Читать книгу Signs from the Other Side - Bill Philipps - Страница 9

1 Surviving Childhood

No child says, “When I grow up, I want to be a psychic medium!” Even if they were to express that desire, it simply does not happen that way.

You won’t find a psychic medium alongside a banker, lawyer, and veterinarian presenting to students at a school on career day. There is no high school aptitude test for your counselor to administer to help you decide if you would be best suited to the occupation of psychic medium. And it’s certainly not a family business that you can inherit from your parents or grandparents.

You are selected to receive this gift, a gift the souls in heaven plant in your mind that evolves over time. Once the spirits know that you realize who they are and that you are willing and able to communicate their messages to their loved ones on earth, word spreads among them. Before you know it, your mind has become their sanctuary, and you have become their channel. They trust you, and they rely on you to convey their messages. Thus, a psychic medium is born.

The experience is very similar to what is depicted in the 1990 Oscar-winning movie Ghost. Whoopi Goldberg’s character, Oda Mae, is a psychic, or at least she pretends to be one to try to make a living. Patrick Swayze plays Sam, who is shot and killed on the street in what appears to be a robbery attempt gone wrong, though it is actually a premeditated murder. After his death, Sam visits Oda Mae in her psychic shop; she can’t see him, but she can hear him. He implores her to tell his girlfriend, Molly (played by Demi Moore), that he was murdered and that her life could also be in danger. It takes a lot of pestering by Sam for Oda Mae to accept that she really can hear a dead person, but after she does, and conveys his message to Molly, other spirits begin to appear to her on a regular basis to try to get her to relay messages to their own loved ones. They have found their channel in Oda Mae.

When it first happened to me, I denied it. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t want to believe it. But once I knew it was real, I didn’t want to let it go. I realized I’d been given a gift that could bring peace, happiness, and closure to people in ways that they otherwise couldn’t experience. As burdensome as it was at times, it was a responsibility I felt I had to assume.

Before I go any further into how I do what I do, let me briefly share with you my bizarre upbringing and how this extraordinary life started for me. You will find many more details in my book Expect the Unexpected, but here is a summary to familiarize you with my background.

My parents both suffered with drug addiction before I was born, and the birth of their first child didn’t change their habits. I was raised in Southern California in a toxic environment, a witness to abuse in many forms. The fact that I made it out of my childhood alive was a miracle.

Mom and Dad separated in 1991 when I was six years old. They got back together after a few months, but my mom secretly had a boyfriend. She devised a plan to kidnap me from my dad, and she followed through with it one day after he left for work. We fled to a friend’s house, where we stayed until late in the evening as Dad drove up and down the neighborhood streets searching and screaming for us. Afraid he would find us, Mom dragged me to an abandoned school bus in a ditch, lit with gas lanterns. We hid there with her junkie friends, who were high on crack, jabbing themselves with needles, and performing sex acts on each other. I buried myself in the backseat of the bus with my ears covered and eyes squeezed tightly shut while Mom joined them.

The next day my mom, her boyfriend, and I boarded a Greyhound bus. We spent several days traveling cross-country to Brooklyn, New York, where her boyfriend had family. We lived there in various houses and apartments, and I often had to visit the closest church to get food since I didn’t have any at “home.” I didn’t realize we were homeless, because I never slept on a street — but we were. I rarely had a bed. I often slept on floors in rooms with multiple people I didn’t know. Once I was settled under my blanket for the night, Mom would give me a kiss, tell me she loved me, and then usually hit the streets for her drug fix. Sometimes she was home by morning; other times she wasn’t.

I was shuttled back and forth between a couple of schools each year, depending on where we were living at the time. I managed to keep up my grades, though I’m not sure how, given the instability in my life. A lot of things I saw daily — drugs, guns, violence — scared the crap out of me, but given that it was all I had known since the day I was born, nothing surprised me.

I lived in New York for three years. My stay there ended when my mom’s boyfriend’s sister, who had been housing us and taking care of me anytime Mom was on a drug run, had had enough. She tracked down my dad, who was living and working in Las Vegas. She told him if he’d send a plane ticket, I was all his. He did.

I was happy to be with my dad, but the living arrangements were like those in New York. We spent about six months in an apartment in Vegas, where Dad struggled to make ends meet and continued to suffer with his addiction. We then moved back to Southern California and lived in different hotels. This transience continued for almost three years until I was twelve, when my grandma (my dad’s mom) took me in to give me some stability for the first time in my life.

While living with my dad and grandma, I regularly kept in contact with my mom by phone. Despite what she had put me through, I loved her deeply, and I knew how much she loved me. Because of my dad’s obvious distrust toward her, I wouldn’t return to New York to visit her until August 1999, just a few weeks short of my fifteenth birthday and nearly six years after I had last seen her. I went back because her boyfriend called to tell me she had pancreatic cancer and was failing fast. She had mentioned to me a few days earlier that she had some medical issues, but she didn’t let me know how dire they were because she didn’t want me to worry. I caught a red-eye flight to New York on a Friday to see her. I arrived Saturday morning and went straight to the hospital.

That evening, alone with her in the room and with her hand in mine, I watched as she quietly passed away.

Two days after my mom’s death, in the guest bedroom of an old home I was staying in on Long Island, I was awakened by a natural light in the far corner of the room. Actually, a supernatural light.

It was my mom.

She was young, beautiful, healthy, and happy — not the sickly, beaten-down woman I had just seen die in the hospital. When I realized that it was her and acknowledged her, she smiled. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but I knew this was not a dream. I was awake, and she was there, like an apparition. She appeared to be more alive than I was at that hour.

“Billy, I want you to know that I’m okay,” she said in a soft, soothing voice. “Also, know that I will take care of you.”

And then she vanished.

I stayed awake for a while in case she returned, but she didn’t. I continued to sleep in that room for the next couple of nights, hoping . . . but to no avail.

Within a few weeks after I returned home to Southern California, my dad suddenly began a yearlong journey toward quitting his drug habit. I know it was fueled by my mom’s death, which bothered him a lot. He cried when I called from New York to tell him she had passed. They’d had some serious differences, but I always knew they loved each other, even when they didn’t outwardly show it. Since the end of that year, my dad has been clean. I believe that when Mom said she would take care of me, this is what she meant. She helped my dad sober up, which was a very big deal for me considering I was only fifteen years old at that time and had just lost her. She couldn’t take care of me in her earthly form because of her own drug addiction, but she made up for it when she entered her next life and helped Dad kick his addiction.