Contact from the Other-Side

‘Who’s Maggie?’ The medium asked as we sat in her darkened living room. I’d never laid eyes on her until tonight, and as she lit another cigarette and coughed into the tape machine I tried to get my thoughts in order. Maggie, you see, is my mother’s name. No messing around, she just gave me a name that I could relate to immediately, she had no information about me, I’d booked the appointment from a call box and had given no details.

The medium claimed she was connected to my grandmother, on Dad’s side, who’d died before I was born. She told me that, ‘Mum does too much, takes too much on...’ (Don’t all mothers?) ‘But...’ she continued, ‘...if she doesn’t take things easy, she will become ill.’ Nah! – Mum was never ill, but she did look after her elderly mother, and her elderly aunt, and they both now lived at home with her. (Dad on the other hand was always ill…but Mum…never!) The medium said that if anyone tried to tell her, Mum would dismiss it and say ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ but she wouldn’t actually listen.

Well, let’s put that to the test then…a few weeks later I was visiting Mum, (I lived 300 miles away in sunny Cornwall) and decided to play her the tape from the beginning. My sisters and I crowded around the cassette recorder to listen. I pressed pause on the tape player, after the mediums voice had said that ‘Mum takes too much on’. Mum said…‘Yes, yes, yes...now who’s making the tea then?’ I pressed play and we all fell about with laughter, as the medium repeated Mum’s words exactly. The down-side to this of course was that Mum did become quite poorly within a month. She was struck down with a bout of shingles, and complete rest was recommended.

Over the next 20 years I continued with my research, not because I was grieving for anyone that had passed, I wasn’t looking for comfort or reassurance, I was just curious! What if this wasn’t all there was? What if there was a great unseen world of possibilities...what if all you had to do was ‘be open’ to those possibilities? I could do that, I decided. I approached everything with a healthy dose of scepticism, because plenty of people were ready to claim that if you couldn’t see, hear, smell, touch or taste it – then clearly it didn’t exist.

My investigations saw me visiting more mediums, some great, others – not so impressive. I met many interesting people, and some who were, well, how shall I put this? Total crackpots! - Always lovely though. I looked into life-after-death, and then reincarnation. I carried out self-regression hypnosis to discover more… I am an 8 year old little girl and live in India; I live with my Grandmother who has bad teeth, I am playing; hanging upside down from a tree with nothing on my feet…I am a clerk to the town council somewhere in middle England; I carry a silver topped cane…I am a slave in ancient Rome; I wear a filthy tunic and sandals on my feet …Where did these ‘memories’ come from? Occasionally I would dream about a past life, once I dreamt about my own death, by drowning; I stayed away from water for a long time – I couldn’t even look at it on the television! Luckily I moved on from this fear, and now live near the sea, I am cautious, and treat it with respect; maybe that is why I dreamt of this lifetime, because I was going to move to the coast and I needed to remember – to keep me safe this time around. The people in my past-lives were often people I knew today, they didn’t look the same, of course, but I recognised them on a soul level.

I read hundreds of books, and began to research the bigger picture…the universe! Vibration was a vital clue. Everything was connected, we were all made up of the same basic stuff, but everything was vibrating at different speeds, this was science that I found fascinating! If something vibrated at a fast enough speed it disappeared from our vision – take a child’s spinning-top as an example. So using that analogy what else was out there, entirely unseen I wondered? I was on an expedition, unearthing past-lives and parallel universes – discovering the knowledge behind the mysteries.

During my years of study, Dad’s brother, my dear Uncle Eric died. This was a major blow; he was a funny, sweet and cheeky man. But Eric soon showed us that he was still around, and regularly, when visiting home, if we mentioned his name, ‘on-cue’ the lights would flicker lights, smoke alarms would bleep and doorbells would ring (when no one was there). We always blamed Uncle Eric. It became a standing joke and everyone in the family experienced this phenomena. Dad was regularly ill, and I mean seriously ill, during the next few years, and each time he was well again, we teased, you’re not joining Eric just yet Dad. In his late 70’s, after another serious complaint, Dad was tired and fed up with battling his latest ill-health, we asked him, “So are you going to contact us from the other-side then Dad?”
“Like Eric does?” he grinned.
“Yes, let us know you’ve arrived safely in heaven?”
“Oh I will my darling.” was his lovely reply.

On the night he died, things started to happen, unexplained things: alarms going off that hadn’t been set, mobile phones bleeping when they’d been turned off, coincidences maybe? Dreams, which were clear ‘visitations,’ brought messages and comfort from Dad, and once brought a warning. He was fulfilling his contract that he’d made before he died to let us know he was safely in heaven. All of his four daughters experienced similar incidents, and then an ever-widening circle of family and friends. We started to record these experiences, and collectively they became an impressive document, and then a manuscript.

It has been an enlightening journey, full of amazing discoveries about ‘life’ on the other side. The astonishing communication we experienced when our wonderful Dad died culminated in a book. It was written with love by two sisters, because as we discovered – death is just the beginning.

By Madeline Richardson
www.MadelineRichardson.co.uk

‘Call Me When You Get to Heaven’ by Jacky Newcomb and Madeline Richardson Published by Piatkus – 3rd November 2011.