Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (4 page)

It is the
belief in Mexico, and a number of other countries around the world, that November 2,
El Día de los Muertos
, is the Day of the Dead, when all those who have died come to life. In some places November 1 is called
El Día de los Angelitos
(the Day of the Little Angels), and those who have lost a baby will remember him or her on that day and deceased adults on the second. People will carry flowers and the favorite foods of the deceased to their grave sites and leave them there for the Dead to enjoy this special meal. (For children they would leave toys and traditional candies.) If it’s not possible to travel to the grave site, they’ll set up a small desktop altar with photos of the deceased—very often there will be a cross or religious statue, maybe of a saint, or a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary, flowers (especially marigolds, which are considered especially significant for this remembrance), candles—and set out the foods they liked best, and maybe a bottle of tequila or other spirits. A popular decoration that also is a treat are little skulls made of sugar or chocolate, which symbolize death and rebirth. Day of the Dead celebrations are very old—they can be traced back nearly 3000 years to the Aztecs, Olmecs, and Zapotecs, among other indigenous groups. More modern versions of the celebration are carried out in Texas and Arizona in the U.S.

Different countries also celebrate their deceased loved ones, in a variety of ways. In Guatemala, they make and fly huge kites. In Haiti, drumming and music are a big part of the celebration—they play very loud all night—to literally awaken an entity they recognize as the god of the Dead. In Bolivia, the Dead are remembered on November 9 and the celebration is called
El Día de los Natitas
, the Day of the Skulls. Each home usually has the skull of an ancestor who watches over the family and on that day they get it all gussied up, adorning it with flowers, and make offerings of food, cigarettes, and coca leaves, among other things. The Chinese do things completely differently with their Qingming Festival (“Clear and Bright” Festival). They celebrate in the springtime—usually April 4 or 5—by making time to enjoy the outdoors and the fresh new greenery of the new season, and at the same time, tend to the grave sites of their loved ones.

But to get back to the original question about the Day of the Dead specifically, the Mexican people have always been extremely in touch with family—both living and dead. But after the revolution of 1910 any overt spiritual expression of this kind was driven underground. Apparently the government considered it backward or superstitious, even though individual politicians honored their own dead relatives in this way. The fact is, you can suppress this kind of loving expression, but you can’t kill it. It might have been publicly “unacceptable” but it still was practiced behind closed doors, so to speak. And not only on November 2, when all the Dead are honored. An individual family member will also be remembered on the anniversary of their crossing. The family will gather and decorate the home with flowers and photographs of the deceased. There may be an urn with the deceased’s ashes present if that person has been cremated rather than buried. The family will enjoy a meal of their loved one’s favorite foods. Sometimes this is a simple and reverent family dinner; sometimes it’s a full-on party.

As I’m always saying, the Dead are
always
with us, not just the second day of November. But that is a day set aside when they are given special remembrance, honor, and celebration. Do they literally come back to life? They are always
literally alive
in spirit form.

Halloween is a
very old celebration in other parts of the world. In this country, it’s mostly just a nice holiday for children—they carve pumpkins, dress up in costumes, have parties, go trick-or-treating, and come home with too much candy. But as far as a holiday goes, Halloween wasn’t even really celebrated here until the last century. It wasn’t any kind of big deal. We had some good innovations—in Ireland they used to carve a face into a turnip; we used a pumpkin, which is a helluva lot easier to get a candle into and make stand up on your porch! But the more important days here, in the Christian tradition, are All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2, when the “faithful who have departed” are celebrated. It’s funny, because
El Día de los Muertos
in Mexico has much more traditional “weight” to it, but now in Mexico the celebration of American-type traditions of this holiday is catching on and children there will dress up and go door to door, saying—instead of “Trick or Treat!”—“
Noche de brujas!
” which means “Night of Witches!”

When I was about five or six years old, my brother Harold and I had these cheap store-bought Halloween costumes—the kind that are all one piece, you step into them and tie them at the back of the neck. I can’t even remember what mine was, but Harold’s was a red devil suit. Harold, eleven months older than I, was simply petrified of his mask. He was crying and crying and my mother, who was trying to get us out the door to a party, said, “You don’t have to wear it.” And as young as I was, I remember saying to him, “That can’t hurt you.” I don’t know how I knew, and I didn’t really even have the words to express it, but I knew that he was a blessed child and that nothing evil like a devil could harm him. I understood this, even that young, even though I couldn’t say exactly what I meant.

If someone is
a decent human being and does the right thing in their life, the Other Side isn’t going to look at your tattoos and piercings and make some contrary judgment. To them all the things we do over here on this side to make ourselves either stand out or blend in are just amusing. I personally like to wear a lot of big jewelry, but mostly in not very original places on my body. If somebody else wants to get more creative with it—stick seven earrings on this ear, a dozen on the other, a hoop or two on their belly button, their nose or wherever else (believe me, I’ve heard of some
very
creative places some people have pierced, but I don’t really want to mention those)—Grandma Over There doesn’t care. Grandma here might because maybe she doesn’t understand it, or maybe thinks it will reflect badly on the family or whatever. But over there, they realize that it’s not such a big deal. If you have tattoos all up and down your arms, Grandma Over There might wish you’d wear long sleeves when you go to work, but that’s just because she’d be concerned that people here might judge you and it might keep you from being taken seriously and advancing in your career or whatnot. It has nothing to do with her personal feelings that you shouldn’t have tattoos.

Well, for one
thing, usually whoever I’m doing a reading for is able to confirm what I am telling them right then. Bear in mind that I’m only repeating what I’m hearing, I’m not making stuff up. Even if it seems like it, I’m not. As an example, I have a client whose mother died, and she came to see me three times. Both the first and second time she came, her mother mentioned, along with a lot of other stuff, the name Helen. My client insisted she had no idea who Helen was, but clearly this was someone significant to her mother, especially as she repeated the name on both occasions. As I said, it’s her mother saying Helen, not me. Still, I could tell that my client had doubts since she was sure that anyone close to her mother she would have known or at least have heard of. Finally, the third time this woman came to see me she said, “Oh, Concetta, I found out why Mother keeps mentioning Helen! I was going through some of my mother’s things and I found a ring inscribed inside ‘To Helen from John.’ Along with the ring was a card addressed to my mother that said, ‘I’d like you to keep this,’ so at least that part of the mystery is solved.” Even if we don’t know, the souls know what they’re talking about. I say prayers that I’m only passing along the good stuff. I trust my prayers and I trust the souls. The souls over there on the Other Side are really where the credit goes for “getting it right.” They’re so darn good, they could talk a dog off a meat truck! Not all are witty; some are as boring as some people here. But I
trust
them!

No. They have
no reason to lie. What are they going to get out of it? First of all, communication is all telepathic on the Other Side and you can’t get much more transparent than that. Everybody knows what everybody is thinking so lying would be pretty impossible. Kidding? Yes. Joking? Yes. But lying? Not possible. Now that I think of it, since telepathically we all understand one another, maybe over there we’d even be able to get all the dumb jokes that didn’t make sense to us before!

If there was a person who had lied or betrayed someone when they were here and then crossed over, it’s not like they’d come through with a full confession or explanation of their behavior. They might possibly be able to convey a couple key details to me about the situation, but it’s far more likely that they would just express remorse or say they were sorry.

I was in
a restaurant bathroom one time, sitting in the stall, peeing, when a spirit started telling me she had a message she wanted me to give to her sister. This was around 1981, and I hadn’t gone public yet. Even though I have a naturally flamboyant personality I wasn’t really “out” yet and didn’t feel that comfortable just saying to a stranger, “Hello, I’m a medium, and I have a message for you.” Anyway, I finished my business, pulled up my drawers, and when I came out of the stall there was a girl standing at the sink washing her hands. I gathered my courage and said, “Excuse me, is your name Cheryl? Or something that begins with a C?” She said, “It’s not Cheryl, it’s Cathy, but I do spell it with a C.” I said, “Okay, well, I feel the need to tell you something. Your sister wants you to know that she loves you.” To be honest, I can’t remember exactly her reaction—whether she was shocked or a little bit disbelieving. All I recall is that she said that it was very nice to know it because her sister had died recently and they’d had an argument just before and she’d been feeling bad about that.

In spirit form
we don’t consume anything—nothing to eat, nothing to drink. It’s just not necessary as we are noncorporeal (a fancy way to say we have no body). However, we do have our memories of wonderful meals we’ve had, and certainly we’ll also remember fondly our favorite foods. At one of my shows a spirit came through for his family and he was telling me to ask them about some cookies they had with them. I said, “Did you bring some cookies with you, in honor of your dad?” They at first looked puzzled and then realized that they did have some cookies in their bag and they laughed. They hadn’t been thinking of him; they had just put them in there in case they wanted a snack. But he’d been aware of the cookies and that’s how he was letting them know it was really him because he’d been known when he was living for his sweet tooth.

Absolutely, they do,
in every way. It might be in a reassuring way, in that they will want to tell a loved one that their worries are for nothing, that some health crisis they are experiencing will end well. Or it might be cautionary. Very often I will have a spirit ask me to convey to a client that they don’t want them to smoke, or they’ll tell them to get some exercise. When I was around forty-seven or forty-eight, I was in a bar for happy hour at the end of the work week. At the end of the bar was a young guy with a bunch of little girls hanging around him. Well, not really “little girls,” but you know—it’s all relative—they were younger than me. As I sat there, just kind of taking in the scene, I heard a dead guy talking to me; he wanted me to go talk to the guy at the end of the bar. It was his father, and he was insisting that I go talk to the son. He was telling me that he was an alcoholic, and he wanted me to tell his son that he didn’t want him to be drinking in a bar. To be honest, I really, really didn’t want to just go up to some guy who had no idea who I was and try to tell him something like that. But the father was very insistent.

Finally, I knew I had to do it. So I went down to where this guy and his friends were and I said, “You don’t know me, but I’m a psychic medium, and your father gave me this message for you, and he’s been really insistent that I pass it along.” I told him what his dad said. I said, “He’s telling you he’s sorry for the way he was. And he doesn’t want you to do this.” It was awkward, to say the least. Afterward, I just went back to my seat.

A little bit later, I stole a look down the bar and I saw the young guy with his head down on the bar, and his girlfriends were around him like, “Are you okay?” I felt a little bad, but I had to tell him what I was hearing. Anyway, after a while, his friends came over to me and were asking, “Who are you?” They told me he was really upset. Then they told me the story, what he had told them. His father had been a serious alcoholic, wreaking havoc with the family. After one episode, the young man had said to his family, “That’s it. I’m done with you. You’re not my father!” Right after that, the father had again gotten drunk and got into an accident and was killed. The young man was feeling so guilty that he’d disowned his dad and then his dad had died. Out of guilt, he was drinking himself into a stupor, and probably an early grave—just like his father. The father, naturally, was upset. He wasn’t mad at his son; he understood. But he was worried and wanted to give his son a warning, any way he could.