"I consult a medium to talk to my dead father"

San Diego is a good place to find psychics - I consult a medium to talk to my dead father

Joe Deegan

...“Your grandmother wants you to know that she is proud of you and is proud you found your faith,” he tells Hackett, who, at this mention of a woman who spent as much time raising her as her own mother, begins to weep. She tells me later that she has always felt the presence of both her grandmother and great-grandmother protecting her at dangerous moments. As I listen, I wonder what they were doing when her stepfather was molesting her. But she credits them with often helping her. “My life should have been taken by now,” she says.

I might suspect some embellishment of the truth after the fact, so to speak, but even before tonight’s event, Hackett had told me a story that her mother once told her. Before Hackett was born, it seems, her great-grandmother, on her deathbed, put her hand on her mother’s stomach and said what her mother had not yet learned herself: “You are pregnant with a baby girl. I will watch over her always.”

On this evening, however, Meredith also describes a dog with short brown hair, a curly white tail, and sparkling eyes sitting at Hackett’s side and pawing her. This detail also causes her to tear up. She once had a golden retriever and St. Bernard mix named Brandi she dearly loved. “He described him to a T,” she tells me. “I have a picture of him on my wall, and his eyes always sparkled. He was a happy dog.”

Out of the blue, Meredith asks, “Who is Jimmy? I sense him coming in here. He is around about you a lot these days and is now standing with your grandmother next to you.” Meredith is starting to wind up his conversation with Hackett, after which he will turn to someone else in the room. She cannot tell him who Jimmy is. “That’s all right,” he says, “but you might inquire a bit about him to your family.”

And Hackett does. Her mother tells her the next day that Jimmy was her uncle but that he was killed in a car crash. “Oh, that Jimmy,” Hackett said to her mother. She goes on to tell me, “I thought he was still alive. I’ve recently been talking to my husband about hiring someone to find him, because I wanted to talk to him and find out what my dad was like. So [through Meredith’s mediation] that was my father’s brother coming back to tell me he had already passed. Which I thought was pretty cool, because then I wouldn’t get frustrated at trying to find this man.” Hackett remembers Jimmy because when she was a little girl he had once given her a doll. He had already stepped in to help the family in the years after his brother had left her and her mother...