I couldn’t have imagined back in 1976 when Ben and I had our last confrontation that I would never again see this man who had so profoundly influenced my life. Our separation seemed to be one we both needed, since neither of us made any effort to bridge the gap. I heard, via the upstate New York grapevine, that he had gone to live in some kind of commune. That was all I knew for almost three decades.
About six years ago, chance brought me into contact with Ben’s son, Stuart, and he filled in some of those missing years. Shortly after our breakup, Ben had abandoned his family to move in with another woman. That didn’t surprise me, since the relationship between him and his wife had always seemed chilly, and I knew that Ben had affairs. However, most of the money on which his family subsisted had come from Ben, so they became destitute. No rent. No heat. No food.
The emotional breach was just as rough. I remember twelve-year-old Stuart at poolside as a happy-go-lucky kid who clearly worshipped his father. His sister, who was several years older, was a shy child who Ben always praised as having a mystical bent. She was even more identified with him as daddy’s little girl.
After the shock of finding herself on welfare, Stuart’s mother switched into survival mode. Not only did she keep the family together, but she earned an undergraduate degree, boosting her income sufficiently to allow Stuart to become a school psychologist and his sister a social worker. Though I have never been in touch with Ben’s grown daughter, Stuart seemed to have come to terms with Ben as a special person who was very flawed. A devoted father and husband, Stuart is a low-key, understated kind of guy, whereas Ben was abrasive and egotistical. Occasionally, Stuart kept the family tradition alive by doing healings and readings, which he has always downplayed.
Some years ago, Ben moved to Las Vegas, where he and his partner lived in a trailer park—in a double trailer, as Ben apparently liked to point out. My guess is that he was attracted to the gambling, though I hope not, because he was only marginally better at it than I was. Our basic difference was that he loved games of chance, whereas I hate winning a quarter just as much as I hate losing one.
I had Ben’s address and phone number in 2004 when I attended a Society for Scientific Exploration meeting in Las Vegas. Boy, was I conflicted! I was going to see him. I wasn’t going to see him, but I’d call him. I wasn’t going to call him. Well, maybe I would. Ben had been an authority figure to me. When you go back inside your parents’ sphere of influence, no matter how good or bad the relationship, you tend to revert.
Events overwhelmed my decision—or appeared to. SSE conferences are so jam-packed with exciting, stimulating events that it’s hard to find time to do anything else. I didn’t contact Ben, but I did get in touch with his partner a few months later. She and I arranged a time for me to call him.
I was nervous, and our conversation felt awkward. Ben’s once-resonant voice sounded weak and frail, but because he knew I had received his number from Stuart, he immediately launched into a defensive screed justifying his behavior toward his family. Despite being in his mid-eighties, he had not mellowed into some warm and fuzzy grandpa.
As I listened, he rewrote his family history as he had once tried to rewrite ours. I remembered how in one breath he used to boast about my healing accomplishments, only to accuse me in the next of trying to sabotage his new ministry by taking it over as pope. As always, he was a man who could do no wrong, and I found myself mentally shaking my head, thinking, “Thanks for reminding me.”
Still, I couldn’t help but feel a poignancy for this oncevibrant man who now seemed so sadly diminished. With a sense of fatalism, he told me that he felt old and tired, and that he was having breathing problems—no surprise for a lifelong chain-smoker. When I suggested sending him some cotton to help his respiratory system, he was clearly ambivalent—here was the sidekick offering to heal the master! It wasn’t a long conversation, no more than ten minutes. I was glad when it was over, and I felt bad about that. Our once-important relationship seemed to have received its last troubling postscript.
I did send the cotton. Through e-mails with Ben’s partner, I learned that he had gone into the hospital shortly after our conversation. My ordinary life took over, and about two weeks later I went to London for a brief holiday. The night before my transatlantic flight home, I couldn’t sleep, which was uncharacteristic. When I arrived at the airport I found my plane had been canceled, and I had to take another flight. Once again, I couldn’t sleep during the trip back. I arrived home at about 5p.m., exhausted from having been up for about thirty-six hours. I decided to set my alarm for 7p.m. for what was to be a power nap. Inadvertently—or advertently—I set it for seven in the morning.
About eleven that night, I jolted up in bed. The room was filled with light, which was what had awakened me. I was reasonably alert because I felt something was wrong. It was the damnedest thing! That light seemed to hover in the middle of the room, and I experienced a powerful sense of presence. Spontaneously, I reached out to the light, startling myself by blurting out, “Ben!” I called his name once again. Suddenly I was filled with an overwhelming sense of love—stronger than anything I had ever experienced before, unbelievable, and certainly different from any feelings I’d had around him. I felt the dissolving of all the antagonism between us.
This, I later learned, was the moment Ben died.
He had gone into a coma while in intensive care. His partner had arrived at his room with my cotton just as he woke up. His immediate response was one of annoyance. “What am I still doing here?” he asked.
His partner told him about the cotton.
“Get that stuff out of the room!” he shouted. “If I touch it I can’t leave, and it’s time for me to go.”
Neither Ben’s partner nor Stuart were surprised about my story of Ben and the light. Others also had strange dreams, experiences, or visitations around his passing. Ben seemed to be in touch, through some mysterious alchemy, with forces most of us only glimpse.
It’s hard to imagine how my life might have been without him.