Monday, June 2, 2014

The Death Whisperer

This past weekend it happened again. While doing my daily walk in my neighborhood park I was struck by a premonition. A man whom I had become recently acquainted with texted me that one of his closest friends was in the hospital with a minor stroke. As I continued my long hike, I started getting intense intuitions about this hospitalized man-impressions of his impending death. These were not feelings, but a compulsive directive from another source telling me this man had very little time left on this planet. From what I could decipher, this man had only a few days to live. A panicky feeling starting developing in my gut.

All of my life I have had such forebodings. I cannot explain how I know but I can tell by visual cues, auditory content of conversations, and a sense of energy ebbing from the dying person's body. What made this augary different was this was the first time I had picked up a future passing from a text. This friend who texted me the information is not what I would refer to as a close friend of mine-I did not even know his friend who had the stroke. A quandary soon developed as to what to do with this information.

Being privy to such sorrowful visions, I have learned never to directly divulge this information. You do not want to disclose the specifics under any condition; even if you did most people would not believe you. Another risk is they will think you are just plain crazy and, there is an outside chance I could be wrong. I weighed my options carefully. Because I really like this man (and he is also an intuitive thinker), I cautiously constructed a general email to him about dealing with loss, dying, and death. The thin line I was walking felt like a tightrope between letting him know how sorry I was for his friend's infirmity and how we all cope with life threatening illness. The next day my friend emailed me saying my concerns about his ill friend were unfounded because his friend was expected to fully recover. The horoscope I sent him, he said, was far more accurate. I was relieved and confused. Could my powerful intuitions have been erroneous?

Yesterday, I received a text from my friend saying he was rushing to the hospital because his friend had a ruptured aneurysm. I knew this was his friend's final day on earth. My heart sank. A few hours later, my friend texted me again saying his sick friend was expected to die that day. He could not believe the sudden shocking decline in a man who, just a day earlier, was expected to fully recover. Knowing prematurely of a person's death is a burden of unimaginable heartache. The email I had sent his days earlier about loss, dying, and death was sent two days too early. Intuition does not follow linear time. My friend now understands what I had tried to convey to him.

My experiences knowing when death is nearby started when I was a child. Because of the bizarre nature of this 'gift', I had to learn to cope by not acknowledging this information. In my twenties, I started working in hospitals which encouraged staff to openly discuss the dying process with patients and their families. It was then my 'gift' for uncannily knowing the finality of a person's life flourished. Though I would not openly talk specifics to a patient and/or their family about death, they knew I knew the details. At UCLA, I received a large number of referrals from families who told other families with terminal loved ones about my ability to perceive the death knell. These families frequently spoke to me how comforting it was to openly discuss the dying process, even if I would not discuss the departure date and time. In most cases, they already knew.

The ability to intuit death has also touched me personally. Through my intuition I unfortunately knew antecedently of my mother's, a former boyfriend's, and several other close friend's deaths. For as hard as it is to deal with the knowledge of an impending parting, it is even harder when it is a family member or close friend.

Every time this happens I hope I am wrong and every time I live with the abject lamentation that the 'gift' I did not ask for but have been given nonetheless is literally dead on.











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