Mediums

   As I travel through my day, I occasionally find myself wondering how many of my dead relatives might be watching what goes on in my life. I then find myself wondering if they approve and are they disappointed or proud. I also wonder what I might hear if there were any way of communicating with them.
   I have always enjoyed watching mediums ply their trade on television, people such as Sylvia Browne, Theresa Caputo and John Edward. I am prone to believing in their abilities and always enjoy the reactions you invariably get from the people being "read".
   There is something in me (and, I suspect, something in a lot of us) which makes me want to desperately believe in mediums and, by default, the spirit world. It is simply comforting to think there is a benign and welcoming place we're all headed for after we pass.
   If mediums truly are capable of communicating with the dead, however, this raises a multitude of questions. As I have pondered the issue of mediums' abilities over the years, the questions have only mounted. Here are some:

   Why aren't most murder cases instantly solvable?
   Why do the dead only seem to have nice things to say about the living?
   What can the afterlife be like if I need to jostle other spirits out of the way in order to communicate with my loved ones?
   What do the dead do when they're not communicating with mediums? Do they talk amongst themselves?
   Do the dead watch you in the shower?
   Why don't spirits from 1754 ever show up? Or 1906 and so on...?
   Are there animal spirits running around in the spirit world, too?
   If spirits can watch out for you can they also enable bad things to happen?
   Can spirits follow around total strangers? Or are they more or less tied down to people who were in their lives in the earthly world?
   Are spirits around forever...? Or is there a shelf life?

   Some of these questions seem a little frivolous and I am aware of that. It might also seem as though I am making light of what mediums do. At the same time, what I see represented through the media begs most of these questions, when you really stop to think about it.
   I also find it vaguely irritating that, after a reading ends, life seems to go on normally. It always feels as though there should be more to it than a spirit saying "It wasn't your fault that Mack truck hit us" or "The other day when that picture of your dead mother fell in your soup, that was me!" Sometimes I just want to scream hey, you were just talking to dead people, find out what it's like out there! Is there a God, are there angels, when will the world end?! Get back in there and find out NOW, dammit!
   Think about it. Someone on T.V. claims to have just communicated with the dead. This suggests there is life after death and, if this is the case, might explain why we are all here. Perhaps at this point anything else you might have seen on T.V., any book you might have read, any conversation you may have had, or any act you took part in becomes almost irrelevant by comparison. Speaking with the dead is monumental and yet in this world we live in it is used only as a hook for reality T.V.
   The dead seem happy. They don't seem to carry grudges and they appear to be very forgiving. Given the show you are watching, however, they are portrayed as either very warm and comforting or restless and terrifying. Who knows what the spirit world is truly like (if there is one), perhaps it is a world very (too) much like our own, with all its different layers of happiness and despair.

   I used to have my own vision of an afterlife. In this vision, when I pass I finally lose all the earthly constraints of the laws of physics and am suddenly able to explore the far reaches of the universe, maybe even engage in a little time travel. Truly, there would be no limit to what I might be able to do. The mediums I have come to be familiar with through the media seem to suggest, however, that spirits are a little more earthbound than that, a little more intrinsically tied to the goings-on of their loved ones. This would be okay, too, in my afterlife. In the end, as the mediums suggest, life goes on in some form and life going on in any form is of some comfort.
   Earlier on, I listed some of the questions I had about the nature of the spirit world. One more just popped into my head.
   I wonder if mediums are afraid to die?