The Unexplained

The first episode on my list today, The Plan, begins with the death of a man who is terminally ill with cancer. The dying man’s wife, Eileen, is portrayed so whimsically by Mare Winningham. Eileen is a psychic. In the episode she awakens from a dream where her husband is packing their car to leave for a trip. In her dream her husband yells at her to bring the dog to the car for the trip. Eileen wakes to her husband mumbling about the dog. An older woman sitting next to the dying man asks Eileen about the dog. Eileen confesses to the woman that they had owned a dog when they lived in Boulder, Colorado. Her husband awakens and she goes to his side to comfort him. He is frightened and agitated from his pain. His wife tells him that it is okay to let go and to move on. The nurses come in to give him more morphine to ease his discomfort. As he settles down Eileen notices a glowing golden light over her husband’s head. In this moment the show's signature graphic announces to the audience that the man has died. 

The series uses the writing device of the living being able to see and communicate with the dead as a way to reveal internal motivations and thoughts of the characters. I believe this device is what originally made the show so appealing to me because, yes, I see dead people. There...I’m out. I have gradually been coming out to more and more people over the last several years. I have been able to see dead people for as far back as I can remember. 

My mother tells me how, when I was four or five years old, we moved into this incredibly creepy rental home and she had an experience where she saw a ghost. While she was downstairs having her experience, I was in the bed upstairs with my grandparents who had helped us move into the house. My grandparents told my mother I was lying between them sweating, staring at the ceiling, and telling them about the red and blue lights on the ceiling. Apparently, I couldn’t stop looking at them. I’m not sure if this experience was what brought on my ability to see, but it is one that I still vaguely recall--or maybe I’ve heard the story so many times I have created the memory for myself. 

To this day I still see people and hear things. However, only recently have I let myself be in my knowing about my ability. I fought it for a long time. I feared it. I even asked the universe to take this ability away from me if it was something evil. It has taken me this long to understand that what I see is not evil. Also, my ability no longer scares me. Truth be told, what I've seen has never really scared me…it simply overwhelmed me as a teenager. I cannot express the stress of being able to see and hear dead people back then. This ability felt like a tidal wave of information that I never asked for and had no idea how to process. My life was traumatic enough just going through the transitions into adulthood without the ability to see and hear my friends’ deceased family members. I hated leaving the house, because there are legions of dead moving around as energies, connected to places and to living people. This is part of why I still find it exhausting to go out in public. It was, and still can be, exhausting to feel these things. And, to be honest, that is how is these entities reveal themselves to me: As feelings. People have asked me if it’s like seeing a living person standing in the room. Yes, sometimes it is. But it is not so much a visualization as it is a feeling, empathic perception of these presences, as well as auditory and visual stimuli which can sometimes be captured on media. 

My friend Maria helped me come out to people about seeing. She and I shared a dorm room together in graduate school. One evening she showed me photos from her honeymoon. She and her husband stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast. As I looked at the pictures I noticed a man in many of the pictures who I knew was a presence. I blurted out to Maria about the man. I told her what he looked like and where he stood in the photos. Maria sat silent as I described the man. She didn’t say anything in the moment. Later she asked me if I’d ever been to that particular bed and breakfast. I hadn’t…hell, at that point I’d never been to Pennsylvania in my life (but remind me another Memorial Day to tell you what it feels like to inadvertently exit the interstate at Gettysburg).  Later, after dinner, Maria told me how her honeymoon was in a very well-known haunted bed and breakfast, and much of what I saw in the photos had been reported by others who see. It was nice to be validated in what I could see. 

Up to then I had not experienced much positive response to my ability to see. My boyfriend at the time was incredibly cruel about my ability and called me a liar--he accused me of making up what I saw in guise of getting attention. That accusation hurt me to my core; because I loved him I was being honest with him. But he used my love for him to make me feel inadequate as a person and to make me feel like there was something wrong with me. He nearly destroyed so much of my spirituality and my faith in my abilities. I recently attempted a friendship with this ex-boyfriend which, unfortunately, did not work out. He has changed so much for the positive and he’s managing to stay clean of drugs, but our memories of what we were are too much for us both. I feel he needs to work more on himself and that he is just not good for me. I just cannot trust him, and though I don’t understand why, he claims he cannot trust me. Maybe one day I’ll figure out why he has this issue, being that I was nothing but honest with him. These are his issues, I suppose. I do hope he can stay on a positive path, but I’m nervous for him. I saw him start slipping back into classic addictive behaviors, so I told him I could not be an active part of his life right now. 

The positive about the friendship we attempted was that it did help me to again see myself as I was before he hurt me. Not only did he apologize for cheating on me, but he went on to apologize for not being more supportive and nurturing of my needs, for making me feel so horrible about my body, and for not believing in my ability to see what I see. He told me that in his recovery he’d seen things and met people like me and that he now believed in my abilities. It was nice to be validated and it was nice to have some closure to the unresolved pain my loving him caused me. I love that man more than I care to admit, but sometimes love is just not enough. There will always be a place in my heart for him. 

In the last year I have been guest lecturing my friend Maria’s Haunted Pennsylvania class at Central Penn via Skype. I have seen some amazing things. I have heard some amazing stories based on what I see. I love doing the classes, but they can be exhausting. The exhaustion is the most difficult part of doing readings. Mostly, and I do not mean this to sound cruel or with the intention to hurt anyone, people’s selfish needs to communicate with deceased loved ones makes many people unreasonable. I understand the pain of loss of a loved one and that desire to have unanswered questions resolved, for the living and the dead. But, I never know what someone's loved ones who have passed will do or say. I often have no idea who they are, and often have no idea who they are attached to...especially when there are multiple presences. I encourage people I’m doing readings for to be gracious. Obviously I’m not amused by those who take it upon themselves to prove I’m a fraud. Part of me finds these people and their determination comical. The other part of me needs a nap after dealing with them. They are draining and suck the energy out of a room. I will say that at this point in my life I’m not out to prove myself to anyone. I am who I am, and I see what I see.  

In the same 6FU episode Nate and Brenda have a discussion about the afterlife. Brenda doesn’t believe in heaven and hell. Nate throws in her face her belief about people being wounded and about our wounds leaving marks in time and space. She says that she does believe because she believes we are all energies and energies affect matter. In a certain regard that is what I believe. I believe I am perceiving energies and that I am merely more attuned to these energies than most. I do, however, believe all living beings can do what I do if they want to and open themselves up to their personal abilities. I believe that I can see because the universe needs certain people to work as catalysts for change. I honestly believe I am one of those people. I believe a large percentage of people who are born to teach are catalysts for change. Maybe that makes me sound like I think I am divine but, in reality, aren’t we all divine? We are all, in fact, spiritual beings having a human experience. I believe this. I’ve seen this. I know this to be true. This is my knowing.

Here is a video montage of some of the deaths from the series. Enjoy.