These conversations about the family became an after-dinner ritual. On Friday nights, after office hours, I would drive over to my parents' condo. When dinner was finished, my father, delighted that my mother and I were getting along and relieved that our fighting was over, would conveniently disappear into the den to watch a Lakers game. With cups of mint tea in our hands, my mother and I would move into the living room.
Though my mother had always spoken her mind, it had been a huge step for her to divulge that Rose was psychic. I soon found out that as bold as these admissions had been, she had been holding back something even more intimate. It was about her own life: her most well-guarded secret.
“When I first opened my medical practice,” she said during one of our Friday nights, “I realized that I had some psychic and healing abilities, too. They weren't as strong as in you or your grandmother, but they were definitely there.”
My mother a psychic healer? I stared at this thin, determined woman beside me and wondered who she was. She had kept this part of herself hidden just as I had tried to do when I began my practice.
“I knew that modern medicine didn't have all the answers,” she went on. “From the beginning, twenty years ago, my oncologist recommended that I take intravenous doses of chemotherapy to treat the lymphoma. But I decided to keep the disease in check with my mind. I never told anyone, but every morning when I woke up, I would hypnotize myself into being well. I would place my hands over my body and send positive thoughts through them while I visualized the tumors shrinking. I believe that I kept myself healthy: According to statistics, I shouldn't be alive today.”
“Why didn't you confide in me?” I asked. “I would have understood.”
My mother shot me a look of disbelief. “If you recall, when I was first diagnosed back in nineteen-seventy, you and I were arguing so much that it didn't feel safe to talk to you. You were withdrawn and unreachable. I didn't consider you a support. My healing was private. Talking about it with anyone would have taken away the power.”
Pictures of our many fights came hurtling into my mind: doors slamming, bitter words exchanged, running out of the house, threats never to return. We were both stubborn. It had been a battle of wills. I could see why she had been reluctant to trust me.
“I learned privacy the hard way,” she continued. “While I was growing up, your grandmother talked a lot about her gifts. And her premonitions were really far-fetched. Rose predicted the jet age, rapid transit, the use of laser beams in medicine. But in the twenties, nobody believed her. I loved her very much, but I was a kid. She embarrassed me. I wanted to be normal. Rose couldn't understand that.”
Mothers and daughters. I could see that we had both engaged in our own forms of rebellion. She had reacted to her mother by becoming conservative, denying her gift; I had fought to express my psychic abilities and let them shine.
The more my mother spoke, the bluer her eyes seemed to become. “When I was ten,” she went on, “I had a premonition that I was going to be a doctor. Nothing would stop me. But there I was, in a society that looked down on anyone who was different. My mother didn't care what people thought about her, but I did. I didn't want to repeat her mistakes, so I decided to keep my abilities to myself.”
I knew her position was well founded. In 1942, when she was accepted into Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, the field of medicine was male dominated. Only a small quota of women was admitted, as compared to the forty percent today. And of course during my own residency, over three decades later, I still didn't feel I could discuss the psychic with my peers for fear of being judged and ostracized. (When my mother was at Hahnemann, the unusual curriculum covered both traditional and homeopathic medicine. Though she was able to study legitimately what her mother had done in her practice with herbs, homeopathy was already well out of mainstream contemporary medicine.)
For the past thirty years, after our move to Los Angeles, my mother had been a traditional Beverly Hills family practitioner with an office on Bedford Drive. Her patients became an extended family, and she was the mother hen. Being a doctor was everything to her; she would do nothing to jeopardize that. But unbeknownst to her patients, she would consciously direct loving energy through her hands. This had become so routine that she barely gave it a second thought. I felt it was a shame that she couldn't have been more open about her gifts, but I respected her decision to heal in the context of mainstream medicine. Just as the persona of “psychiatrist” was one I had to make fit, my mother could never come to terms with that of “healer.” Still, I was sad that she had felt she needed to wall off so much of herself, to deprive herself of such precious talents.
“I sometimes knew things about my patients before they even told me,” she continued. “There's a little voice in my head that I listen to. It's never wrong. My patient Rita is a good example. She once came to see me with a terrible cold. When I was taking her temperature, the voice told me to examine her breasts. I didn't usually do that for a cold, but I followed my instincts. Her right breast was fine, but in the left one I found a small, hard, peasized nodule. I knew it hadn't been there before, so I sent her for a mammogram and a biopsy.”
“What happened?” I was spellbound.
“The lump was malignant. In a week, she had it surgically removed and started radiation and chemotherapy. That was two years ago. Rita's been cancer-free ever since. If I hadn't picked up the lump so early, there's a good chance that the cancer might have spread. I believe that by listening to the voice in my head, I saved Rita's life.”
I was now completely reappraising my mother. The effort I had made to incorporate the psychic into my medical practice was a task she had already accomplished! Without knowing it, I was following in her footsteps, carrying on a family tradition. I had always searched for a feeling of rightness about my life, and now I was getting validation for the direction I'd instinctively chosen to pursue.
I later found out that my mother's younger sister, Phyllis, a doctor in Philadelphia specializing in internal medicine, was also a psychic. Despite their mutual affection, there had always been a certain amount of competition between them. Yet the psychic was a common bond: When they couldn't talk to anyone else, they became confidantes in late-night long-distance phone conversations, discussing their psychic experiences with each other.
“In nineteen sixty-three,” my mother told me, “Phyllis's husband had his first heart attack. While he was still in the hospital, she had a dream that she was making medical rounds with a group of physicians. After they all reviewed the current treatments for heart conditions, she came away knowing that subcutaneous heparin was the right medication for her husband.”
“What made that dream psychic?” I asked. “Heparin is routinely given to cardiac patients to prevent blood clots.”
“But in the early sixties,” my mother replied, “heparin wasn't used for that. There was no clinical documentation to indicate that heparin would help in postcoronary care. It didn't become standard practice until much later. When Phyllis told the cardiologist to give her husband heparin, he refused. So she decided that she'd administer it on her own. Phyllis didn't have many dreams, but when she did, they almost always were right.”
“Did she ever tell anyone about her dream?”
My mother shook her head. “She once mentioned it to another doctor, but he gave her such a strange look that she never brought it up again. He wanted scientific proof, but of course she didn't have any.”
Phyllis's husband, a gynecologist, had no interest in the psychic when they married. At first, when her predictions came true, she felt that he was threatened. He had been raised believing in traditional male roles, and she was convinced it challenged his need for control. But over the course of fifteen years, she watched him become more comfortable with her predictions. When enough of them had proven accurate, he no longer viewed them as untenable. He had come to appreciate their value in time for her to save his life.
Since 1942, there had been twenty-five physicians in our family: five women and twenty men. The healing instinct had been there for all of us. But as far as my mother knew, none of the males had ever been psychic. She couldn't explain why. Maybe there was something inherent in being female that made it easier to tap into this information, or perhaps it was genetic. Maybe some of the men were psychic also, but had even less cultural permission to express it than the women had. Neither of us was sure.
What was sure for me was that with each conversation I had with my mother, the inner fabric of my being was being woven more tightly. After years of floating above myself, disconnected from my body, I felt as if a gigantic magnet were pulling me back down to earth. The ground seemed more solid beneath my feet. I now began to pamper myself in ways that I'd previously dreaded or considered an inconvenience. I went shopping for new clothes, permed my hair so that it was wild and curly, had regular facials, and, when I was especially brave, darkened my eyelashes with black mascara.
In my freshman year of high school, I'd had my first heartbreak, which undermined my confidence. I was fourteen. Without any warning, my boyfriend left me for a gorgeous blond-haired, blue-eyed cheerleader who drove a red Camaro. I blamed myself; I decided that I hadn't been pretty or popular enough to keep him. It took me months to get over the breakup, and my insecurities stayed with me for years, churning below the surface. After I learned about my family history, these beliefs changed. Looking in the mirror at my Modigliani face, olive skin, and hazel eyes that peered into people for a little bit too long, I now liked what I saw. Discovering the psychic link among the women in my family had strengthened me; I was allowing the richness of my womanhood to emerge.
In the spring of 1990, I had a dream.
I'm standing in a bombed-out deserted chapel in a desert wilderness. Above me there is a four-story cathedral ceiling with huge triangular-shaped windows on each wall with sunlight flooding through them. The remnants of a small altar stand toward the front of the room. The atmosphere is peaceful and comforting. Although I can see no one, I am aware of the presence of a group of ancient invisible beings, but I don't know who they are.
All at once, I am overcome with shame about my anger and rebellion at being on earth. There has always been a part of me that never felt I belonged here, and so I didn't feel obliged to cooperate fully. I never gave my all; I hid in my mother's shadow, not speaking up about what I knew. She was the star and I remained anonymous. I am ashamed of my lack of courage.
Gently and with care, the group of invisible beings lift me high into the air, showering me with a feeling of pure forgiveness. I see my life with sudden clarity, and I understand that none of my concerns about the past matter. Everything is exactly how it was meant to be. I have been forgiven. Now is the time to share what I know with others.
This dream led me back to my past. While I was growing up, I kept notebooks filled with poems I'd written. They were intimate accounts of my first love affair, feelings about my mother, about my LSD trips I took in high school, all laced with a thread of the separateness that pervaded my life at the time. When I was fourteen, my mother told me she wanted to publish these poems. She was obviously extremely proud of my writings and wanted to share them. Hungry for her approval, I reluctantly gave my consent, a decision I hadn't fully thought out. She published the poems in a small hardcover book, and before I knew it she had given copies to all of our family, friends, and her patients. One of her friends, a music teacher at Julliard, even set a few of my poems to music and sent us the tape. I was mortified; my inner life was on public display. Embarrassed and exposed, I wanted to curl up into a tiny ball and become invisible. I didn't write another word for years.
The forgiveness dream brought with it great freedom. It was as if a restrictive mantle had finally been removed, one I hadn't even known was covering me. That very morning, I grabbed a yellow legal pad from my desk and began writing. Ideas flowed out of me like a torrent of water breaking through a dam. The voice that had been stifled for decades was released. The dream had given me permission to take chances, think in new directions, let my daydreams take form.
While my strength was mounting, my mother was gradually beginning to fade. She lived through the next two years propelled solely by her ferocious passion for life. Her body was gradually weakening, but she put on a convincing front. No one besides my father and a few close friends knew the seriousness of her illness. Her medical practice continued to flourish, and she didn't miss a single day of work. Each morning, outfitted in designer dresses, her hair perfectly groomed, her makeup flawless, she'd see patients nonstop for eight hours. No one suspected that there was anything wrong.
Although I was aware that the cancer had grown and I could see that she was wilted with fatigue each evening, I refused to acknowledge how sick my mother really was. I didn't want to know. I had expected her to live forever. My mother had always been vivacious and outgoing. She loved nothing better than attending extravagant black-tie parties and lavish high-profile political events. Wherever she went, she had always been the center of attention, commanding the respect due to a matriarch. Now that the years of struggle were behind us, I clung fiercely to my mother; I had no intention of letting her go. The possibility of her death was unthinkable. I simply blocked it out.
Early in October of 1992, my mother visited me at my condo in Marina del Rey. We laid a madras blanket on the beach and sat down to talk. She had noticed that I was short tempered and burned out, that I hadn't had a vacation for eight months. I had never been very good at carving out time for myself, so together we went over my appointment book and blocked out a week at the end of the month. I agreed to take that time to rest and regenerate.