One Last Time: A Psychic Medium Speaks to Those We Have Loved and Lost

It's easy to distrust those who claim to communicate with the dead, to dismiss them as charlatans who take advantage of the bereaved. Psychic medium Edward himself urges readers to ""be skeptical, though not cynical."" But it is not so easy to reject Edward's compelling tale of gradually accepting his psychic abilities (seeing auras, astro-traveling, premonitions) and acting as a messenger between spirits who have passed over to ""the Other Side"" and their loved ones left behind. With a college degree in public health and administration, and ""rising within the ranks"" of a large hospital, he finally gave in to the ""constant yanking feeling"" he had experienced since he was a boy. In several poignant stories of connecting people with their deceased family members, Edward tries ""to demystify spirit communication"" by explaining exactly what he sees, hears and feels during a ""reading."" The spirits, he says, speak to him in voices, sounds, images, sensations, smells, tastes and feelings, mostly in symbolic form (for example, a father who always signed things with the numeral ""4"" fills the psychic's head with images of golf swings--""fore""), to convey a message to loved ones. Usually, beyond identifying the senders in verifiable ways, the messages are simply that those who have passed on are all right and that ""they're still with us."" Coming off like James Van Praagh (Talking to Heaven) tempered with the down-to-earth appeal of Caroline Myss, Edward offers an intriguing collection of anecdotes that may not convince the cynical but that can both comfort and fascinate the merely skeptical. Author tour. (Dec.)