Deathwork Diaries: Ethel's Story

For this week's Deathwork Diaries blog post, I'd like to write about an experience I had this morning that led until and through lunchtime. And yes, I made myself some toast part way through, lol. Warning: This edition is going to get heavy, with talk of SA.

So I was trying to connect and communicate with Lox, the spirit attached to my latest haunted doll (I have 4, started something of a collection, but this is another story and just context). I was running the spirit talker app and a lady called Ethel came through and sort of took over the spirit talker session. After establishing she needed assistance crossing over, I invited her to the kitchen with me so we could talk while I made and ate lunch. The spirit talker didn't come with me, I was relying solely on my mediumship abilities at this stage.

Ethel was such a lovely, sweet old lady. But she carried with her so much self hate and such mental and emotional anguish. She believes that her husband is in some way responsible for her death. So I asked her if she was okay with continuing this topic as she was clearly distressed - we must always offer the deceased the same respect we would offer the living - and she said yes.

We backtracked. Seriously backtracked, to when she was only 15. Her husband had originally been courting her older sister. She told me that the reason she ended up married to him and not her sister was because she was pregnant by him. Dear all 3 readers: he forced himself on her. She smiled at him while he was waiting for her sister and he took that as invitation.

See, Ethel lived in an era where one simply didn't have children out of wedlock, it would have brought shame to the whole family. Her father presented her with two options at the time: marry her rapist or he would personally remove the babe from her belly and kick Ethel into the streets, disowned.

Fearing for her safety and her life, she chose what she believed to be the safest option: she married him. This caused friction between her and her sister, that relationship broke down. Her sister said Ethel was "stealing her man," and didn't care that Ethel didn't want what happened.

Throughout their marriage, Ethel and this awful man went on to have 3 more children, and Ethel made it known that she never wanted to keep being intimate with her abuser. But they were married and that essentially made her his property and there was nothing she could have done. It wasn't a loving relationship, Ethel spent her entire life miserable and married to the man that had violated her. He was as violent as her father was, he treated Ethel awfully and treated the children like dirt. She told me her children are all grown now and haven't spoken to their father for at least 2 years, though they would spend time with their mother while their father was out.

The husband, dear readers, was carrying out an affair with Ethel's sister the whole time. Her sister went on to marry and have children with another man, but it didn't stop her from dallying around with Ethel's husband.

The reason she believes her husband was in some way involved is because she went to see him shortly after she realised she passed. He was with her sister. In Ethel's own words she said she thought she heard him saying "the stupid slut is finally pushing up daisies. It should look like natural causes."

Though she can't prove he had a hand in it, it's something that she truly believes. She told me she often felt nauseous and would vomit a lot in her last days and never understood why, as she didn't change her diet or anything about her environment, so she just put it down to old age and "some internal system or the other shutting down with age."

In the end, Ethel was in floods of tears before she left, and honestly I was pretty emotional myself. She was so grateful that someone had listened and really heard her and not passed judgement. I told her that she didn't do anything wrong. Her perceived "crime," was being polite to the young man that had arrived to court her sister. She was a child of fifteen when this happened to her. She made the best and only choice she could, given her situation. After all these years, she thought she'd done something wrong and carried so much guilt with her.

I told her she didn't do anything wrong, and the people she should have been able to count on - notably her father - failed her. Her mother lived through something similar to Ethel's experience, so the women in this family most likely grew up thinking this was normal. It was all extremely sad. She was so upset and kept crying and thanking me, and in all honesty I was upset too! She crossed with her mother in the end and after I don't know how many years of grief and suffering, Ethel finally knows peace. Fly high Ethel, you deserve everything you want and more in heaven