Now that Tom was on the other side, my psychic floodgates opened wide. My whole concept of life was undergoing a cataclysmic paradigm shift. It was like I had a very powerful connection to the spirit world, and it was open for business. I believe this was instigated by Tom from the other side. He had some very urgent, unfinished business which could only be accomplished if he opened up my psychic communication channels. Some part of his heart had remained close enough to mine to enable us to sense one another as spirits. It wasn’t easy. Even with a great deal of evidence, it’s so challenging to have faith in what the spirit world is trying to communicate to you.

Tom and I had spent a year bound together in a long, exhausting struggle of doctor's appointments and hospital stays, where they had been accommodating enough to let me stay over and care for him. There were numerous operations, radiation treatments, chemo, pain pills in ever higher doses, and our apartment had so many medical devices it was practically a small hospital itself. Tom's physical suffering had been punishing and acute, but we still had to beg him to take a narcotic pain killer. He never complained, was the most patient patient, and never cursed fate or anyone. His stalwart spirit kept our spirits up, until the end. I can never forget his dreadful physical suffering. He paid a terrible price for his sins.

When we had to let him go, my son and I were devastated. Our fearless leader was gone. The man who we both loved and adored was no longer there with us, cheering us onward. Our lodestar through good times and bad, our champion who could always find something to make us smile in any situation, was gone.

Now that I was done with doctors and hospitals, except for the endless bills, there was so much to do that I hardly had the time or energy to grieve. Because New Jersey was no longer in the budget, I had to get ready to move out of our apartment, every corner stuffed with fifteen years of memories and mementos to sort through. On top of everything else, there was so much aggravating official paperwork to be gotten through. Every day brought some new crisis that had to be dealt with.

However, my constant state of weary apprehension and worry seemed to open psychic windows that I didn't know I had. The psychic things that started happening were vivid and startling, as they had to be to penetrate my distracted consciousness, but I hardly thought about them at the time. I merely accepted them with a kind of detached curiosity. But though I was lost in that dark obscurity, Tom was reaching out to my spirit and soul from beyond.

Within a week of Tom's passing over, I had a visitation from him in a dream, but it had an odd feature. In the dream, Tom and I were together, laughing and happy, like the old days. He looked younger and seemed full of energy. As we walked around, I was happier than I'd been in a long time. Suddenly, I became aware of what was happening. Tom wasn’t sick. I took his hand and joyously burst out, "Honey, look at you! You're much better. That new chemo is working. We'd better call the doctors." He looked at me a bit sadly, as if I'd spoiled our good time and said, "Oh, I'm tired of doctors." Then he was gone, and I woke up.

I lay in bed, reliving the dream, savoring every second of it. It was Tom. There was nothing dreamlike about his presence. He was so real that I was calling doctors again. I had felt his presence in the way I felt Tom's grandfather, with that eerie sixth sense that seemed to come and go. These dreams were not filaments and wisps, mixed up stories from daytime, these dreams seemed to occur in the theater of my heart. They were more vivid than life, because their physical presence was pure feeling. I knew it was Tom's spirit and mine having a little bit of happy time together after all the suffering we’d endured.

And what was odd about this dream experience was that our spirits were so happy that my physical body woke up enough to make plans for this world. Honey, we need to tell the doctors the new chemo is working. Was I really so dim-witted that I had forgotten Tom was gone, dead, not of this world? No, I had experienced him as recovered, that’s why I wanted to call doctors in this world. Was this just a wish fulfillment dream? Who sees their loved one well and wishes for more chemo and doctors? Nor was it merely wishing he was back again or revisiting the past. He wasn’t back. And the minute I felt he was back, he had to go. No, we were somewhere else.

What I think had happened was that my spirit had been with Tom's spirit in the afterlife, without my human person knowing it. Tom's sad look told me that if my spirit hadn't gotten so carried away with joy and awakened my body, we could have gone on awhile longer, laughing together. Maybe this was happening every night.



But of course... it was just a dream. Believe it or not, even after all my experiences, I remained stuck in my rational world. I felt the dream strongly, but it was only a feeling. Feelings are just ephemeral chemical reactions in the brain. Best to ignore them because they cloud your powers of reason. That old skepticism and doubt overcame me, as always. I had too much to do to think about it.