Psychic Pursuit
By Lauren F. Winner
If the Spirit Moves You
Life and Love After Death.
By Justine Picardie.
258 pp. New York:
Riverhead Books. $23.95.
When the journalist and shopaholic Ruth Picardie died of breast cancer, she left behind toddler twins and a widower, Matt Seaton; fans all across Britain, who had followed her illness in a column she wrote for Observer Life; and a sister, Justine Picardie, also a journalist, who was comfortless. Justine and Matt compiled Ruth’s last writings — her Observer columns and the e-mail she exchanged with a handful of far-flung friends — into a book called “Before I Say Goodbye.” An unblinking account of illness and death, “Before I Say Goodbye” concludes with short essays by sister and widower. Justine’s prose is sad and graceful, and her bewilderment recognizable to anyone who has mourned: “Somehow, Ruth slipped away to a different place, a place where I could not go with her. It seems . . . impossible to comprehend; impossible to find words to describe the loss.” Over two years later, Justine still had not found a way out of her sorrow, but she did find the words, in “If the Spirit Moves You,” a tender memoir that reads as something of a sequel to Ruth’s spare book.
Although friends and relatives suggested that Justine should have already shaken denial, she remained unable to accept that her sister was simply gone. She “longed to go after her,” and wondered if, perhaps, a psychic could help. There begins the quest Justine chronicles here: a year spent patronizing mediums and channelers, well-meaning gurus and wholesale quacks, hoping to contact her Ruth. She attends a spiritualists’ conference in Tucson, investigates the electronic voice phenomenon (through which, according to devotees, one can record the voices of the dead on cassette tape), spends a weekend studying mediumship at a Gothic mansion north of London and chats on the phone with Rita Rogers, a psychic best known for her consultations with Princess Di. Along the way, she pops into cathedrals, discusses Jewish mysticism with her father, reads a little Freud, and attempts to e-mail Ruth. She consults a “junior sensitive” who asks if Justine knows someone named Clarissa. When he learns that Justine is looking instead for her sister who died of cancer, the sensitive says “I can feel her nausea.”
A little kooky, sure, but Picardie brings a sensible skepticism and a wry irony to the crystal balls and paranormals. (When the College of Psychic Studies tells her to call 24 hours in advance if she is going to cancel her appointment with the sensitive, her husband notes, “You’d think the College of Psychic Studies would know if you were going to cancel.”)
Indeed, Picardie’s memoir is far more than a provocative tour of England’s psychic labyrinths. “If the Spirit Moves You” quickly rises above the particularities of the electric voice phenomenon to its true subject: grief.
What Picardie captures perfectly is the letting go that happens while the bereaved aren’t looking. In the thick of her grief, moving on and letting go seem both unimaginable and undesirable. Nonetheless, as she drives around England searching for a trustworthy medium, life inevitably intrudes on Picardie’s mourning. There are sponge cakes to bake and neighbors to nurse and, perhaps most important, children to rear. After receiving a curious note from her father about Melanie Klein and cannibalism, Justine dreams that she meets Ruth in a tea queue. Justine, briefly consoled, hugs her sister and asks “How can I live without you?” Before dream-Ruth can answer, Justine’s son wakes her up, tapping her face: “It is as if my child’s touch is the answer to the question.”
”If the Spirit Moves You” does not tie up neatly. Readers never learn, for example, just what Picardie makes of Rita Rogers & Company. After a year with the psychics, does she or doesn’t she believe that tape recorders can talk to the dead? Nor does Picardie, in today’s therapeutic lingo, achieve closure — the last pages find her still “walking toward Ruth,” still sure that “one day I will reach her.” The untidiness, of course, is the point, for grief does not tie up neatly either.
Originally published in The New York Times, 10/06/2002, Late Edition - Final, Section 7, Column 3, Page 30.