Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

The séance has a long history, though of course it has had its fashionable periods, and its shabby ones. I’m always fascinated by the idea of talking to the dead, and I’ve come to realize there are a few basic reasons people really want this to happen.

First, of course, is that they simply miss the person that has died. To have lost a life-long spouse, a child, or a parent, especially without warning, is sure to leave a person feeling hollow, lost without that piece of their lives. For those people, it is all about contacting someone specific, finding out that the person that has left the world of the living is happy. What they want is the realization that their loved one is just fine.

Then we have people that have specific questions to which they want an answer. Questions that for whatever reason, they think only the dead will be able to answer. Maybe this is the result of too many family secrets, or simply of a life cut tragically short, but the human need for answers is a very powerful thing.

The last two reasons we do this could be the motivations for so many other, less savory endeavors: guilt and fear.

How many people are interested in talking to the ‘other side’ because they didn’t bother to talk to the people they’ve lost while they were alive? Or perhaps anger drove a wedge between you. Or some guilt over what you should have done lingers there, burning at a person, until they turn to this option that most of them only half believe in just to get a little relief.

Fear may be the biggest reason of all, though. We seem to be hard wired to fear anything that we cannot see or understand. What fits that bill more than death?

Yet psychologists tell us that within every single one of us, there exists a death wish, thanatos.

So we fear it, but we want it. There isn’t a single religion that I can find that doesn’t try to answer the question of what happens to us after we die. Science isn’t much help, at least not yet, so we turn to philosophical and religious explanations. When those aren’t enough to soothe our fears, then we turn to the only people we are absolutely sure know the answers.

The dead.

Personally, I feel like I belong to a minority group. Curiosity is what motivates us. We wonder if it works, and if so, how?

I’ve seen death, and I do not fear it. I can’t say I want to add it to my to-do list anytime soon, but I don’t fear it.

Still, despite my scientific leanings, my intense curiosity leads me to try many things. The Séance among them. Though our results were less than spectacular, I can say that I did try it. If nothing else, it will be good research for a book someday.

Cheers,

Michelle