Why I believe in an afterlife
Marc Berman’s psychic quest led him to TV mediums John Edward and Jeffrey Wands, among others. He now believes in spirit communication and life after death.
I will never forget that horrific moment when our lives were shattered forever. I was resting on my bed, an innocent teenager just three weeks shy of turning 20, when the doorbell rang downstairs.
Minutes later, two police officers were at our door and my mother was lying on the floor screaming, “Jeffrey was killed in a car accident.”
Two hours later I was sitting in a funeral home making the arrangements for my 22-year-old brother. At the time he was on a camping trip in Maine. And, at that very moment my biggest problem in life was deciding what to do that evening.
None of us would ever be the same again.
I lost my father at age 74 in February 2006, 28 years after my brother passed away. It was unexpected and it was far too soon. But when you lose your brother at such a young age, particularly at a time when going for help was considered taboo, there is little to console you.
Unlike my father’s passing, no one can say, “I know how you feel.”
So, I went on a mission, and that was to get
a message, any sliver of information, from my beloved brother. It never dawned on me how close we were until after he was gone.
At first I started reading books, anything that would touch on life after death. “Did Jeffrey walk into the light?” I desperately wondered. “Was he okay? Was he watching over us?”
Fear
Unfortunately, I started having nightmares so I had to put my quest on hold.
Instead of Jeffrey coming back to me in my dreams, igniting me with a jolt of optimism, I was paralysed by fear and anxiety.
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Marc with his
brother Jeffrey |
Would I ever be able to move on?
Eventually, I relocated from New York to Los Angeles in search of a new life. I was 23 and needed a completely fresh start. But not even 3,000 miles could diminish the pain of Jeffrey’s absence, so I did what I should have done three years earlier: I went into therapy. I needed to understand how someone so close to me could be here today and gone tomorrow.
And I knew that at some point I needed to work on getting that message from Jeffrey.
Two years later, I came back to New York, met my future wife and was ready to jump-start my search. So I made an appointment with my first psychic, a woman named Karen in Farmingdale, New York.
Sitting at a table in her typical split-level home, she read some tarot cards and proceeded to tell me I
had a brother with the initial J who had passed; I would have three children, and an Asian woman was about to help me make a career change.
“I don’t know any Asian women, so I can’t imagine what you mean,” I said. But since I was more concerned about Jeffrey, I asked her: “Where is he? Why did he leave this earth this soon?”
“The lessons he needed to learn were completed, so it was time for him to go,” she said. “But his spirit lives within your son. He is watching over you.”
While I was not overly satisfied with the message from Jeffrey (anyone could have said what she did, I thought), it suddenly dawned on me that I did know an Asian woman, who I used to work with. And she did indeed eventually call me with a job lead.
| TV medium Jeffrey Wands |
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Not convinced
I visited Karen a second time when I was working at a job that was not going well and she immediately said, “There are two men at work, their first initials are M and S, and they are torturing you. Stay low, and you will be okay and on to a new job soon.”
Their names were, in fact, Marc and Scott, and I was free shortly after that. Karen definitely had something, but I was not convinced that Jeffrey was “there” during my two readings.
Eventually I landed a job as a TV journalist and started writing about a psychic I was fascinated with: John Edward (pictured bottom left).
John had his own talk show, Crossing Over With John Edward, and I used my connections to sit in the audience at three of his tapings. Although I did not get a reading, I was still convinced John had a message for me, so I asked the publicist for Universal, his then distributor, for a personal appointment.
“I am willing to go on his show,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
About six months later, it was music to my ears when I heard he was willing to do a private session with me (at no cost, I might add). “Bring other people with you that are looking to reach the same person and don’t tell anyone who they are,” I was told.
So, my parents (who were in town from Florida) and I drove to Astoria, Queens, on a Thursday in 2000 for the reading. About five minutes into it, we knew John had a gift when he looked at my parents and asked,” Who is Beatrice?” Beatrice was my father’s older sister who passed when he was just five.
Although John focused predominantly on my father’s immediate family, I knew he was communicating with my brother when he looked at me and said: “You need to chill out.”
That was the expression Jeffrey always used to me. And Jeffrey was apologising, too, for an incident he apparently felt bad about years before he passed away. I knew exactly what that incident was. But what really blew me away, so to speak, was when John looked at the three of us and asked, “Who has four children?”
I had three and my parents only two, but he looked at me and said it was me. “Your wife had a miscarriage and your brother is rocking the baby.”
Completely
accurate
Needless to say, my wife did tell me she thought she had miscarried years earlier but I did not believe her. Now I did.
One year after the reading with John Edward, I took my wife to a John Edward seminar at a hotel in New York. In a room with about 200 people, John looked right at us and completely came through with a message from my wife’s father, who passed away when she was just ten. “Your father feels badly for not always being there for you emotionally,” he said. And he was completely accurate, describing how he passed away.
