Laura was wracked with grief and guilt. Josh had been her best friend as well as her younger brother. The killer had been her client, not Josh’s. She tortured herself with what might have happened if she’d gotten to work on time. Maybe she could have placated the killer. Talked him down. At the very least, she would have been the victim, and Josh would still be alive.
Josh’s killer escaped, and in the weeks after the murder, Laura grew more and more terrified to leave her house. She felt safe in her car, a big old Cadillac she’d inherited from her mother. It had power windows, power door locks, and a car phone. But simple acts like walking out her front door to pick up the newspaper or crossing a parking lot from her car to a supermarket entrance triggered panic attacks. Even at home, where at least she felt safe, she was in constant, unbearable pain. “Like when you hurt yourself,” she told me, “and the hurt is so bad that you have to cry. It’s as if [the killer] blew a hole in my body, too, a gaping wound that everything I see, everything I do, causes it to ache. Only sleep numbs the pain.”
Laura became a virtual recluse, barely able to get to her appointments with her therapist, who diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed medication for anxiety and depression.
My understanding of what happened next comes from long conversations that Laura and I shared over the months that followed. She’d talk. I’d listen and record her words, transcribing them later and sending her a copy with the idea that her experiences might become the basis for a book we’d write together about what it’s like to lose a loved one to homicide.
Here’s how Laura described Josh’s first visit:
Early one morning, I’m lying in bed, fully awake. I’m looking out the window when something makes me look up at the ceiling. Josh is here, floating right above me. I feel as if my body isn’t mine. For a while I just stare up at him, cemented in place, the whole of my being focused on his presence an arm’s length away.
I can’t communicate with him at first. He isn’t talking to me. He’s just here. I want so badly to communicate with him, but it’s hard. In my mind I keep saying, “Tell me how to do this.” No response. I beg for a sign that he can hear me. For what seems like a very long time I lie immobilized, looking at him. Finally I hear “Laura, you always knew what was on my mind. Just do it!” And all of a sudden the floodgates open. I can hear him, and I can talk to him.
What he says is very simple. He says that I can trust Uncle Albert. He also tells me that my Aunt Irene is with him. Aunt Irene has been dead for about five years. All I can do is nod to let him know I hear and understand. It feels as if he’s draining me, drawing off my will and strength.
Then, before I know it, he’s gone. It’s a cool morning, and I’m under the blankets, sweating. All the energy has been sucked out of me to make room for accepting Josh. When I get out of bed my legs are trembling. The physical sensation lasts most of the morning.
I know this sounds like a scene out of a movie or TV show—Truly Madly Deeply, Sleepless in Seattle, Ghost, Sherlock, or The Kominsky Method, to name a few. But to Laura, this was real. Josh visited her many more times. Often when she was in her bedroom. Sometimes in her car. Once while she was walking on a beach. The “visitations,” as she called them, were tiring but never as intense and draining as the first time. Soon she was looking forward to them. Only her therapist knew.
A turning point came on a Sunday morning about six months after the murder.
I am reading the Sunday New York Times in my living room. All of a sudden Josh is here with me. Aunt Irene is with him. I try to stand, a skeptic, outside of myself. Wondering. Doubting. Are they really here? Or is this my imagination?
Laura talked to them for a long time. At one point Josh suggested that she write down the things he was telling her. She was afraid to leave the room, afraid that they’d vanish while she was off fetching something to write on. But she went to her office, and when she came back with a yellow legal pad, Aunt Irene and Josh were still there.
A short time later, as Laura was writing what Josh was telling her, she realized that her fifteen-year-old son, Brian, was standing in the doorway. She had no idea how long he’d been there and what he’d heard. He asked her what was going on.
I ask him if he sees anything in the living room out of the ordinary. He looks around and obviously sees nothing. I decide to tell him. I say that Uncle Josh is sitting in the red chair. Aunt Irene is in the rocker. He stares at me for a moment, then sits down next to me on the couch. He stays there for another fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m interpreting Josh and Aunt Irene to Brian because Brian can’t see or hear them.
By the time Josh and Aunt Irene left, floating out the living room window, Laura had been with them for nearly an hour. It was only then that Laura registered the fear and confusion in Brian’s eyes. He’d lost his favorite uncle, the man who had filled the hole left in his life after Laura split up with his father, and now it must have seemed as if his mother were losing her mind.
Listening to Laura, I was shaken, too. Nothing in my own experience prepared me to make sense of hers. She was talking to a ghost yet describing the conversations so matter-of-factly that she might have been talking about conversations with the mailman.
There are no ghosts, I reminded myself. These had to be waking dreams, hallucinations cooked up by grief, abetted, perhaps, by lack of sleep and the medications she was taking. But she was so convinced and so convincing that, for the first time in my life, I was open, if just barely, to the possibility that Josh’s restless soul really was reaching out to her.
I hoped that the spiritualists’ meeting would give me insights, if not answers.
Spiritualism goes back to the mid-1800s, and one of its adherents was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s friend, the great magician Harry Houdini, spent decades debunking psychics and mediums. Those who practice spiritualism today believe that some people can act as channels through which spirits can communicate with the living. The term spiritualism conjures images of musty Victorian houses with darkened rooms, windows shrouded with heavy drapes, candles flickering, people gathered around a table and holding hands as they summon the spirits of the dead. Cue spooky music.
The setting for this spiritualist meeting was a fifth-floor apartment in an undistinguished modern brick building. I parked, rode up in the elevator, and was greeted at the door with a warm hug by the host, Reverend Ida. She was an older woman, generously proportioned, wearing a flowing coppery caftan with amber beads and earrings that seemed to glow. We’d talked on the phone earlier, so I knew that I’d have to wait until the second half of the meeting to learn about mediumship. First there’d be a psychic healing.
Reverend Ida ushered me into the living room, where about a dozen others were already waiting. Folding chairs were set up in a circle around a mirrored coffee table topped with porcelain angels, votive candles, and lava lamps. The air was heavy with incense. I overheard one of the men saying, “Some people. They have rocks in their heads and don’t see the truth of healing, the power of the mind.” He punctuated the thought with a clenched fist. I made my way to the opposite end of the room, afraid that if he were at all prescient, he’d take one look at me and see how much uncertainty and doubt was knocking around inside me.