The Monash Weekly
“Ghost whisperer” by Daniel Tran
08 Nov, 2011 02:39 PM
When a loved one dies, can we ever speak to them again? Daniel Tran goes in search of answers.
When I meet Maria Last, I’m surprised by how, well, un-supernatural she looks. A blue-eyed blonde with a killer smile, Maria isn’t what I expected when I set off to meet a psychic. She invites me into her home, a bright, comfortable place with neither crystal ball nor tarot cards in sight.
Maria talks in a soft Irish brogue dulled by 13 years in Australia. She’s 38, an avid Essendon supporter, and she believes she can speak with the dead.
As we chat I notice her eyes occasionally flick to the other side of the room. She explains that she’s looking for the person I’ve come to speak to, my late grandfather.
The night before my visit, Maria had asked me to put a call out to any spirits I wanted to join us, so I stood in the backyard, looked at the sky, and asked if he could pop by.
‘‘I always say, ‘I can’t guarantee you anything,’’’ Maria says. ‘‘If, for any reason, they don’t turn up, usually they’ll send somebody.’’
She tells me there’s been somebody here all morning — an elderly man.
My heart leaps, but as she continues it becomes clear this isn’t Thang Dac Vu, my grandfather.
I was devastated when he died of cancer in 2005. I still miss him, and I’d love to talk to him again, so why not try?
When I was younger, he would walk my brother and I to and from school every day. He was easily the best-dressed man at school with his pressed suit pants and immaculate white button shirt, a possible remnant from growing up in French-occupied Vietnam.
When I was growing up, he was the most reliable person I knew. If it rained he had an umbrella and if it shone, well, the umbrella kept us cool, too. He used to carry it like a rifle and his walk had a certain marching quality, a habit he was never able to break after several years in the army.
When I meet with the Monash Spiritualist Centre, they assure me that getting in touch with my grandfather is possible. I visit the centre’s founder, Val Pearson, and her daughter Sandra at Val’s home in Berwick.
Spiritualists believe that, when a person dies, they end up in places they call the ether and the astral plane, where they can be contacted.
The religion’s founders claimed in 1848 to have contacted a deceased man in their home through a system of knocks corresponding to letters of the alphabet. This transmutation of life rather than death, and the contact it allows, forms the core of the Spiritualist faith.
‘‘All the communication goes through the ether,’’ Val says. “This is how we contact the astral plane but we have to put ourselves in a state where we are not physically thinking. We’re in a meditative state so that we go to a higher level within ourselves to enable us to be able to contact that higher level.
‘‘To be able to communicate with spirit, you have to be in a certain atmosphere. You have to get yourself in a certain state.”
When I ask Val and Sandra whether they can show me this type of mediumship, they say the circumstances are not right.
Wavecare counselling grief counsellor Grant Holland says that when someone dies, the people who love him or her often feel that death should be put away and never spoken about again. In therapy, though, he helps them come to terms with their loss and unlock the memories pushed down by grief.
“We have to get to a point where there’s some acceptance that physically this person is not going to walk in the door,” he says. “But spiritually and in a memory sense … they’re not deceased, they haven’t left.”
Holland succeeded where the others had failed. After talking to him I pulled out some old pictures of my grandfather, showing his time in the South Vietnamese army, and they brought back a flood of happy memories that I realised I had been keeping buried. It was nice to see him again, even if we couldn’t talk.
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