that,” Jen says, and tells me about a former student whose whole family were mediums. It’s the first of many times in this conversation that we’ll acknowledge the rhymes and resonances the dead make for us. I tell her about the previous day, and she jokes that I am now the medium’s medium, passing along third-hand information. As we talk, the hazy performance that Lawrence and Dan and I had created gathers meaning, becoming sturdier, like a sheet that stands up and begins to walk. It hadn’t meant anything to me when Lawrence mentioned spending time with Dan at a favorite bar; but the night before I spoke with Jen, she’d been at his favorite bar in London, ordered a cocktail she thought he would have liked. We go on like this for a while, me conveying what was conveyed to me, her making sense of it. Finally she asks, her voice trembling, “Is he okay?” I tell her that it seems like he is. He’s writing under a tree. He’s wandering in Rome. We both cry a little.

Part of me wonders if I thought that this experience would give me some back-door entry into the question of how to carry those other dead, those Palestinians in my family or not, counted or uncounted, whose loss is a tear in the fabric of the world. I think I knew I wouldn’t find that. Rather, I was looking, I can see now, for a tether to a world that had felt totally alien to me for the past eight months. And, in a way, I got that. Maybe it didn’t matter what Dan said to me so much as what I said to Jen, what we said to each other. After all, it was in this pull back toward the living that I was able to most intimately connect with the eerie ways the dead find to make themselves understood—and to let myself feel that there is indeed something beyond this world, which is maybe what I’ve been desperate for this whole time.

One thing neither Jen nor I could parse, though, was Dan’s mention of a book with a white cover. Jen had sent me a few of Dan’s books after he died, though I didn’t recall any that fit the description. But later, looking through my shelves for books to gift to some former students, I found a book of Dan’s I hadn’t remembered: an old paperback edition of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry collection Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. The cover is white, with a lavender gradient along the edges. An aura. I pulled the book off the shelf and opened it to where Dan had left a bookmark. On one side of the page: “Being and Nothingness,” on the other, “A Poem of Friendship.” It was absurd, as if I had scripted it: a gentle, mournful elegy, a séance that heals, a ghostly loved one who sends exactly the message I need. It didn’t happen that way, except it did. The dead don’t send us what we need, except they do. It’s frustrating, but that’s Spiritualism. That’s faith. Maybe it gets us through the day.

When someone dies, Lawrence told me, “the body falls away. The burden is lifted and becomes a memory.” It’s a nice line, a beautiful message. It’s also, for me, a kind of challenge: to choose to believe in what I can’t fully know, to let mystery be the answer and faith the obligation. To take, for example, the word “martyr” seriously. To insist it is not interchangeable with “victim” or “dead” or “murdered,” but is instead a marker of a life that is, on some plane, in some world beyond this one, valued, loved, understood. To speak across that distance in order to be drawn back to the living, which can only mean being drawn back to struggle. Maybe it’ll get me through the days.