Chapter 5
by Bruce Gale
On January 31, 2014, I attended my first channeling event with Roland. I honestly had no expectations, but I must admit that I was secretly praying that I might be able to get some peace about my brother, Ed.
Edward Emerson Gale was my cool older brother. His behavior began to frighten all of us. One day Mom went into the cellar and found a large pile of rocks. She asked Ed if he had brought them in for any particular reason. With utter calm he told her of the “spirits” that inhabited them and gave him messages. When they put this together with other changes in his behavior, my parents became concerned for him. But it was when he was taken into custody by police for being found in camos with a loaded gun in a state forest that they became frightened about what those “messages” might be causing Ed to do that would be a danger to himself or to others.
He had a happy, normal childhood and was diagnosed with late onset of schizophrenia at the age of thirty-two. Although the impact of the disorder can often be eased by treatment, schizophrenia is a lifelong disorder that affects a person’s ability to think, feel, and behave normatively. The key symptom that creates gravest concerns are the times of delusions or hallucinations the person deems real. People affected by this mental illness are often living in an alternative reality.
That was the first time we lost him.
When he was married and a new father, he became severely delusional and required psychotropic medication to function comfortably. With treatment, it is possible for people to live well with schizophrenia. Without it, the prognosis can be frightening. In my brother’s case, a terrible misjudgment by his mental health clinician to lower medication dosage led to what could have been an avoidable tragedy. On Good Friday 1986, he took off in his car and we never saw him again. Ed now felt lost to us forever.
Now aware of how many thousands of families end up with missing persons due to mental health issues, my wife and mother helped form the National Network for the Missing and Homeless Mentally Ill in Massachusetts. Their mission was to try to locate persons with mental illnesses who are reported missing by families, loved ones, or friends and to reunite them when possible. Their work finding many missing persons for other families using data from other organizations and the shelter system across the nation had success, but not for our family. My brother Ed never interacted with the homeless or human services support systems. There were no records of his real name or Social Security number having been used after he disappeared. He did not turn up in homeless shelter records or prison system databases. No sign of him ever emerged in public records even to this day. Upon my mother’s passing, we handed over our work to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (now the National Alliance on Mental Illness) so that the work would go forward by the next teams of caring family members.
The one thing I knew about him was that he had keen survival skills from his teen years. He would often retreat into a state forest and collect pieces of tree trunks in the family home basement before he left, so we thought he might have headed deep into some woods somewhere. That is how my wife and I would picture him as we prayed for him and worked with agencies to find him.
We longed for peace of mind about his well-being—or even of his demise. I had recently learned of the national network of medical examiners and police who were cataloguing DNA to identify all the deceased men and women who were never claimed by families and so existed as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” and I contacted them. This is the work of NamUs.gov. The ability to reunite families, even after their loved ones had passed, would bring great peace to so many. I then sought that peace that at least knowing whether he was alive or had passed would bring. My efforts here failed. No matches were recorded. It seemed as if my brother vanished forever.
And so the night I sat down in the room with other grieving souls to listen to Roland, I did open my heart as Roland asked. I opened my heart and spirit to any message for me. Not yet with belief it would come, but with hope.
Roland pointed to me and told me there was a man behind me. My father. I adored my father and was able to have wonderful times with him as we cared for him through his last years. I long felt him near me and now had affirmation that he “always was there.” But when asked if he was whom I was hoping for, I was honestly able to say no.
Then I was uplifted as Roland went on to say that my mother was next to him! His description of them together fit truth only my wife and I in that room would know. I felt a wonderful calm love enfolding me.
But again, I was able to honestly and simply answer “no” when he asked if that was whom I was seeking.
Roland seemed content with those two responses, and we had a moment of comfortable silence as he listened and looked at me.
Then he said he saw a younger male with them—and that they said, “We got him.” He repeated that several times. And it was exactly what my mother would say! It was an expression I recognized immediately.
This was a very comforting statement, but we also had another younger male family member that passed. I was not assuming who it was and simply took the joy of having Mom and Dad with me and whomever they were with. It was not a fully satisfying answer, but it brought me peace and I was grateful for any blessing of affirmation.
The event ended.
Before we left, Roland asked my wife to go up to him as he had “been waiting for her” and had to talk to her. She had held in her heart special prayers about the passing of her Native American grandmother, Gra, and her beloved niece and nephew, whom we had raised as our children and who passed as young adults. And she did, indeed, get messages from both.
Doe awoke one morning to a clear vision of her Gra at the foot of her bed with an arm around our “children”—all were younger, fully healthy, and shining with a gentle glow as they laughed in pure joy! Doe had been waiting for her Gra to make some contact, as she was raised and trained in tribal tradition. Gra’s silence was bewildering. Once Gra showed up with the “children,” she understood that Gra waited to bring them all together for reassurance!
I was so grateful for her sake and was gathering our coats to leave when I heard her cry out my name and beckon me forward.
As she was speaking with Roland, she had thanked him for the message voiced to me and mentioned that she felt it was about my brother. She talked about him having been missing these past decades and was compelled to mention his relationship with trees. His relationship with trees went back to our childhood and was a primary place where we bonded and shared stories—we went fishing, had long walks in the woods, and both felt a powerful, life-long relationship with trees. The Purple Paper revealed trees with a stream … just as it had been in our childhood forest where we spent countless hours fishing. This was affirmation, along with the words on the paper and Roland’s spirit bringing him to speak to me that night.
Roland literally lit up in his countenance and began to go through his pile of Purple Papers. He pulled one out and read it and told me he had written it that morning as he prayed and was preparing for that night. It was dated that morning and had seven pine trees colored in with green. A stream, with blue lines, wound through the trees. And a figure was lying next to the stream. The words he had written that morning said, “I know you don’t know what happened to me. All I know is that I’m in heaven. I saw ‘the light’ and followed it. I promise to stand with you, just you wait and see … all the signs will come.”
“This,” Roland said to me, “is for you.”
My heart and spirit leapt as I could “hear” Ed’s voice saying those words—in that cadence—with exactly that expression! “Just you wait and see …”
I felt the peace that passes all understanding fill me, as I knew that Ed had used Roland’s gift to grant me this time of healing and assurance.
Ed is lost no more!