Dead As I'll Ever Be: Psychic Adventures That Changed My Life

DEAD AS I’LL EVER BE

Psychic Adventures That Changed My Life

by

Pamela Evans

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by:

Shavian Publishing

79 Shavian Blvd.

London, ON N6G 2P4

Dead As I’ll Ever Be

Copyright 2002, 2013 by Pamela Evans

ISBN: 978-0-9736673-4-9

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Evans, Pamela, 1937-, author

Dead as I'll ever be : psychic adventures that changed

my life / Pamela Evans.

Reissue of print version. Originally published: London,

       Ont. : Shavian Pub., 2002.

Type of computer file: Electronic monograph.

ISBN 978-0-9736673-3-2 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-0-9736673-4-9

(MSWord)

1. Reincarnation. 2. Pre-existence. 3. Spiritualism.

4. Death. I. Title.

BL515.E83 2013              133.901'35              C2013-903181-2

To Mary Muhlmann, who started the quest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 How It All Started

2 My Bizarre Spiritual Background and Other Events

3 Marge

4 Three Favorite Séances

5 The Seminars

6 Astrology Explained a Lifelong Conflict

7 Life’s Patterns

8 Palmistry

9 My Reincarnation Experiences

10 Teaching About Reincarnation

11 Ghosts

12 Stories from Friends and Acquaintances

13 Summing Up

Appendix: Suggested Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Reader Comments

1

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Mary

During lunch, Jane talked me into trying a psychic reading. That was twenty years ago, and I haven’t been the same since.

We chatted in a half-empty restaurant, the clatter around us dwindling to the odd clang of a dropped fork or bang of a tray being stacked. My gaze slipped past her to the glassed-in front of the restaurant and the gunmetal March sky beyond. As she was talking, my drifting attention was creating a beach scene… Paul Newman, tenderly anointing my back with lotion, was about to seal his achievement with a kiss… when Jane interrupted the reverie by saying, …and then she said I’d meet this man with salt-and-pepper hair, who came from the east… at the home of friends… and it happened!

She was talking about a psychic she’d just visited. I looked at her. Tell me again, I said, I missed some of the first part. She did, with more specific details the psychic had told her. The psychic’s name was Mary.

At the time, I knew nothing about psychics. I remembered that one had told a friend of mine when she was in high school that there would be a death in the family within a year. Her father had a sudden heart attack and died within 12 months of the reading. I shivered at the time, but hadn’t thought much more about it.

Years later, I heard another friend’s story. A psychic had described her husband’s girlfriend and given the details of the girlfriend’s personality. They turned out to be true. That was interesting but… who knows? The psychic had been reassuring about my friend’s future, giving her a glimmer of hope that I dismissed at the time.

Books about haunted houses had always intrigued me, and I loved arguing with anyone about the reality of ghosts. During my 30-year agnostic phase as a recovering Anglican, I’d wrestled the subject of life-after-death to the ground. Death was final – period.

Do you want to go? asked Jane.

Sure, I said. Why not?

I was reasonably content with my life. I’d more or less accepted the limitations of being a freelance fashion illustrator and copywriter in London, Ontario (population 300,000) and realized that working out of town, particularly in Toronto (Canada’s advertising Mecca), was out for a few years. I played tennis and bridge. Family and friends, reading and work filled my days, so I wasn’t going to a psychic as a last resort to solving a problem.

Jane made the appointment from the restaurant, for four o’clock that afternoon. It was 2:30 when she called. (No time for the psychic to do any research.) She didn’t mention my last name. An attack of butterflies settled in as she hung up the phone. I certainly wasn’t going to take anything the psychic said seriously!

•

Driving up the gravel driveway to Mary’s small white bungalow, my butterflies changed to anxious shivers. A small homemade sign stood in the middle of the front lawn, reading simply Mary. We drove around an apple tree and parked behind the house. Another similar sign hung above the back door. Climbing out of the car, I noticed a small graveyard just beyond the neighbor’s fence and shivered again. As if that wasn’t enough, a black cat joined us at Mary’s back door and waited to be let in.

Nothing happened for about a minute after we rang the doorbell. Then we heard footsteps. The door opened and a Walter Matthau look-alike scrutinized us. He wore an old gray cardigan and baggy brown pants. In a funeral voice, he said, Who are you?

I didn’t like him.

Jane reminded him that she’d been there before and introduced us. This was Mary’s husband, Paul.

Come in and sit down, he said, we’re in the middle of a reading. Mary will see you presently. We followed him through the glassed-in porch, into a small dark room. The only light came through two tiny high windows. An old sofa and an assortment of kitchen chairs surrounded a kidney-shaped coffee table piled high with the National Enquirer and other neon publications. Exchanging amused smiles, we sat down, and I lit a cigarette. I couldn’t get rid of my feeling of unease.

Paul explained that he sat in on the readings to translate for those who didn’t speak German. He told us to make ourselves comfortable, excused himself, closed the door and disappeared into the kitchen. I didn’t want him in the room for my reading.

Jane made herself comfortable. The gaudy literature might have been entertaining at some other time but I was too nervous to concentrate even on junk. Jane filled me in with other accurate predictions and facts that Mary had told her. Every new piece of information increased my toe tapping until I thought I was going to have to pace the floor. I’m a nervous Nelly at the best of times, not about big events or disasters, but about small things – thought this small thing turned into one of the biggest events of my life.

Finally, we heard voices approaching and the door from the kitchen opened. Paul and a middle-aged woman came into the room, deep in conversation. The woman seemed like a regular visitor and appeared quite relaxed after her reading. (Maybe it wasn’t scary.) Saying goodbye, she left.

Mary will see you now, announced Paul, looking at me.

"What am I doing here?" I thought, following him through the door into an ordinary-looking kitchen. Not a broom in sight. We crossed the kitchen to a small room where Mary waited. Paul paused inside the doorway to say something to her in German while I tried to peek around him. Mary, from the side view I caught, was small and round with gray hair skinned back in a bun. She wore something shapeless and blue. Rocking slightly back and forth, she held one hand to her forehead. She remained turned away from me, with her eyes closed.

Paul pointed to a chair attached to a tiny table in front of Mary. I had to sit sideways and turn my upper body to the left to face her. A gooseneck lamp focused light on a pad of paper resting on a small flat pillow on the table.

Just sign your name, and write down your birthday and two or three names of anybody else you want Mary to talk about, said Paul, parking himself on the edge of an old green sofa beside us.

Mary’s round face was scrunched up with concentration. She looked older than Paul. Intense blue eyes suddenly opened and looked at me. She must have reached some sort of conclusion while her eyes were shut and, having done that, took my hands in hers, turned up my palms, pressed her thumbs to the base of my third finger on both hands and spoke in a stream of German.

I waited.

Most epiphanies happen in dramatic settings. Mine took place in a closet-sized room on the outskirts of London, Ontario, where four people surrounded a table. Across from me sat Mary, a tiny Catholic woman who was a renowned medium from Europe. To my right, sat her Walter Matthau look-alike husband, a former Nazi, who interpreted her streams of German.

•

In my chair sat a loud-mouthed agnostic who was there to be entertained. Hovering over my left shoulder and observing the proceedings was the Virgin Mary—life size, in blue and cream plaster—clutching a vial of Holy Water that had been blessed by His Holiness, the Pope. A tricky little group, historically speaking.

She says you have talents untried, translated Paul, talents in the public eye… television… radio… speaking to large groups of people. What do you do by the way?

She was wrong about the talents untried, I thought, because I had tried many different areas in the fashion business as well as many other types of work, volunteer and paid, and I’d run out of ideas. When she mentioned the public eye, I thought she had probably read my mind – I had done work in those areas. But should I help Mary by answering Paul’s question? Why not? So I mentioned that I was in the fashion business and advertising.

She says she sees a lot of money around you, said Paul.

Money? I asked.

Lotta money, said Mary herself. (Apparently she could speak a bit of English.) Should I believe this? I knew I would inherit some money eventually, but not a lot. Nice as this was to hear, it could apply to many people.

After that dubious start, she made some predictions that I didn’t take seriously because they sounded too good to be true: If you write a book about your special knowledge, you will make a lot of money, she continued. It would be an unusual book.

My only writing experience was rewriting a friend’s essay in university. She got an A and I got a B. (I’m not proud of either fact, but we had 35 hours of classes a week, and by the time we got to the library all the books were out.) As for special knowledge, all that I had at the time was about the fashion business.

Interesting, but hardly thrilling.

You have been a spiritual teacher in many past lives, Paul said. What religion are you now?

None, I replied, I’ve been an agnostic since I walked out of the Anglican Church when I was 13, a year after I was confirmed. But I was thinking simultaneously that maybe the reason I left is because I’d had enough of organized religion in past lives. This was the first time I ever thought about reincarnation.

I left the Church because I found it boring. My parents weren’t churchgoers, and only some of my friends. Also, the minister lived right behind us and, though friendly, was a heavy drinker even at social gatherings. (As an all-knowing teenager, I thought he wasn’t up to his job, or any other.) One day I just walked away after yet another confusing service, thinking to myself, If I live by the Golden Rule, surely I can’t go too far wrong.

I might have found Mary’s suggestion of spiritual lives or even past lives amusing, but oddly enough it struck a chord somewhere inside and I kept my mouth shut for a change. I’d think about it.

Then came the first big one.

You will never inherit your mother’s diseases...you have strong feet and legs...you will never be in a wheelchair.

How could she know my greatest fear? I’d never told a soul how frightened I was of inheriting my mother’s Alzheimer’s or her alcoholism or diabetes. I sat up straighter—probably with my mouth open.

One of the names I’d given her was my husband’s. Running the finger of her left hand over it, Mary said, Your husband loves the water...but he must be careful in the water...with the tops of his legs. Dave, my husband, would live and die on a boat if he could have his way. He’d been in a naval officer’s training course in university and still took annual boat trips with his buddies. He’d also just completed a scuba diving course. Maybe that’s where the danger might be.

Shaking her finger at me, Mary said, Your husband must not take on a fourth partner. Business is going to drop off severely. He won’t have enough work for a new person. She repeated the statement when she sensed it hadn’t sunk in. Things are going to be tight for a while, she added, and fixed me with those eyes, making sure I got this message loud and clear. She had already told me that he practiced law but didn’t go to court. Since that was correct, I began to have the feeling that this might be too. I hadn’t known that Dave and his two partners had been talking about taking on a student in their office as a fourth partner because business was booming. As it turned out, he and I had seven years of serious financial hardship that started later in the month when his largest client, a builder, announced that he wasn’t going to build houses that year for fear of a coming recession.

Before moving her finger down to my daughter Lisa’s name, Mary closed her eyes again for a few seconds, opened them and said, Somebody close to you...an older woman...has a constriction, and she made fists to show me. She will have crisis in five months...I see her eyes go black.

It’s probably my mother, I said, She’s been sick for about three years.

No, seben, said Mary. Seven years?

My mother passed out in her bedroom five months later, falling and hitting her head on her dressing table. Dad and I thought it was just from drinking too much, but a later test confirmed a stroke.

Mary described the personalities of my two children better than I could have, and gave me general reassurances about their futures, with one exception. Your son will be a self-made millionaire...he will make you very proud. That statement sustained me over the years.

Your Daddy is sick...he must go to the doctor, she said, pointing to her lower abdomen, side and ribs. I told him right away but it was two weeks before he finally took my advice. It was bad news—prostate cancer had advanced to what is called stage D, and had spread to his bones.

(I had heard that the worst cancer pain of all was in the terminal stage of bone cancer. My heart ached for him. The next time I would see Mary was following the diagnosis. Will he suffer terrible pain, Mary? No, she said, he will fight this disease because his constitution is strong and then he will sleep away for three days. She put her hands to one side of her face, palms together. No pain...he has suffered enough in this life. He lived for nine years and died peacefully after a three-day coma. His doctor assured me he was in no pain.)

May my mother forgive me for mentioning such a personal matter, but I feel the need to show how remarkable Mary’s gift was. This older woman close to you...is destroying herself [with alcohol, over the past forty years]. You must never feel guilty, Mary went on. She is childishly irrational...it is not your fault.

I couldn’t have described my mother more accurately even though I had lived with her and tried to figure out what made her tick all my life. Tears came. I sat there stunned again. Forty years of guilt lifted off my shoulders with one simple statement. What psychiatrist could have done that?

Mary folded one of my hands over the other and placed her hands on mine. The reading was over.

Mary wants to know if she can say a prayer for you, said Paul.

Sure, I said. If Mary thought a prayer might help, that would be fine—she obviously knew more about matters of the spirit than I did. After the reading I’d just had, I felt like I was in the presence of real magic. That thunderbolt started a quest for knowledge about reincarnation and psychic ability that is as insistent now as it was then: I was still an agnostic that day, but soon became a true believer in a Creator and a divine plan.

Mary prayed silently. Then, looking up, said goodbye and smiled for the first time. She said something to Paul who turned to me. Mary wants to know why you are wearing a square bracelet.

I shrugged in my mesmerized stupor. Just to be different, I guess.

Creaking out of the cramped chair, I fished for my money. (Ten dollars for the extra-ordinary information I’d just heard was the best deal ever. Imagine knowing I would never have Alzheimer’s disease, particularly when it seemed to run in the family.)

Saying goodbye to Mary was frustrating. I wanted to tell her how fascinated I was