 Adam [my son who has Down’s Syndrome] was seven when my cousin Lydia and her sister Sylvia talked me into visiting a psychic. I'd never done it before, and don't really intend to do it again, but my cousins convinced me that until I'd gone in for a reading, I simply hadn't been on all the rides.
The psychic wasn’t at all what I’d expected. She was an eminently normal-looking woman in her mid-thirties. I showed up at her place of business with my mind as open as I could get it. I’d been trying hard to live by my new credo, in which anything must be considered possible until it is proven false. Still, I expected the woman to say things like, ‘Someone you once knew died in the last ten years, of a heart attack or cancer or some other disease, or possibly an accident. Or maybe you didn't actually know this person, but you knew of him. Or her.’
She was good
Instead, the psychic parked herself in an easy chair across from me and closed her eyes for about fifteen minutes. Then, eyes still shut, she gave me a detailed description of my life. She included things I was positive my cousin couldn't have known, such as the nature of this bladder disease I have, which is too embarrassing to mention to anyone, although I have now announced it in print. I guess the secret’s out anyway, because this psychic knew all about it.
I have to admit, I was impressed.
I was so busy being sceptical that I didn't do the logical thing, which was to ask the psychic about stock investments. Instead, I had her describe other people I knew. I’d give her the name and approximate age of each person. She'd sit there for a while with her eyes closed, and then tell me about them. In detail. I threw everything I could at her, to see how good she really was. I asked her about people I’d met in Japan, in Switzerland, in deepest Communist China. I’m telling you, she was good. There was no fumbling around. She knew who had lost a finger in a factory accident, who had just gone to work for a bank, who had been divorced and remarried within three weeks. Nothing she said had any implications for my life, but I enjoyed just sitting there seeing what she could do. It was like watching a contortionist: not particularly useful, but most amazing.
Toward the end of the sitting, I asked the psychic about my children. I gave her their names and birth dates, starting with Katie. She told me everything I already knew about Katie’s sensitive personality, her childhood bouts with ear infections, her insistence on never being late, and her love of Baroque choral music, which seemed to spring with her from the womb. Cool, I thought.
Then I gave the psychic Adam’s name and birthday. She sat there for a while, as usual, with her eyes closed. Then she said, ‘Adam isn't like your other children.’
I said nothing. I was careful not to change my expression, in case she was peeking.
‘I have to explain this to you,’ said the psychic. ‘You see, Adam is an angel.’
I felt a little bristly around the collar, but I still didn’t move.
An angel?
‘Angels are different from other metaphysical beings,' she went on. ‘Occasionally they decide to incarnate – to become human for a while. Not that they have to, you understand. Sometimes that's just the best way to do what they want to do.’
The psychic then went into a quasi-technical and very wacky-sounding New Age theological discussion, which I found difficult to follow and even more difficult to swallow. I tried to take it in without rolling my eyes, but it was a struggle. After about ten minutes or so, the lecture wound down.
I cleared my throat. ‘Adam has Down's syndrome,’ I said. The psychic didn’t seem at all surprised. She just shrugged. ‘That,’ she said, ‘has nothing to do with it.’
This was what clinched my belief in her psychic gifts. If she had said, ‘Oh, yes, that makes it perfectly clear; all our little retarded brothers and sisters are angels,’ I would have looked upon her with a more jaundiced eye. I’ve heard that line many, many times, from people so sanctimoniously sweet that just standing near them will rot your teeth. These are the same people who always tell me that God would never give them such a child, because they are too weak to be deserving. They are the people who look at Adam and then tell me, in a stage whisper, ‘Mongoloids are always so content, aren’t they?’ I wish these ‘contented-mongoloid’ theorists had to deal with Adam when he's sleep deprived or his dad is out of town or his sisters are picking on him. It’s true he doesn’t indulge in the sort of morose weeping to which I am prone. Mostly he dismantles the furniture. But there are definitely times when he is not content.
At any rate, the psychic did not come back at me with any of the hundred cliches I’d heard targeted at people with Down’s Syndrome. She didn’t even want to talk about genetic disabilities. She wanted to talk about angels.
‘Anyone you meet could be an angel,’ she said. ‘Usually you just see them in passing – they show up to do something and then discarnate again. But sometimes they come the regular way, as babies, and live like other humans for a lifetimes. Like your son. I’d imagine a few of them have Down’s syndrome, but I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.’
By this time I was squinting at her out of one eye and contemplating whether I should ask her about what research methodology she had used to get all this information on angels. Then I remembered that, without any research beyond sitting quietly, she had just accurately described almost everyone I knew. I decided to leave the question alone.
Spiritual Beings
Of course, just because I believe that the psychic had a gift of some sort doesn’t mean I buy into her theology wholesale. Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is. One thing I don’t believe, though, is that there are no spiritual beings around us. They popped into my awareness often enough while I was expecting Adam to disprove that hypothesis to my satisfaction. I don’t know what to call them, I don’t know how they work. But I know they’re there.
I have consciously believed this ever since the night [when I was pregnant with Adam] that John and I sat on our couch, looking out over Harvard Square, and told each other everything. I told him about the invisible hands that rescued me when I was caught in the smoke and, later, when I was bleeding. He told me about the ‘dream – sort of’ that he’d had in Japan. I told him about the Seeing Thing. We talked about the way Dr Grendel’s face had floated around in two parts as he sat on my hospital bed. We went over all the strange coincidences that kept occurring, like the way Sibyl just happened to show up with exactly the groceries I craved exactly when I needed them, and later just happened to know every little, tiny detail one could ever hope to know about infants with birth defects. As far as I was concerned, Sibyl alone constituted a major miracle. John had to agree.
We didn’t sleep at all that night. We talked, and talked, and paced around, and talked, and baked what was left of the cookie dough, and talked some more. Our immense physical fatigue was more than offset by an intoxicating sense of freedom, as we both learned that we could talk to each other about our bizarre new beliefs, and be believed. More than just companionship, we found validation in each other's experiences. It is one thing to suspect, in your own fevered mind, that all kinds of supernatural things are happening to you. It is quite another to hear that someone else’s fevered mind has its own suspicions, and that your experiences complement each other like two halves of a broken seal. Reality has never felt quite so surreal as it did to me that night. I had to keep drawing in big gulps of air, as if I were sprinting to keep up with the pace at which my worldview was being transformed.
Wonder
The next day I dropped Katie off at day care and set off for class as usual. I never got there. I was too stunned, too full of wonder, to sit still. I kept walking around Harvard, staring at the familiar buildings, the familiar people, as though I had just climbed off a spacecraft from Neptune. The whole universe seemed different to me. I didn’t know how to be at Harvard while believing such irrational things.
After walking around in this contemplative daze for half the morning, I went back to William James Hall and took the elevator to the Sociology floor. I had missed the gender seminar. I was also becoming increasingly certain that I would not be able to put aside the tempest in my mind long enough to complete the research for my thirty-page term paper. I dimly remembered that five years, one year, ten months ago, failing to turn in a paper on time would have been unthinkable to me, unforgivable. Now it seemed trivial. I decided to explain my situation to one of the seminar's instructors and ask her for an incomplete on my transcript. This would buy me until two months after Adam's birth in which to research and write my paper.
The course instructor, an assistant professor, was in her office surrounded by a colourful chaos of books, papers, and greeting cards left over from the holidays. I waited outside in the hall while she finished a phone call. Given a few minutes to float free, my mind zipped right back to the strange new structure of my reality the way your tongue goes to a new filling, exploring its shape and dimension. Maybe Plato was right, I thought. Maybe we really do live in a dark place, a shadow world, a cave. The things I'd thought to be improbable, nonexistent, ghostly, insubstantial - all of these were quite possibly more real than the physical things I could see with my physical eyes.
I suddenly developed a craving to go back and read Plato – to read the work of any mystic, past or present. This seemed much more pressing than the reading for my gender seminar. It increased the electrical feeling that seemed to have become my constant companion. I walked into the office still prickling with it.
It took me less than five minutes to state my case. I confessed that I hadn't been able to focus on the course content, that my attendance had been somewhat spotty, and that I couldn't concentrate long enough to write a cheque, let alone a term paper.
‘So,’ I said after I’d laid it all out, ‘would you be willing to give me an incomplete instead of failing me?’
‘Sure,’ said the instructor. Then she stopped. She got a disconcerted look in her eyes, which appeared to be focused somewhere behind and above me. The electric feeling swelled until I shivered inside my maternity clothes.
‘No,’ said the instructor slowly. ‘No, I'm not going to give you an incomplete. I'm going to give you an A.’
‘An A?’
She nodded.
‘Surely you jest,’ I said. ‘I mean, I appreciate it, but...’ I was going to say that I didn’t deserve an A, which was true, but my voice trailed off. The professor didn’t seem to be hearing me, not at all. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was moving like a robot.
Now, just to assure the folks at Harvard that they don’t need to track me down and revoke my PhD, I must tell you that I did in fact complete every bit of the work for that course. In fact, I have never been so motivated to write a term paper in my life. I finished it late, but I didn't have to go back and cope with the bureaucratic process of turning an incomplete into a letter grade. The most probable reason for this is that the instructor was a kind person. I happen to know that this is true. But since then, I have often seen people's native kindness spike upward just when I feel that strange electrical force surge in the air around me. The sensation has become a cue to me that something like this is about to happen.
How goodness works
I like to think that this means there are angels at work. As to the nature and identity of the angels, I’ll accept as many interpretations as you like. Maybe the instructor for that gender seminar was, herself, an angel. Maybe there were invisible angels in the room, pushing on her psyche, nudging her toward magnanimity. Maybe they were my own, court-appointed guardian angels. Maybe Adam was the angel, as the psychic said. Or maybe the answer is (D) All of the above.
For now, it's enough for me to think that angels, or for that matter any forms of goodness, function like water; they run into any opening they are given. There may be some people who are born open, who soak up goodness like sponges and leave traces of it on everything they touch. But even when an ordinary person (like me), or a bad person (like, say, Hitler), has a moment of openness, a moment of compassion, goodness rushes in to fill that space, to make us capable of receiving grace and transmitting it. These moments are rare for me, and mostly accidental. I think that they are much more frequent for Adam.
The psychic may be right; Adam may be a kind of angel. But I don’t think he's the only kind. Since that night on the sofa with John, I have come to believe that there are infinite passageways out of the shadows, infinite vehicles to transport us into the light.
From Expecting Adam, copyright 1999 by Martha N Beck, published in the UK in 2000 by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd
|
Inspirational features 
