a meeting. When Josephine arrived, I mentioned the name to her and she reacted instantly. The name I had heard was that of her husband, who had died many years previously. Immediately I felt him coming through to me, telling me that he had died while he was tying his shoelaces. I know ‘coming through’ is a strange sort of expression to use, but I think it’s a more accurate way of saying that I felt him ‘telling’ me, as we weren’t actually ‘talking’ as such.
I hesitated about saying this to Josephine, because it sounded so strange, but the voice was insistent, and so I said it.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said very matter-of-factly. ‘He was out in the yard bending down to tie his shoelaces when a tractor backed into him and killed him.’
After that there was no stopping him; he gave her all sorts of information and advice about various personal and business matters. At this stage I have no recollection of what they were; in any case, they would only have been of interest to her. I remember, though, how delighted I was by the session with her. She was obviously very pleased about the contact with her late husband.
A few months later I met a woman named Anne. Once again I was visited by a communicator, who absolutely insisted that I pass on a message. The message or, more accurately, the instruction, was: ‘Tell her to play a piece of string.’
This seemed completely nonsensical to me. I was thinking of ‘string’ being a slender rope of some kind. However, when I eventually took a chance and told her, Anne lit up immediately. The spirit was a friend of Anne’s, and she had been wondering what music to play at a memorial service for him. She knew exactly what he meant – music played by string instruments. She didn’t seem to be surprised – but I was.
These and other experiences have provided me with plenty of incontrovertible evidence of continuing life. My communication with Margaret Anna has, therefore, always made sense to me, and I’ve never doubted that the details she has provided about the spirit world are accurate and believable. In many of the experiences I had provided information that sounded superficial to me, but was deeply moving or important to the people receiving the messages. However, the very fact that it was possible for both sides of the physical and spirit dimensions to make contact was comforting, particularly because it was obviously genuine. I was eager for more information – and a wider discussion of life in general in the spirit dimension – and that’s where Margaret Anna came in.
Living after death
Like many others, I was often wrenched by agonising self-questioning. In most of my communications, when people came to see me, I had proof that the communication was accurate because it was confirmed. In Margaret Anna’s case I was working in the dark. Was I fooling myself into thinking that the soul who was Margaret Anna Cusack was actually communicating with me? And by questioning this communication, was I showing a lack of trust? Margaret Anna had been such a celebrity in her earthly life, I wondered if I had just somehow extrapolated information about her and created artificial communications. I was worried, too, that the information I was transcribing might in some way create a misleading impression about her.
Margaret Anna gave short shrift to my qualms. She suggested that we forget about all that and get on with the project that would become this book. She began by describing to me her own death: ‘My friends put on my coffin: “Margaret Anna Cusack fell asleep June 5th, 1899, aged 70 years.” The thought was nice. I said goodbye to my poor old body, which had been tired out for a long time. It had struggled with ill-health for many years and had lasted a lot longer than I could reasonably have expected.’
Margaret Anna looked on as her friends lovingly dealt with her body. After the burial ceremonies were over, she suddenly became aware of what she could only describe as a radiant being smiling at her and then giving her a big hug. Without any perception of movement she found herself as a guest of honour at a big welcoming party. It was a wonderfully joyful reunion with many friends.
I asked her whatever questions occurred to me and she answered them directly, without any evasion. Did she expect to be judged after her arrival? She did, she said, but there wasn’t any sign of anything like that.
How did she recognise her friends? She said she just knew them. They were like effulgent beings of light, yet easily distinguishable one from another.
Were there gender distinctions in spirit? She answered: ‘There were and there weren’t. I know that’s a strange kind of answer. The best way I can try to explain it is that there was a transcendence of gender, like, say, when you communicate on a soul level with somebody. Yet there were some whom I had known as female and some as male, and I seemed to communicate with them in that way and they with me.’
Was there any sexual frisson? ‘I wasn’t always a nun! Yes, there was sexual frisson, as you put it, in the sense of a wonderful joyful intimacy, which is what sexuality involves, as I understand it.’
In asking her questions, I was aware that I was thinking in a linear way, from a time and space point of view. In her new situation it seemed as if everything was happening simultaneously. She explained that she was no longer aware of time. She was still getting used to feeling completely free. On earth she was always busy – things to be done, ideas to be explored, books to be written, bishops to be cajoled. Now here she was with no agenda, but full of the joy of just being, and surrounded by kindred spirits in every sense of the word.
In order to help me understand, she explained that the reunion went on for maybe a few hours or maybe a few days in my time. She hadn’t yet completely shaken off the feelings of illness and tiredness that were her constant companions on earth. At some stage one of her old/new friends suggested that she might like to take a little rest. She agreed, and instantly she seemed to be lying on a wonderfully comfortable bed in a beautifully appointed room with soft music enveloping her. She relaxed into the harmony of it all. She said that it was misleading to talk of things happening in sequence, because everything seemed to be happening all at once.
In any event, the relaxation process refreshed her and, once again, she found herself with a group of the friends she had met earlier. They had a lot of catching up to do. I asked her whether she was beginning to be curious about what she was going to be doing. I said that I couldn’t imagine her being happy sitting around relaxing and doing nothing, no matter how enjoyable the company.
She replied that she didn’t have to do anything – but that she wasn’t doing ‘nothing’. Impressions were coming to her all the time. Even as she thought about something – for example, how her Sisters from the Order were getting on – she found she was able to get a picture or a vision of that immediately. It was all completely effortless. She asked me to imagine this scenario: I want to visit my friends in America. I have to go through a lengthy process of booking tickets, paying fares, hours of travel interspersed with delays at airports. But in the world she was now in, there was none of that. The only drawback was that she couldn’t converse with her sisters in the Order or touch them. She could talk to them, but they didn’t hear her. Initially, that was a big disappointment, particularly as she had had to suffer the pain of separation from them while she was bodily on earth. After a while she adjusted to the way things were and began to enjoy helping out in unobtrusive ways.
Who is God?
Early on in our communication I asked Margaret Anna whether it was possible to prove for those of us on earth that there is life after death. ‘It’s often said that there is no proof of life after death, because no one ever comes back to tell their relatives, friends or even interested researchers about their new life; however, this is not the case. Many souls have been communicating through the centuries with those humans who have been open to receiving them so I can’t take any credit in projecting, as it were, a voice from the grave.’
Margaret Anna was very easy to
