There’s a sucker born every minute—and I wish more than anything I was one of ‘em

Can I climb on my soapbox for a few minutes?  I saw something on Sunday television this weekend that threw my usual tranquil Sunday-state-of-mind into a bit of upheaval.  More on that in a minute.

When my Grandpap Morris died in 1982, I felt sad for my Grandma Morris and my dad and my aunts & uncles but that was the extent of it.  Pap and I were never close.  He left Grandma in the early 1960s, and when they got back together around 1974, made no real effort to know his grandkids.  When I cried at his funeral, my dad was both touched and surprised.  Dad, I was crying for your loss—not mine.

When my Grandma Barnhart (my mom’s mother) died in 1988, I felt bad her last years were difficult ones, but little else.  She was an unkind person who never liked me and was abusive to my mom when she was a child.  I felt sad for my mom though, who maintained a loud, funny love/hate relationship with her mother for as long as I could remember. 

(I didn’t know my maternal grandfather, he died when Mom was only 5 years old.  Her only possession of him, a 5x7 framed photo now sits on my bedroom dresser.)

When Grandma Morris (my dad’s mom) died in 1997, I was 35 years old and felt the loss of a loved one for the first time in my life.  We were very close and the best of buddies from the time I was 4-5.  She was the best grandma, ever.

Grandma Morris & me, October 1996—my 35th birthday.  Sadly she’d be gone 6 months later

When Dad passed in 2001, I cried pretty hard at his funeral, and then never wept again.  I always wanted us to be closer, and now I knew we never would be.

When my mom died in 2004, I was devastated.  Her passing wrecked me, it was a struggle to get out of bed in the mornings for a good year.  My sister Shawn’s daughter, my niece Sophia kept me going though.  She was a newborn, only 2 months old and with no grandparents on either side to call her own, she would need all the family she could get.  I know I sure did.

Right after Mom died, I was almost desperate to know if there was the smallest chance she was still “out there” in some way, and would we see her again.  I’d scour the internet for articles from so called experts on the afterlife and interviews with mediums who assured us they were in constant contact with the dead.

And then I read Harry Houdini’s story, which saddened me greatly but was the wakeup call I needed.  When his own mother died, he was inconsolable; he often laid on her grave and wept.  But he was a world famous celebrity, and used his wealth to search the globe for one medium—JUST ONE—who could help him contact his mother.  He was unsuccessful. 

Houdini spent the rest of his days giving sold-out lectures on the fraudulent practice of speaking to the dead, that it was all a hoax and every medium was a fake, a charlatan.

I’m sharing all of this now because earlier today, on a respected news program, they did a report on Tyler Henry, a 28 year old “Hollywood medium”. 

He has a waiting list of 600,000 people willing to travel far & wide to meet with him, but when Jim Parsons (Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory) requests to speak to his real-life mee-maw, Tyler Henry will make house calls. 

Tyler Henry; yes this young man is smiling, all the way to the bank!

On CBS Sunday Morning, we see him on the stage in front of a large group of people, asking if anyone knows this random name and does it connect to this random month; yes, yes shouts someone from the audience!

C’mon people, his act is so old school it’s straight out of vaudeville!  Are you that desperate to believe?  It’s okay, I get it.  For a long time, I wanted to believe too.

But Tyler insists he’s real, and tells CBS that he believes half of the so-called mediums out there are phony.  Really Tyler?  Half?  THEY ALL ARE, TYLER.  JUST ASK HARRY HOUDINI.  

You can contact him, can’t you? 

Anyway, if you made it this far—thanks for listening and I’d be very curious to know what others think.  Apparently Tyler has a show on Netflix, but I don’t subscribe to that service so I’ve never seen it.  Am I being too harsh?  Have you seen it?  Does he seem legitimate to you?

I asked my friend Diana (who happens to be a pretty devout Christian) what she thought about contacting the dead.  She said she very much believed in an afterlife, but there was no bridge between their world and ours.  That made good sense to me.