Reaching Rosa

I sit on my bed, cross-legged in darkness. Moonbeams reflect light off my white walls. My singing bowl sits heavy in the palm of my hand and I stroke its rim with a striker in repetitive circular motions. I take deep breaths and shut my eyes as soothing vibrations fill the room and I slowly fall into a trance.

I spent my childhood shutting out the spirit world. For as long as I can recall, they’ve been trying to make contact. It started with a simple sense of knowing but this intuition gradually built into detailed premonitions. They would come to me in images like a collection of stills, which together formed a movie.

The visitations initially occurred in dreams. My parents would tell me my imagination was too vivid; that this was what I got for watching 18 rated films at 13; that I shouldn’t eat cheese before bed. Cheese or no cheese, they came to me. There was never a night they didn’t come. I lay awake in the darkness attempting to delay their presence. For a time, this would work, but my weary eyes would always grow tired eventually and, once they were closed, there was no stopping them.

It wasn’t long before they were tormenting me in wakefulness too. Dreams became nightmares, nightmares became sleep paralysis, sleep paralysis became apparitions, apparitions became voices.

It’s a funny thing, disbelief. For me, they were as clear as day but everyone around me couldn’t see them. I figured that other people must have shut them out and that I could too, although it seemed that the harder I tried to ignore their existence, the more determined they became to make me aware of it.

I tried to drown them out with headphones but the voices just grew louder. With my eyes screwed shut, I would sing as loudly as I could to block them out, until my throat hurt and I lost my voice. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” stopped being a cheesy party classic for me many years ago. My parents couldn’t stand it, invested in some ear plugs and left me to suffer. When objects were moved in the house, often lost for weeks at a time, I would ultimately get the blame.

The activity I experienced at home was putting strain on my parents’ marriage and they began to resent me and my “tall tales”. They always had their own rational explanations. It felt like they cared more about pretending I wasn’t crazy than trying to understand me. I was shunned at school for being weird and life became lonely. There was nowhere I felt safe.

My parents forced me to see a therapist. I knew I wasn’t going mad but out of sheer desperation I attended the sessions. I wished that just one person would understand that it wasn’t all in my head. I tried hypnotherapy with no results. Eventually, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and prescribed a long list of drugs.

I hated that label. How dare they not believe me?! My own flesh and blood branding me a liar. But I took their stupid drugs. What did I have to lose? If I was entirely honest with myself, I’d never heard of anti-psychotic drugs curing genuine spirit communication but it shut up the living, at least. In their eyes, I was trying to resolve things.

When the drugs failed to work, my mother began to accept that perhaps I hadn’t been lying. Her acknowledgement that there might be some truth in what I was saying was life-changing for me. I had felt so alone for so long and finally someone was on my side. It was just a shame that I had to exhaust all other potential explanations and solutions before I was finally (even just a little bit) believed.

Mum contacted a local priest, Father Matthew. He came over to ours on a frosty October afternoon in his ceremonial robes. I thought his presence would reassure me but he made me feel uneasy. He stepped through the front door muttering to himself, holding a bible in one hand and a jar of liquid in the other. A large cross pendant hung from his neck. As he introduced himself, he joked that my mother, named Mary, might have more success cleansing the house herself given her biblical association. Mum rolled her eyes and went to help Dad rake the leaves in the back garden; she was never known for her sense of humour and had had enough of the Virgin Mary jokes she’d endured throughout school.

Ignoring the awkward silence that followed, Father Matthew instructed us to light a candle in a window of our living room. I then lit some incense and some sage and we went from room to room chanting the Lord’s Prayer as Father Matthew flicked the holy water from his jar around the place and I smudged all the corners of the rooms.

I felt sceptical but this exercise was really a last resort so I hoped more than anything it would work. After cleansing every room, Father Matthew and I ventured back to the living room. As we entered it, a book fell off the shelving beside the period fireplace, breaking the silence. I rushed over to it and as I bent down to pick it up, the candle in the window blew out. The book was spread open on the floor and as I turned it over my eye was immediately drawn to a single word on the page, “hex”.

Before I knew it, Father Matthew was making his excuses and had nervously exited via the front door. I looked out of the living room window and, as he approached the end of the garden path, he seemed to vanish into the fog.

Feeling like I had no options left, I took the book to my room and decided I was going to face my fears and figure out this issue myself once and for all. The book smelt musty. It looked well used as the binding was falling apart and just a few threads were keeping it together. Inside the cover on the first page, a note read “October 1997, Dear Mary, I trust you will use the content herein responsibly and hope it helps you. Peace, love and light, S.”

This was Mum’s book? How had I not seen it before? All these years she had been in complete denial about the spirit world yet here I find she has an entire book on the occult. I prayed that within these pages I would find the answers I’d been searching for all these years.

The first chapter was about protection. Protection?! Why had no one told me about protection? Mum’s handwriting annotated the grubby pages, “I encase myself in a healing, rose gold pyramid. Healing white light pours into me like a cup, gradually filling me until it’s spilling over from my crown and surrounding my entire body. Roots from my feet into the soil keep me grounded and I’m ready to open my chakras one by one before welcoming in spirit.”

Welcoming in spirit? She had encouraged this? Who in their right mind would encourage this? Well, here I am I guess, reading this book. Is this where I had been going wrong? Was I supposed to be encouraging spirit, listening to them, playing out their wishes? Why would Mum have kept all this from me?

As I briefly perused the remaining chapters, a small square of paper fell from the pages; an image of a baby scan, labelled “Rosa Black due October 1995”. I had an older sister? Why would my parents keep this from me? I decided I needed time to absorb all of this new information and slept on it in an attempt to make sense of things.

Weirdly, the activity lessened that night. The voices backed off. At breakfast, Mum commented that she hadn’t heard my singing last night and concluded that the cleanse had been successful. I knew I had to broach the topic of Rosa with her but we weren’t close. We had never been close. As Mum stared blankly out of the kitchen window, I blurted it out, “I have a sister? Rosa?”

Mum looked at me with sad eyes, “How do you know about Rosa?” I felt guilty for rifling through her book but I had to come clean, “I accidentally discovered your book on the occult.” Mum started to panic, “I didn’t mean to invite them in. I didn’t mean for them to pursue you. I just wanted to speak to Rosa. I just wanted to contact my baby. I never even got to hold her in my arms.” In that moment, I felt angry. How could my own mother let me suffer alone for so long when this spirit communication was her doing? Everything began to make sense but I bit my tongue, trying to empathise with the pain of losing a baby.

We sat down in the bay window and Mum explained to me how she had carried Rosa full-term but that she had experienced abnormal bleeding just weeks before Rosa was due. Knowing something wasn’t right, she rushed to the hospital where the midwife made her go through labour aware that there was no longer a heartbeat and that there was nothing they could do. Mum started sobbing inconsolably, “They wouldn’t let me hold her. They said it would be too damaging to see her perfect but lifeless.”

Mum explained how she had suffered with postnatal depression as a result of Rosa’s stillbirth. When she fell pregnant with me, she was so fearful of losing me that she had consciously prohibited herself from forming any bond before my arrival. When therapy and anti-depressants failed to dull Mum’s pain, she had visited Eltham Spiritualist Church. A member named Sandra had gifted Mum the book to assist in her contacting Rosa. Instead of connecting with Rosa, Mum had unintentionally invited in all the spirits who hadn’t found peace and they began to use me as a vessel. Despite my hurt, I reassured Mum that together we were more powerful. I knew that the activity had lessened because spirit finally felt they were going to be heard but Mum wasn’t convinced. So now I had to determine a way of contacting them on my own terms....

My singing bowl sits heavy in the palm of my hand and I stroke its rim with a striker in repetitive circular motions. I call to Rosa for her help. I know it won’t be long before the sweet lady with my nighttime meds will be here for her reading.