FEMALE LINEAGE
Around the ancient tower, I have been circling for a thousand years.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
Mothers and daughters. I was now forty years old. Over the last decade, I'd been a practicing psychiatrist, a member of the faculty at UCLA Medical Center, Saint John's Hospital, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. That I was devoted to a profession my mother understood and respected meant a great deal to her. It had taken compromise by us both, but we initially had found safe terrain by talking about medicine. My mother referred patients to me, and we discussed their treatment. It was easier to stay away from more personal subjects like our relationship or my boyfriends. In her eyes, no one was ever good enough for me: They were too old, too young, not Jewish, not financially secure enough.…Otherwise we'd argue—get defensive, take strong opposing positions, and then a blowup would inevitably follow. So we learned to use our discussions of medical issues as neutral ground where there was mutual trust.
As time passed, when I'd go to my parents' home for weekly Shabbat dinners, my mother and I grew able to talk about everything. We had found a more tender way of relating. Increasingly, she became my close friend, my confidante. Now more sure of myself, I no longer felt overshadowed by my mother's strength. I could be giving, express my feelings, and listen without always being on guard. Realizing how important my parents were to me, I was determined to savor the love we had for each other. As for my mother, she had been afraid of my anger, how fiercely I could lash out and wound her when we disagreed, and she had learned perhaps too well to avoid these clashes. Over the years, sensing that our time together was finite, she risked reaching out to me.
In the winter of 1990, my mother became ill with cancer. Twenty years before, she had been diagnosed with a slow-growing type of lymphoma, but her symptoms—small lumps in her neck—had been treated with minimal doses of radiation. Recently, however, she had been having low-grade fevers, indicating that the disease had progressed.
One February evening while my mother and I were drinking tea on the living room couch, chatting, feeling particularly close, she began to talk to me about her mother, Rose Ostrum. Though my mother had in the past spoken of Grandmom as a free spirit and ardent feminist, Rose lived most of her life in Philadelphia, and my parents and I moved to Los Angeles when I was six, so I never really knew her until her later years.
“I want to tell you something about Grandmom,” my mother began. “You know, she was always flamboyant. A whirlwind of energy, wildly opinionated. She walked with her head high. She managed the family pharmacy. And at a time when women didn't go to college, she sent two daughters to medical school.”
I suddenly noticed an undertone of urgency in my mother's voice, as she paused before going on, seeming to compose herself for what she was about to say.
“Judith, I don't know how to put this.” Several moments passed. “The point is…your grandmother had an unusual reputation in the neighborhood, a reputation for…for being a healer.”
“What?” I blurted out. I couldn't believe my ears. “You must be kidding.”
My mother pushed on with what she was determined to say. “Grandmom also had a knack for predicting events that came true. She was raised Jewish and kept a kosher home, but she believed that her abilities to heal and see into the future were separate from religion. These talents were passed down through the generations, from woman to woman. It was during the Depression. Many of her neighbors couldn't afford doctors. They would come to Grandmom when they were sick. She would take them back to a tiny, unheated wooden shed behind our home, would lay them down on a wooden table and place her hands on their body. Warmth would radiate from her hands, going deeper than the skin. When they sat up, my mother would give them herbal tea concocted from medicinal plants she grew herself. These were recipes that had been passed down from her mother.”
I felt dizzy, an intense heat rising into my face. My grandmother a psychic and a healer? “Mother,” I exclaimed bitterly, “why didn't you tell me this before?”
My mother's terrible look of anguish stopped me short. “Try to understand. I only wanted the best for you. Your grandmother was eccentric. Though she was beloved by most of our neighbors, some people thought she was weird. I was afraid for you.”
“But couldn't you see it would have helped me to feel that I wasn't alone?”
She noticed the struggle in my eyes, reached over to touch my hand. “Oh, Judith. When you were a young girl and I found out that you were psychic, I didn't want to encourage it. I didn't want you to be ridiculed like my mother sometimes was.”
I was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. I was flabbergasted and hurt. I felt cheated out of the closeness we could have had. How much difference this would have made to me as a child. To learn it now seemed far too late.
“Maybe I made a mistake,” my mother went on. “I was only concerned about your happiness. I was torn, so I downplayed your abilities to protect you.”
“So what made you bring this up tonight? What changed?”
“Judith, dear, please hear me out. Our lives are so different now. You stuck to your beliefs, carved out your own path, even though it's not the one I would have picked for you. But I respect your choice. We're not at war anymore. And I have so little left to risk.”
I was reeling. An old emptiness was being unearthed, a terribly familiar unnerving sensation that I had lived and breathed so often as a child. As these dark thoughts coursed through my mind, I fought back my tears. My greatest fear was that my rage would cause my mother to stop talking. I realized what an extraordinary moment this was, that my mother finally felt compelled to place my psychic abilities in context, to show me my true lineage—also that she wanted to clarify her own position, to set the record straight. Finally, of course, she had done everything but make explicit that she was really ill, with all that might imply.
My mother and I quietly watched the brilliant flames of the fire cast long shadows on the corner walls. I tried to collect myself. Looking over at my mother, now so tiny and frail, I felt my anger undercut, replaced by compassion. I would gain nothing from lashing out or blaming her. As she lay her head back and rested in front of the fire, I made a decision: I refused to allow my anger to poison whatever time we had left to be together.
By now, in my spiritual search, I had learned that everything in life has a time and a purpose. It was no mistake that I hadn't known about my grandmother before. I had had to struggle, to grow, to gain strength, in order to become the woman I was now. I began to comprehend that my battle to make the psychic my own had been crucial to my growth. It had been arduous, a fight I could have lost. To win, I had been pushed to my limits and then beyond. It was also true that my mother had been one of my greatest teachers. Her uncompromising dedication to her convictions had over and over again forced me to take a stand. Nonetheless, I had waited a lifetime to hear these words.
My mother leaned toward me, love radiating from her face. I had paid a price for her decisions, but I knew in this moment that none of them had been based on malice. She had done her best. As difficult as it was to accept this, as angry as I wanted to be, I couldn't deny that I also was experiencing a profound sense of relief. She was finally telling me the truth. I appreciated, too, that she'd taken an enormous chance that I wouldn't understand. She was, I saw, counting on the resilience of our love, on the intimacy we had worked so hard to establish.
As my mother and I sat there, silent, I remembered a recurring dream I'd had about my grandmother. Naked, her body soft and fleshy like a Renaissance nude, she would lead me through a labyrinth of dark underground tunnels. We proceeded down blind passageways without so much as a candle to light our path. I held on to her hand, trusting that she knew her way. There was a quality of yearning and timelessness in our closeness. I could now see that we were linked by an invisible cord. As long as I'd been having that dream, she had served as my guide.
“You know,” my mother said, bringing me back to the present, “when I was a child my mother would lay me down on a couch, and with a sweeping motion run her hand over me three times from head to foot. Then she would shake my feet up and down, making me giggle and squirm. And while she did this she'd repeat in Yiddish, ‘Grace, Grubb, Gizunt.' Through her hands she was imparting, as the words said, greatness, hardiness, and good health. She wanted to help me grow. She would only do this for children, to give them long life and make them beautiful. It was an extension of the healing work she used in the shed room with her patients.”
I was amazed. Suddenly I remembered my mother doing just this to me when I was a child. How I loved her to hold me then, the subtle scent of her perfume, the warmth of her touch, the tranquillity afterward. It was hard for me to take in, but my mother had known she was transmitting energy, although she refused to speak of it that way.
I realized that many parents are able to send love through their hands, but see it matter-of-factly, as a natural expression of their affection. They don't think of this as healing, but it is. When a mother holds her newborn in her arms, her joy and acceptance are directly communicated through touch. If our child is hurt, we rush to embrace her, to stay close and soothe her pain. Our impulse to comfort, our need for physical Contact, is predicated on an instinctual desire to give and receive love. This is the essence of being human: to share our hearts, to exchange warmth and be nurtured by one another.
When I was a child, sometimes just before I went to sleep, and always when I was ill, my mother would sit beside my bed and gently pat my stomach, creating a subtle rocking motion, until I either fell asleep or felt better. I found this sensation of love flowing into my body very soothing.
“Yes,” my mother said. “I learned this from your grandmother. I knew it was a form of healing, but I didn't want to fill your head with strange ideas,”
I breathed deeply and thought of Grandmom's death. At eighty, she had gotten Alzheimer's disease, losing her memory and regressing to a childlike state. Having moved to Los Angeles, she spent her last few years in a retirement home in the Pico-Fairfax district, a few miles from us. The night she died, I was the one they called, because my parents were traveling in Europe and couldn't be contacted. I was told that Rose had been sitting in her favorite rocking chair, eating a vanilla ice-cream cone. When she finished, she mentioned to her companion how delicious it was, and then quietly slumped over. No fanfare, no fuss. A perfect departure. Beyond this image of my grandmother, however, I barely knew her. I had missed so much.
Throughout that winter, my mother gradually opened up more about my psychic heritage. She told me that my cousin Sindy went into labor at midnight, with her second daughter. Melissa, her four-year-old, was sound asleep and unaware that her parents had rushed out to the hospital, leaving her in the care of Sindy's mother, Phyllis. At 2 A.M. Melissa woke up, crying hysterically, “Something happened to Mommy!” No amount of reassurance would quiet her. The truth was that at exactly that moment Sindy's labor became complicated. The anesthetic had been too strong, she wasn't taking in enough oxygen, and a tube had to be inserted down her trachea in order for her to breathe. Although Sindy suffered no ill effects and the baby was healthy, Melissa had picked up the danger they were in. Because Sindy was herself somewhat psychic, she wasn't alarmed by Melissa's premonition. She recognized that Melissa might be psychic, too.
These conversations about the family became an after-dinner ritual. On Friday nights, after office hours, I would drive over to my parents' condo. When dinner was finished, my father, delighted that my mother and I were getting along and relieved that our fighting was over, would conveniently disappear into the den to watch a Lakers game. With cups of mint tea in our hands, my mother and I would move into the living room.
Though my mother had always spoken her mind, it had been a huge step for her to divulge that Rose was psychic. I soon found out that as bold as these admissions had been, she had been holding back something even more intimate. It was about her own life: her most well-guarded secret.
“When I first opened my medical practice,” she said during one of our Friday nights, “I realized that I had some psychic and healing abilities, too. They weren't as strong as in you or your grandmother, but they were definitely there.”
My mother a psychic healer? I stared at this thin, determined woman beside me and wondered who she was. She had kept this part of herself hidden just as I had tried to do when I began my practice.
“I knew that modern medicine didn't have all the answers,” she went on. “From the beginning, twenty years ago, my oncologist recommended that I take intravenous doses of chemotherapy to treat the lymphoma. But I decided to keep the disease in check with my mind. I never told anyone, but every morning when I woke up, I would hypnotize myself into being well. I would place my hands over my body and send positive thoughts through them while I visualized the tumors shrinking. I believe that I kept myself healthy: According to statistics, I shouldn't be alive today.”
“Why didn't you confide in me?” I asked. “I would have understood.”
My mother shot me a look of disbelief. “If you recall, when I was first diagnosed back in nineteen-seventy, you and I were arguing so much that it didn't feel safe to talk to you. You were withdrawn and unreachable. I didn't consider you a support. My healing was private. Talking about it with anyone would have taken away the power.”
Pictures of our many fights came hurtling into my mind: doors slamming, bitter words exchanged, running out of the house, threats never to return. We were both stubborn. It had been a battle of wills. I could see why she had been reluctant to trust me.
“I learned privacy the hard way,” she continued. “While I was growing up, your grandmother talked a lot about her gifts. And her premonitions were really far-fetched. Rose predicted the jet age, rapid transit, the use of laser beams in medicine. But in the twenties, nobody believed her. I loved her very much, but I was a kid. She embarrassed me. I wanted to be normal. Rose couldn't understand that.”
Mothers and daughters. I could see that we had both engaged in our own forms of rebellion. She had reacted to her mother by becoming conservative, denying her gift; I had fought to express my psychic abilities and let them shine.
The more my mother spoke, the bluer her eyes seemed to become. “When I was ten,” she went on, “I had a premonition that I was going to be a doctor. Nothing would stop me. But there I was, in a society that looked down on anyone who was different. My mother didn't care what people thought about her, but I did. I didn't want to repeat her mistakes, so I decided to keep my abilities to myself.”
I knew her position was well founded. In 1942, when she was accepted into Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, the field of medicine was male dominated. Only a small quota of women was admitted, as compared to the forty percent today. And of course during my own residency, over three decades later, I still didn't feel I could discuss the psychic with my peers for fear of being judged and ostracized. (When my mother was at Hahnemann, the unusual curriculum covered both traditional and homeopathic medicine. Though she was able to study legitimately what her mother had done in her practice with herbs, homeopathy was already well out of mainstream contemporary medicine.)
For the past thirty years, after our move to Los Angeles, my mother had been a traditional Beverly Hills family practitioner with an office on Bedford Drive. Her patients became an extended family, and she was the mother hen. Being a doctor was everything to her; she would do nothing to jeopardize that. But unbeknownst to her patients, she would consciously direct loving energy through her hands. This had become so routine that she barely gave it a second thought. I felt it was a shame that she couldn't have been more open about her gifts, but I respected her decision to heal in the context of mainstream medicine. Just as the persona of “psychiatrist” was one I had to make fit, my mother could never come to terms with that of “healer.” Still, I was sad that she had felt she needed to wall off so much of herself, to deprive herself of such precious talents.
“I sometimes knew things about my patients before they even told me,” she continued. “There's a little voice in my head that I listen to. It's never wrong. My patient Rita is a good example. She once came to see me with a terrible cold. When I was taking her temperature, the voice told me to examine her breasts. I didn't usually do that for a cold, but I followed my instincts. Her right breast was fine, but in the left one I found a small, hard, peasized nodule. I knew it hadn't been there before, so I sent her for a mammogram and a biopsy.”
“What happened?” I was spellbound.
“The lump was malignant. In a week, she had it surgically removed and started radiation and chemotherapy. That was two years ago. Rita's been cancer-free ever since. If I hadn't picked up the lump so early, there's a good chance that the cancer might have spread. I believe that by listening to the voice in my head, I saved Rita's life.”
I was now completely reappraising my mother. The effort I had made to incorporate the psychic into my medical practice was a task she had already accomplished! Without knowing it, I was following in her footsteps, carrying on a family tradition. I had always searched for a feeling of rightness about my life, and now I was getting validation for the direction I'd instinctively chosen to pursue.
I later found out that my mother's younger sister, Phyllis, a doctor in Philadelphia specializing in internal medicine, was also a psychic. Despite their mutual affection, there had always been a certain amount of competition between them. Yet the psychic was a common bond: When they couldn't talk to anyone else, they became confidantes in late-night long-distance phone conversations, discussing their psychic experiences with each other.
“In nineteen sixty-three,” my mother told me, “Phyllis's husband had his first heart attack. While he was still in the hospital, she had a dream that she was making medical rounds with a group of physicians. After they all reviewed the current treatments for heart conditions, she came away knowing that subcutaneous heparin was the right medication for her husband.”
“What made that dream psychic?” I asked. “Heparin is routinely given to cardiac patients to prevent blood clots.”
“But in the early sixties,” my mother replied, “heparin wasn't used for that. There was no clinical documentation to indicate that heparin would help in postcoronary care. It didn't become standard practice until much later. When Phyllis told the cardiologist to give her husband heparin, he refused. So she decided that she'd administer it on her own. Phyllis didn't have many dreams, but when she did, they almost always were right.”
“Did she ever tell anyone about her dream?”
My mother shook her head. “She once mentioned it to another doctor, but he gave her such a strange look that she never brought it up again. He wanted scientific proof, but of course she didn't have any.”
Phyllis's husband, a gynecologist, had no interest in the psychic when they married. At first, when her predictions came true, she felt that he was threatened. He had been raised believing in traditional male roles, and she was convinced it challenged his need for control. But over the course of fifteen years, she watched him become more comfortable with her predictions. When enough of them had proven accurate, he no longer viewed them as untenable. He had come to appreciate their value in time for her to save his life.
Since 1942, there had been twenty-five physicians in our family: five women and twenty men. The healing instinct had been there for all of us. But as far as my mother knew, none of the males had ever been psychic. She couldn't explain why. Maybe there was something inherent in being female that made it easier to tap into this information, or perhaps it was genetic. Maybe some of the men were psychic also, but had even less cultural permission to express it than the women had. Neither of us was sure.
What was sure for me was that with each conversation I had with my mother, the inner fabric of my being was being woven more tightly. After years of floating above myself, disconnected from my body, I felt as if a gigantic magnet were pulling me back down to earth. The ground seemed more solid beneath my feet. I now began to pamper myself in ways that I'd previously dreaded or considered an inconvenience. I went shopping for new clothes, permed my hair so that it was wild and curly, had regular facials, and, when I was especially brave, darkened my eyelashes with black mascara.
In my freshman year of high school, I'd had my first heartbreak, which undermined my confidence. I was fourteen. Without any warning, my boyfriend left me for a gorgeous blond-haired, blue-eyed cheerleader who drove a red Camaro. I blamed myself; I decided that I hadn't been pretty or popular enough to keep him. It took me months to get over the breakup, and my insecurities stayed with me for years, churning below the surface. After I learned about my family history, these beliefs changed. Looking in the mirror at my Modigliani face, olive skin, and hazel eyes that peered into people for a little bit too long, I now liked what I saw. Discovering the psychic link among the women in my family had strengthened me; I was allowing the richness of my womanhood to emerge.
In the spring of 1990, I had a dream.
I'm standing in a bombed-out deserted chapel in a desert wilderness. Above me there is a four-story cathedral ceiling with huge triangular-shaped windows on each wall with sunlight flooding through them. The remnants of a small altar stand toward the front of the room. The atmosphere is peaceful and comforting. Although I can see no one, I am aware of the presence of a group of ancient invisible beings, but I don't know who they are.
All at once, I am overcome with shame about my anger and rebellion at being on earth. There has always been a part of me that never felt I belonged here, and so I didn't feel obliged to cooperate fully. I never gave my all; I hid in my mother's shadow, not speaking up about what I knew. She was the star and I remained anonymous. I am ashamed of my lack of courage.
Gently and with care, the group of invisible beings lift me high into the air, showering me with a feeling of pure forgiveness. I see my life with sudden clarity, and I understand that none of my concerns about the past matter. Everything is exactly how it was meant to be. I have been forgiven. Now is the time to share what I know with others.
This dream led me back to my past. While I was growing up, I kept notebooks filled with poems I'd written. They were intimate accounts of my first love affair, feelings about my mother, about my LSD trips I took in high school, all laced with a thread of the separateness that pervaded my life at the time. When I was fourteen, my mother told me she wanted to publish these poems. She was obviously extremely proud of my writings and wanted to share them. Hungry for her approval, I reluctantly gave my consent, a decision I hadn't fully thought out. She published the poems in a small hardcover book, and before I knew it she had given copies to all of our family, friends, and her patients. One of her friends, a music teacher at Julliard, even set a few of my poems to music and sent us the tape. I was mortified; my inner life was on public display. Embarrassed and exposed, I wanted to curl up into a tiny ball and become invisible. I didn't write another word for years.
The forgiveness dream brought with it great freedom. It was as if a restrictive mantle had finally been removed, one I hadn't even known was covering me. That very morning, I grabbed a yellow legal pad from my desk and began writing. Ideas flowed out of me like a torrent of water breaking through a dam. The voice that had been stifled for decades was released. The dream had given me permission to take chances, think in new directions, let my daydreams take form.
While my strength was mounting, my mother was gradually beginning to fade. She lived through the next two years propelled solely by her ferocious passion for life. Her body was gradually weakening, but she put on a convincing front. No one besides my father and a few close friends knew the seriousness of her illness. Her medical practice continued to flourish, and she didn't miss a single day of work. Each morning, outfitted in designer dresses, her hair perfectly groomed, her makeup flawless, she'd see patients nonstop for eight hours. No one suspected that there was anything wrong.
Although I was aware that the cancer had grown and I could see that she was wilted with fatigue each evening, I refused to acknowledge how sick my mother really was. I didn't want to know. I had expected her to live forever. My mother had always been vivacious and outgoing. She loved nothing better than attending extravagant black-tie parties and lavish high-profile political events. Wherever she went, she had always been the center of attention, commanding the respect due to a matriarch. Now that the years of struggle were behind us, I clung fiercely to my mother; I had no intention of letting her go. The possibility of her death was unthinkable. I simply blocked it out.
Early in October of 1992, my mother visited me at my condo in Marina del Rey. We laid a madras blanket on the beach and sat down to talk. She had noticed that I was short tempered and burned out, that I hadn't had a vacation for eight months. I had never been very good at carving out time for myself, so together we went over my appointment book and blocked out a week at the end of the month. I agreed to take that time to rest and regenerate.
The night before my vacation, I had a dream:
I'm a child practicing T'ai Chi movements on the grass in a freshly mowed public park. A compassionate older Asian man is guiding me. I recognize him; he has been my teacher in earlier dreams. He shows me that by moving my body in a certain way, I can learn how to cross the bridge between life and death at will. I try the exercise, and I am ecstatic at the ease with which I can traverse both realms. My teacher says that to ready myself for what is to come, I must remember that I possess this ability, and I must have faith that death is not the end.
I stayed curled up under the covers half asleep, luxuriating in the triumph of my accomplishment in traveling between two worlds. But my hands and feet turned cold as I came more fully awake and the meaning of the dream began to sink in. It was a clear sign predicting my mother's death, and I didn't want to see it. Grief welled up in my chest, a virtual tsunami that threatened to swallow me up. But I had to protect myself. This was my first day off in many months. I was too tired and depleted to dwell on the implications right then. With as much emotional control as I could muster, I suppressed my feelings before they had a chance to gather momentum. I would reexamine the dream after I rebuilt my strength.
For the entire week I rested. I soaked up the sun, read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, an escape into the world of the preternatural, and meditated for an hour a day, slowing myself down to a saner pace. When my vacation was over, I was reenergized and my mind was fresh. I was eager to resume work. On the evening of my first day back, however, my worst fears were realized: I received an urgent phone call from my father. His voice was faint; he could have been a million miles away.
“Judith, your mother collapsed on the floor with a fever of a hundred and four. She's in the intensive-care unit at Cedars-Sinai.”
I strained to hear him, to take in the news. The words sounded long, drawn out, and deep, as if he were speaking in slow motion. Then I went numb. All was deadly silent. In one swift movement, the earth had been ripped out from beneath my feet. Unsupported, I was falling through space. Alone. Spinning out of control.
I don't know how I managed to drive myself to Cedars. I can't recall much of the trip. I do remember being dazed, wandering down the long hospital corridors past a blur of modern artwork on the wall. I took the elevator up to the third-floor intensive-care unit, where I joined my father. Although I had treated many terminally ill patients in the very same ICU, some comatose, some on the edge of death, I was unprepared for what I saw. There was my own mother, hooked up to a life-support system. Not a stranger or a patient. The woman who'd given birth to me lay in bed, tubes in every orifice, an arterial catheter in her neck, restraints tied to her wrists and ankles to prevent her from pulling out the IV. She was ranting, delirious from the fever, didn't even recognize me. I was seized by the horror of the scene, my helplessness, and the love I felt for both her and my father.
It was long after midnight when I got home. I went straight to bed but couldn't sleep. Getting up, I turned on the lights and rummaged through my closet shelves until I found the old stuffed white rabbit I'd slept with as a child. Then, again wrapped up in the covers, sheets quickly soaked with sweat, I rocked back and forth clutching the rabbit in my arms. The pain was too great; I didn't know how I'd ever get through it. I was terrified of the loss of my mother, of the hollow pit of aloneness that had lodged itself in my gut. My mind was racing; it was impossible to calm down. I got up and knelt at my meditation altar in my study, praying harder than I had ever prayed before. I made my bed beside the altar that night, and slept under a thick, pale blue down comforter. It felt safer there than in my bedroom. Finally, at three o'clock, I drifted into a dream:
I am in God's reception room waiting to be seen. God is late and I am impatient. His secretary, a radiant brunette woman, about thirty with a pageboy haircut, tells me that God has been delayed but has sent a message for me. He apologizes for his lateness, but he's very busy today. He hopes I won't get angry with him and leave in a huff. When he comes back, he promises that he'll meet with me for as long as I like.
When morning came, I arose still shaken, but I had regained my bearings. I had reached out for help and received it. The innocent sweetness of the dream, the acknowledgment that God was with me even though it didn't always feel that way, was tremendously reassuring. My mother's circumstances were no less distressing, but my panic and despair had lifted.
Within twenty-four hours, my mother's fever broke. I visited her in the hospital late that afternoon. She was limp with exhaustion and could barely talk. In one brief, lucid moment, she said, “Judith, I've passed the power on to you. It's yours, and you're ready to take it.”
“Stop being so melodramatic,” I said. But I understood. I saw an image of my mother handing me a priceless golden serving platter piled with luscious fruit that would remain perpetually ripe. The generational gift in our family—our psychic heritage—had been transmitted.
For me, the most difficult part of this time was watching the intensity of my mother's anger about being sick and out of control. She didn't want to die. She held on to life with the tenacity of a prizefighter, bloody and knocked down, but continuing to drag herself back into the ring. Sometimes, when I arrived at the hospital after a long day's work, my mother looked like a wild-eyed demon spitting fire at me and my father, relentlessly criticizing us for almost everything we did. I fought to remain patient; the few times I lost my temper only made things worse between us. Then one night, I had another dream:
I am in a prison cell, all alone, raging at the universe. I raise my arms into the air and scream out in frustration, “Why is all this happening to me?” Not expecting a response, I crumble to my knees. Then, although I can't see whom it belongs to, a genderless voice tenderly speaks out to me: “As you watch your mother deal with her illness, you are learning compassion. This isn't easy.”
It was difficult to be compassionate when I took my mother's anger so personally, but the dream allowed me to see her behavior from an entirely different point of view. My mother was tormented by her fear of death. In the middle of the night she would wake up from nightmares, panicked that she was going to die. Once, in a dream, her parents came to visit her and asked her to join them. She pushed them away, furious at the offer. Suddenly I understood that her anger wasn't directed at me. Rather, she needed to remain as disgruntled as possible because lashing out was her only remaining lifeline. I knew that this wasn't a conscious decision on her part, but rather an instinctual reaction to her feelings of spiritual emptiness. Judaism had always been important to her. She had attended services on Friday nights and on all the Jewish holidays for most of her life; and doing that had given her solace. Since getting sick, however, she felt that God had abandoned her, devastated that God would have allowed her to become so ill. As she lost faith in the religion that had previously sustained her, anger was all she had. In order to survive, she was holding on to her rage; it was like the last ember in a dying hearth.
At the same time, however, pieces of her armor were cracking. Many nights she would melt into my arms and ask me to lay my hands on her to help her sleep. It had become a natural part of how we related, and she willingly participated. I was honored that she allowed me to help her. She didn't have to hide anymore, to keep up pretenses. She responded to my touch and had grown to trust me. Once, at her request, I sang her the same lullaby she sang to me when I was a little girl, and I watched her face grow younger. Not caring if other people knew what we were doing, she would relax like a child while I transmitted all the love I could summon through my hands, as she peacefully dozed off in my lap.
She told everyone proudly, “My daughter's a magician. I don't need sleeping pills when she comes to visit. Judith puts me into a trance with her hands.”
Despite my mother's praise, I knew this was something we all can do. I had learned never to underestimate the power of love. When our family or friends are despairing or in pain, we don't have to sit by helplessly. Our love can be sustaining. True healing is put to the test in real life. This is when we can act, can apply everything we've been taught. For me, years of spiritual study were brought to bear as my mother lay dying. It was as though I'd been preparing for this moment all along.
When I sat with my mother, I often felt my grandmother's presence in the room. Three generations of women were gathered at my mother's deathbed.
Before this period, much of my energy had been tied up in grappling to find peace with my mother, in striving to make our relationship succeed. For the first time, I felt we had reached a resolution. All the barriers were gone. Even though, when I turned forty, I believed that I had come to terms with not having children, I now ached to have a child of my own. I wanted to pass on the gifts to keep the hereditary link unbroken.
My mother slipped into a coma late Christmas Day in 1992. As I was leaving her hospital room earlier that morning, she turned to me and whispered, “I love you, Judith.” These were the last words she ever spoke. During the next week, when I went to the hospital each evening to watch over her, I knew we were irrevocably connected, clearly members of the same tribe. I became fascinated with the beauty of her body, her soft, pink belly rising and falling with each labored breath. As I looked at the horizontal cesarean-section scar above her womb, I imagined myself as a newborn infant being lifted out of her and into the world. Now the boundaries between us had become blurred. No tightening. No resistance. No more strife. We were so interconnected that it was hard for me to tell where she ended and I began.
My mother lay in a coma for ten days, but although she was wasting away, her vital signs remained stable. I had underestimated her tenacious hold on life; she would not let go of her body. In the first week of the new year, my mother came to me in a dream:
We are standing on the roof garden of a two-story apartment building on Olympic Boulevard in Beverly Hills. My mother looks twenty years younger and is robust with energy. With a whimsical look, I ask her if she wants to fly. Without hesitation, she takes my hand and we lift off into the air miles above the city skyline, ascending toward the sun. She's amazed at how effortless our flight is. Cool wind rushes past our faces. We are both exhilarated.
I sat up in bed elated, but within minutes my mood darkened. The image of flying was an apt metaphor for her imminent death. The message flashed before me like a huge multicolored neon sign: My mother would be gone very soon. Any illusions that I still had about her possible recovery vanished with that dream. I had to accept the inevitability that even her unswerving determination and her bullheaded obstinacy didn't have the power to ward off her death. Although the impending loss was unbearable, I also knew there would be relief in the end of her suffering, a freedom in the fight being over. It was time. I could help.
Once at the hospital, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I spoke to my mother, certain that she could hear me. “Mother, you can't keep holding on. You must let go of your body. There's nothing to be afraid of. Life doesn't end when you die. You just go somewhere else. There'll be plenty for you to do there. You don't have to worry about being separated from me. We'll contact each other. Our communication won't ever stop.”
I knew she was in a coma too deep to allow for any physical movement, and yet, impossible as it should have been, I felt her gently squeeze my fingertips, letting me know that she had heard me. I held her hand and went into meditation while she lay in a fetal position on her side, breathing heavily. The entire room pulsated with concentric waves of golden light, and I was filled with the profound and uncompromising love between a mother and daughter.
I was tempted to stay with her, but I didn't. I remembered when my beloved fourteen-year-old Labrador retriever was dying. Frantic, I called my mother from the animal hospital, and she rushed across town to meet me. When she arrived and saw me sitting in the kennel, holding my dog close, she advised me to say good-bye and leave. My mother believed that as long as I was in my dog's presence, she would struggle to hold on. I listened to her advice, and, difficult as it was, we both went home. My dog died soon afterward. Now I had to follow the same wise counsel that my mother had given me.
Taking one last look, making a small reverential bow in my mother's direction, I said a final good-bye and left the room. I walked to the parking structure in a trance, while an unexpected sense of calm washed over me. There were no loose ends between my mother and me, no insurmountable barriers to scale, no pressing issues to discuss. Driving from West Hollywood toward downtown, where I was scheduled to see patients in a residential drug-treatment center, I felt the fresh air rushing past my face. It had just rained, and I breathed in as if for the first time. A half hour later, I received a phone call from my father saying that my mother had died. I was filled with the grace of the moment, touched by how much faith she had in me. Despite her fear of death and her loss of belief in her religion, she had trusted me enough to give up control and pass on. She had leaped into the great abyss, motivated by the strength of our love.
For the three days following her death, I had no contact with my mother. I'd expected to sense her presence around me, but I didn't feel a thing. My father and I arranged the funeral, and the family flew in from Philadelphia. On the day of the burial, I hid an owl feather in the elastic waistband of my skirt and tossed it into the ground with the casket. I wanted to put something in the grave that I considered meaningful: This feather, in Native American lore, is symbolic of the transformation from life to death. The owl, which is believed to be able to cross back and forth between the seen and the unseen, would help her with her passage.
That night, I had a dream in which she brought me a present:
We are standing on my balcony overlooking the ocean and my mother hands me a large, porous loofa sponge. “I want you to make sure you use this,” she says. “It's the highest-quality loofa sponge available anywhere in the world.” I am puzzled by this gesture, but I accept the sponge. My mother beams at me and disappears.
Initially, I wasn't sure what to make of her present. Loofa sponges are used for rubbing off dead skin cells from the body. What was she trying to tell me? Then the answer came. In her own inimitable style, she was stressing how important it was for me to slough off and release the old in order to allow room for something new to replace it. She was making a plea that I not focus on her past pain and suffering, that I stop dwelling on the horror I'd felt watching her die. It was time for me to move on. She was encouraging me to embrace every moment of my life with the same enthusiasm with which she had lived her own.
I can't imagine how I could have survived the three-month period of my mother's dying without my psychic dreams to guide me. I would have been lost without them. In my darkest days, when it seemed impossible to muster the energy to keep moving forward, these dreams lit up my path. I felt protected by them, heartened by their intelligence and compassion.
Such dreams respond to out deepest needs during times of crisis. An alarm is set off, calling on a wisdom within to direct us. The art is to listen, not to discount the information received, to follow its instructions. Through faith, the psychic can intervene. Our inner resources are more bountiful than we envision. Even if we're alone, without the support of friends or family, the integrity of our spirit, the prescience we all possess, will come to our aid. Once we believe this, and recognize our strength, we gain courage to face whatever lies ahead.
To this day, I often feel my mother with me. One night, for instance, she came to my bedside, and while I lay suspended between sleep and wakefulness, I felt her stroke my hair with her hand. Her essence was like a subtle veil, one I could sense but could not reach out and touch. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.
On the Mother's Day following her death, I ran across an old photograph of my mother, taken while she was riding a camel in the Egyptian desert. I stared at her face, missing her very much, when suddenly I saw her wink at me. Startled, I ran into the next room to tell a friend. She laughed and said that earlier that morning she'd been looking at the same photograph and my mother had winked at her, too. This was just like my mother—to catch us by surprise and reassure us both that she was still there.
The great gift that came from my mother's death was that my father and I grew closer. While she was alive, my mother always took center stage and overshadowed our relationship. The love he and I had for each other ran deep, but never had a real chance to flower. It was waiting for the right time to emerge. After my mother died, my father and I began to really communicate for the first time. Now we talk on the phone daily, have dinner at least once a week, and share the stuff of our lives. One aspect of this change is that he fully appreciates the woman I've become, and relies on that. There's both trust and frankness.
Recently my father told me that when my mother was pregnant, he saw an ultrasound of her belly in which he noticed that my head was almost exactly the same shape as his. When I was a child and insecure with my own identity, the fact that we looked so much alike had embarrassed me. My slender face, prominent forehead, olive complexion, and even some of my simple gestures—folding my hands in my lap when concentrating—were an exact image of his own. Now, as my father spoke with such pride about our resemblance, I felt proud, too.
During a meditation about a year ago, I had a vision in which we were walking down a dirt road in the canyons above Malibu and my father suddenly died. Instantly, his body disintegrated into dust but his heart was transformed into an exquisite statue of jade, so green that it could have come from the bottom of the sea. I took it with me on the journey home and treasured it. The new relationship I had begun with my father was that same precious jewel.
On Christmas Day of 1993, my mother had been dead for nearly a year. As on every Christmas before, I performed my ritual of feeding the seagulls loaves of Wonder bread by the ocean in front of my home. On this day, at least thirty of them swarmed around my head, squawking at each other and aggressively snatching chunks of bread from my hand. When the last of the bread was gone, I sat cross-legged in the sand while the birds landed on the ground and stood around me in a concentric circular formation. These throngs of white-breasted seagulls looking attentively into my eyes reminded me of angels, pure, white, and majestic. Then, fluttering their wings in unison, they rose high up into the azure sky until they became tiny black specks on the horizon.
I pictured the faces of the women in my family, some dead, some still here. Just like the gulls, we were all connected by a continuum. I felt particularly close to Melissa, my cousin Sindy's daughter. At age four, she had already demonstrated evidence of prescience. Melissa was more fortunate than I had been. If she needs us, Sindy, her grandmother Phyllis, and I will be there as role models to support and direct her without fear or reservation. When the time comes, perhaps she will do the same for her own daughter. Woman to woman, our psychic tradition will be passed down. I walked back toward the warmth of my house, content in the knowledge that long after I have gone, the legacy will continue.