Give the Dead Some Cred
(and a miracle story)
When working with those on the other side, people often want to know if they have to call on particular ancestors or saints by name. Can’t we just turn it over to all of them in a vague, general way and let them sort it all out? To which I often respond, “Don’t you remember that group project in middle schoool where you did all the work and only got a fifth of the credit?”
The dead long for acknowledgement because they long for intimacy with the living. Call them by their names. Every mantra is, originally, a summoning spell to someone on the other side…by name. Hail Mary, Om Nama Shivaya, Help Me Granny Nell. Names, as we know from the old fairy tales, have magical powers. Just as objects can hold vibrations so can words and the old names hold old magic.
Once during Covid we were taking my daughter to see a new doctor in the city. She has an incurable genetic condition that brings with it all kinds of complications and other problems and we’ve been to a lot of specialists over the years. Often the visits themselves are traumatic—as the doctor peers at his computer screen, makes her recount her health journey one more traumatizing time, and offers instead of care some terrifying pronouncement about her prognosis. Because of the pandemic I would not be able to go into the appointment with her and hold her hand. I was worried and, as I always do when I am worried, I began summoning the dead. I called on my father the doctor, his partner, his various colleagues at the hospital. “Please,” I begged them, “Daddy, Dave, Dr. Goldfarb, Dr. Lincoln, Dr. Gleason and Dr. Gleason, somehow make this physician a human being, let them be capable of eye contact, let them be empowering instead of destabilizing.”
We were driving along the Palisades, the cliffs that border the Hudson River and for no reason I could ascertain I remembered, during my litany, Viggo Peterson. He was not a doctor. He was, when I was growing up in a tiny village near Cape Cod, the local ice cream man. Every night he made seasonal flavors—strawberry ice, blueberry, peach and ginger—and posted a sign outside his shop with the special. The shop itself was old fashioned with a bar and booths and shiny wood varnished and polished. Mr. Peterson himself was a curmudgeon who barked orders at the young women, in hairnets and gloves, who worked for him. He would not tolerate a single milky smear on any surface. They were terrified of him. He treated his shop like it was an operating room and ice cream was a high stakes venture.
[an article about Viggo Peterson in the local newspaper in the 1970s]
In fact, when my father the surgeon once noted this, he discovered that Viggo had, in fact, dreamed as a boy of becoming a doctor. But his father had demanded he take over the family business. Which he did brilliantly but grudgingly. My father who had to become a doctor instead of the poet he dreamed of being understood the man’s resentments—and invited him to watch him do surgeries from time to time. My father enjoyed putting on a performance.
[now a whisky bar the interior of the shop , nevertheless, still looks like it did]
Somehow I did not feel like Viggo had shown up to wipe the germs of the examining table at my daughter’s appointment. No, I thought, remembering the joy people would feel eating this man’s old fashioned ice cream. No, she needs sweetness. She needs a special flavor of care. “Please, Viggo Peterson,” I prayed silently in the car. “Let this visit be sweet.”
We dropped Sophie off in front of the huge medical complex and watched her enter the glass and chrome building all by herself. “Please,” I whispered, “please.” Some time later, she emerged and she was, astoundingly, smiling. “The cardiologist says I am doing everything right,” she announced when she got in the car. “She thinks I’m a wonder. I really like her. We talked about everything. She’s very smart but she’s also really, well, sweet.”
I knew my daughter had walked in with an invisible ancestral team but that one word let me know who had worked the miracle. Viggo Peterson. “Thank you,” I whispered to him again and again as we joked and laughed on the way home.
We got back just in time for me to teach one of my workshops on Ancestral Collaboration and I knew had to share what had just happened. That is part of the old magic. You call on the dead to ask for help but you also claim and proclaim your miracle when it arrives. How else do you think people knew that St. Anthony would find things for them, St. Joseph would get their houses sold, and St. Jude would show up when all hope seeemed lost? The only way we know what the dead can do is when the living tell their stories and give them credit where credit is due.
About thirty people were staring back at me from the Zoom screen as I recounted what had happened. One woman’s face, open mouthed with awe, stared back at me. She was from far away in Canada. I saw that she had unmuted herself. “Not Viggo Peterson from Marion, Massachussetts?” she said.
“Yes! Marion. It’s a tiny town with less than 2,000 people just before the Cape on Buzzard’s Bay. It’s where I grew up.”
“It’s where my sister worked one summer in the seventies,” the woman said dumbstruck. “She was apprenticing with a local potter…”
“Not Dorcas!” I interrupted.
“Yes!” exclaimed the woman. “Dorcas! But she worked for Mr. Peterson—and he was an absolute tyrant. It was the worst summer of her life because of him. He tortured those girls who worked for him, ran them ragged, yelled at them…nothing they did was right or good enough.”
“That’s the man, I remember,” I admitted. “But he brought such sweetness to my daughter today. I think he was happy to be on the medical team. He might not have been able to be a doctor in life but that doesn’t mean he can’t be a powerful healer from the other side.”
It turned out the woman’s sister was facing a serious health crisis and she began calling on the man who had made her life so miserable to guide her through it. When last I heard, he had shown up for her too.
The dead have special skills, uniqe atonements they need to make, and they know best how to weave us all together, in ways both magical and mysterious. But we have to call on them by name and we have to tell their stories to each other, even when we are not entirely sure why we are doing so.
If we are sick we need a specific potion, not any old general vague medicine or herb. Dandelion is different from marshmallow is different from mugwort. The dead are no different. St. Anthony is a different flavor than St. Christopher or St. Zita or St. Rita.The dead have so many different flavors and we are invited, when we work them, to choose the one we need or want on any given day.
Who do you need today? Who are you going to ask for help? Are you ready to give the dead their cred when your miracles arrive? I hope so…because one miracle so often, as with Mr. Peterson, weaves us into another.
This has been an offering to my Free Substack audience. I also offer a Paid Substack that includes Monthly Magic, a conversation on Zoom about working with the dead on the third Sunday of every month. Our next meeting is Sunday, April 21 at 3 pm eastern time. The Zoom link is sent out to subscribors on Sunday morning.
My introductory course, Ancestral Collabortions, is now available as a series of recordings on my website. You can find out more about my offerings on working with the dead at takebackthemagic.com
Big heart.