Lily Dale by Christine Wicker Page A

one rather blunt friend, who nodded, said, “Ummm,” and then demanded, “What does that mean?” Probably everyone else was thinking that also and was too nice to say so.
    To me, Hilda’s words meant I could stop thinking I was accomplishing too little too late. They relieved me of the terrible envy one feels when someone younger does something marvelous. They gave me a sense that my life made sense and counted for something. Were her words true? I don’t know, but they helped me. I might have used that piece of wisdom as a pointer to indicate that Lily Dale had lessons of a spiritual nature to teach me, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to take Lily Dale seriously enough to learn from it.
    Even so, I liked Hilda’s idea so well that I even quoted it to Betty Schultz.
    Betty had a more casual attitude about how much knowledge a person needs. “You want to know enough to say, ‘Oh, I’m dead. I want to go up,’” she said.

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    T he main question I wanted answered—how do beliefs change lives?—would seem easy to answer. Since people of Lily Dale believe “there is no death and there are no dead,” they ought to feel less grief than the rest of us. If death is just passing over to another life, they ought to have no fear of death themselves.
    I saw little evidence that Spiritualists walked toward death any more happily than the rest of us. They’d had no suicide cults, no laced Kool-Aid parties. I heard of no great mediums who voluntarily passed over in order to use their ability on the other side for the benefit of humankind. Several did claim to feel great peace and to have no fear of death. Medium Sherry Lee Calkins mentioned that the angel of death is not the grim fellow most people imagine him to be. “I consider the angel of death to be a birthday boy or birthday girl as the case may be,” she said. “He’s a friend.”
    In Lily Dale the past is quite alive. Close enough to touch, they say. Lily Dale residents regularly report seeing wraiths strolling the streets dressed in Victorian-era clothes. Native American braves often pad single file by the edge of the lake with tomahawks in hand, according to more than one living resident. Relatives often cross from the other side to speak, to move things about, to show themselves in various locations.
    Yes, folks in Lily Dale frequently see the dead and hear them, they say. But grief, well, that’s a strong emotion, hard to conquer. Visions and voices are nice, considerable comfort, but they’re not warm bodies.
    Lily Dale resident Bonnie Mikula, as stout a believer as anyone I met, told me of grief so crushing that it almost drove her crazy. Every night her sobs were so loud that her daughter slept with the radio on to drown out the sounds. During the day Bonnie was so lost and angry that the two fought constantly. A little red-haired nurse and single mother who specialized in survival, Bonnie could not accept the injustice of losing her longtime lover, Chapman Clark.
    Chapman, the only brother of Sherry Lee Calkins and Gretchen Clark Lazarony, was not a medium, as his sisters were. He was a healer. He had often healed Bonnie’s headaches with a touch. And every night when they were apart, he dropped in for telepathic chats at 10:00 P.M ., she told me. Bonnie knew he was terribly ill in the weeks before he died, but he promised that he would never leave her, and she believed him. She thought that man could do anything.
    He was found one balmy April afternoon lying in the grass, his lawn mower beside him, his glasses folded next to him, his arms crossed over his chest. It was as though Chapman Clark, fifty-five, a healthy-looking, handsome bear of a man, decided one lovely afternoon that the time had come to quit mowing and die. So he made himself comfortable, arranged himself presentably, and did just that.
    â€œChapman was always in control,” said his friend Shelley