Do Dead People Watch You Shower? (16 page)

You know, I
don’t have a perfect answer for that. I wish I did because this is the million-dollar question. It doesn’t make too much sense a lot of the time. At least not from this side. I know total whackadoodles, complete nut jobs, who have partners and I know wonderful, kind people who do not. I cannot tell you why. I do know that there is a reason and that reason will be revealed to us on the Other Side.

One thing I can tell you is that you cannot rely on the Other Side to make things perfect for you. Believe me, They are trying. Whenever They get the chance They will try to set something up to make us happier. But we have to do our own work on this side. I have a client who has come to see me a couple of times. He came to see me when his first wife divorced him, and the next time he came, he was divorced from his second wife. He said, “Concetta, can you tell me, am I ever going to find real love?” I looked at this guy’s grim face—the same face any time I saw him—and I said, “Barney (not his real name), did you ever
smile
at your wife? You are paying me money and I want to give you your money’s worth. So I’m not just going to tell you what you want to hear. You need to make the effort. Until you decide that you are going to be someone it’s nice to be around, nobody is going to want to be around you! It’s not magic. It’s just common sense. That face would kill anyone’s soul.” No smile equals little chance.

Besides not making any effort to be pleasant, I also find that some people can be just unbelievably picky. You have to be happy with yourself, and then, if you want to be happy with someone else, you have to understand that there is no such thing as perfection. I have seen people who will decide not to date someone because they don’t like the kind of shoes the guy wears. I’m not making this up! I mean, how important is
that
in the scheme of things? You have to be willing to change a pair of shoes if you don’t like them—you can always go to Shoetown!

Well, again, I’m
not God. But I would say that a good start would be to love yourself and know that you have a right to happiness. Look in the mirror each morning when you’re brushing your teeth and say, “I love you! You’re a good person!” And smile! Every morning do this—you’re doing something positive for yourself, as well as brushing your teeth. Some people think that for anything, you have to work hard or it’s not worth it. Sometimes it can be simple. You look in the mirror every day, say, “I choose to be happy.” And smile.

Not in the
way you probably mean. The love of a married couple is eternal, but on the Other Side they wouldn’t necessarily be husband and wife, even though the love would still be there. They would be two energies that love each other. And then when they come back to earth, they could come back as father and daughter, or brother and sister, or best friends. They don’t have to be husband and wife again. It all depends on the mission God wants them to go on the second time around. God might say, “You can go back with him the next time, but you’ll be siblings. And I want you to join forces to teach so-and-so the following lesson…”

But definitely that connection remains. A man—his name was Joe—who had lost his wife came for a reading and as he was leaving I saw this image that his wife was showing me. It was like making two linked circles with the thumb and first finger of both hands—just like links of a chain. I said, “Just a minute, Joe. Why is your wife showing me this?” and I did that with my fingers. Well, he got a big smile on his face and it was like “Oh my God.” He explained to me that he and his wife used to love to watch the TV show
Friends
and there’s this one episode where two lobsters get their pincers locked together and one of the actors says to the other, “Lobsters mate for life.” His wife had thought that was so funny and she used to make this little signal to him, linking her fingers like that, across the room at a party or whatever—it was her way of saying without saying “I love you.” Lobsters mate for life, and we mate—in various ways—through
many
lives!

I don’t think
you can fall in love, I think you are reunited with love; it’s not like falling in love, the love is continuous and it doesn’t die.

One of my clients was upset because her mother had died and her father was dating. She said, “He’s dating a woman, Concetta.” I said, “Honey, do you realize your mother is happy about that?” It’s not the same as dumping his wife and getting a new one. He’s alive, this loving connection gives him a reason to get up in the morning. Her mother on the Other Side understands this. The new woman might be a karmic lesson for her father, a continuation of her father’s life that we have no clue about. Maybe in this lifetime someone had three wives or five husbands. Maybe they were widowed, or maybe they were divorced. On the Other Side, all the exes are there together. So often they all show up together when I’m doing a reading for someone. They want me to tell everyone that over there it’s all knowing and all forgiving and all loving. That’s how great God is. And over on that side, They all know why it went down the way it did on this side. They know why things worked or why they didn’t or what the reason was that they were together in the first place.

Well, first of
all, I think it is very sad if anyone spends a lifetime on this side and never experiences human love, but I know it can happen. It could be that they actually were loved, but the one who loved them felt restricted in some way that they could not express the love. It could be a personality thing, or a society thing. It could be a physical handicap of some kind. There are definitely numerous things on this side that restrict the flow of love or make us incapable of communicating our love. None of those restrictions exist, however, on the Other Side. In fact, some of my clients have been totally shocked to hear from a deceased parent, for example, who suddenly is able to tell them how much they love them, how much they wished they’d been able to say it before. They can barely recognize this spirit as the same person they knew in the flesh. The love we know on this side continues eternally over there, but more than that, on the Other Side of the veil, it is
all
love. Over there, love is like the air we breathe. On this side we are sustained by food, water, oxygen—the things our body needs to keep working. Over there, where we are only spirit, love sustains us.

Absolutely, he will
(and so will her beloved grandmother, or great-aunt, or little brother who has crossed to the Other Side). And I want to stress that this is in no way “metaphoric.” The dead are able to know about all our important times, and They love to be with us for all the highs and lows of our life. They certainly would not miss a wedding, especially their own daughter’s (or son’s, for that matter). I have had readings where a client has asked me this question, and always the answer is: “I’ll be there.”

I don’t know
about power napping, but I do believe that at least some of them need to rest when they first get to the Other Side. It’s safe to say, I think, that when we die we are pretty worn out—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, often spiritually. My brother died of AIDS; he weighed only eighty pounds when he died and he was a tall guy. He looked awful. After he left this side, I didn’t hear from him for months. When he finally came to speak with me I asked him where he had been and he told me, “I was in transition.” I don’t know what exactly transition is, but I’m assuming it is some kind of resting, like in a divine spa, that some souls go through to regain their strength. I’ve heard of this from others, too, and it does seem like “transition” is kind of a convalescent halfway house of the spirit world. A place for souls who need special attention. They’re greeted by Masters and given help to adjust to this new existence, without being in a body with the body’s limitations and imperfections.

It’s true. On
the Other Side we all are perfect in that we are all part of God and in energy form. We are not held back in any way. I might hear from a spirit that the leg that was amputated because of an accident or illness has “grown back.” But this is not literal. They tell us that only because they know that this is how we on this side picture them. They don’t want to be remembered like that, with their physical flaws. I am entirely certain that after years of being held in bondage in his body, when Christopher Reeve was released and able to “stand upright” and was lighter than air, nothing would have made him happier than to phone home to tell his loved ones about it. If he’d been offered the chance to do an infomercial for the miraculous glory of God, he’d have done it in a heartbeat.

None. At least
none pertaining to the body. There it’s about our spiritual health and well-being. The nearest comparison to here is our psychological and/or emotional health, such as healing our guilt over things we wish we’d done differently. But that is usually resolved very quickly once we cross. On this side we need to take into account the laws of the physical universe. You can’t eat Twinkies for twenty years and expect to have no physical consequences. On the Other Side, you might be able to get away with that.

I do think
that is the case, but it’s certainly not the same lesson for every person with the same disease. And sometimes the lesson is more for, or also for, the individuals surrounding the person who is ill. It’s a network of shared experiences, challenges, and learning. A serious illness does not just strike someone randomly.

One thing I want to be very clear about is that an illness is
never
retribution for anything we did or didn’t do. God is a loving God and does not mete out punishments of pain and suffering. Whatever happens to the soul, the soul has agreed to allow it in order to gain a deeper consciousness unobtainable in any other way. The soul will not know every detail in advance of what he will go through, what turns the experience may take. And I would be lying to say that there is never a time when in the midst of the experience the soul was not wishing he could change his mind and opt out. There is no illness on the Other Side, so without experiencing it here they cannot possibly understand how blessed we truly are when we are with God. The fact that a soul makes this choice for spiritual growth is very different from what some have called “blame the victim,” which I’ve heard a lot about when someone who doesn’t really understand how this all works will say, “so-and-so caused his own illness” or “it’s her karma.”

The miracle of
God never ceases to amaze me—the miracles God creates, the miracles He provides or gives. Recovering is a miracle, but going home also is a miracle. We are predisposed to prefer that our loved one stay on this side, but for the person who is sick, crossing over, being whole again, and being reunited with loved ones might seem the greater miracle.

From what I know, I’d have to say that one person recovering and one person not must be based on karmic reasons. Maybe it is known that the soul who recovers is someone who will make something larger of the life she got back. Maybe she is setting some kind of example. Honestly, I don’t know, but these explanations make sense to me from what I know of the way the Other Side works.

I’m sure they
are getting a kick out of it. They must be impressed with some of the advances in the world. But also, they are involved in it. They are sending souls all the time who will be working on one thing or another, whether it’s home technology or medicine or whatever. So they may be going “Wow,” but it’s like when
you
make something that’s so cool you can’t help but appreciate it yourself. It’s not like, “Oh my God, look what they’ve created down there!” It’s like “Wow…look what we made!”