In many respects, 2008 has been a strange year for me, so it’s appropriate that it should close with a mystery. There are people out there to whom Lynn Grabhorn’s death is not a mystery, but they’re remaining silent, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. Let me explain.
A few years ago my friend, Conni Laine, gave me a book called Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting, which has the subtitle, the astonishing power of feelings. It was written by Lynn Grabhorn. On this, the final day of the year, I woke up at around 5:00 AM feeling concerned about money. (Who isn’t these days)? When my inner worrywart shows up, I often reach for Lynn’s book. There’s something reassuring about her contention that we can manifest anything we want in our lives through the Law of Attraction. Many people have written about the LOA, which is something you either believe in or dismiss as hokum. I’ve always liked the idea and have chosen to believe in it.
Lynn Grabhorn believed that we can attract whatever we want, not by thinking about it, but by getting deep into how it would actually feel to have it. We are all a form of energy that connects us to the universe. When we experience positive feelings, we vibrate at a high frequency level, as opposed to a low frequency level which is negative. We then send out electromagnetic waves that connect with like waves of energy and come back to us. In other words, we become walking magnets. So, if we focus on what we want, instead of dwelling on what we don’t want, we’ll attract those wants into our lives. Unfortunately, it works the same way with things we don’t want.
Although I loved Lynn’s book, I had never bothered to find out anything about her life or to read anything else she’d written. I immediately began to feel better after reading the book again. So much better that I decided to go to her website and find out more about her. When I typed her URL into my browser, the site that came up surprised me. I was at LynnGrabhorn.com, but it seemed to be some kind of psychic site that provided links to lots of other websites, spiritual and non-spiritual. I checked out the site and followed links to various blogs and discovered that that Lynn had died in 2004 in her early seventies. Not only that, but there were persistent rumors that she had died through an assisted suicide.
I immediately began to research Lynn’s death, but could find very few hard facts about it. More than one blogger maintained that she had cancer and had flown to Europe, probably Holland, where Dutch doctors assisted her suicide. I was shocked and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was that her death called her work into question. How could I share her beliefs about attracting good things into your life if she died a painful death or committed suicide? Then I dug further and found that all references to her death that emanated from Olympia, WA, where she lived, maintained that she died in her home from an unnamed illness. Another website opined that she had a painful disease that doctors couldn’t diagnose properly. Some said it showed the same symptoms as diabetes, but that she didn’t have that particular disease. Most people seem to believe it was cancer.
I also discovered that Lynn had written other books. Her first was published back in 1999 and was called Beyond the Twelve Steps, so it seems as if she may have had problems with alcohol. After Excuse Me and the Playbook that followed it, Lynn published two more books. The first was called Dear God! What’s Happening to Us? Not an encouraging title for someone impressed by her humorous, upbeat writing style in Excuse Me. Reader reviews on Amazon all agreed on one thing: This was the dark side of Lynn Grabhorn. I haven’t yet read the book, so I can’t comment objectively.
The last book was called Planet Two: Earth in a Higher Dimension…Are You Ready? Again, I haven’t read this book, but I gather that Lynn believed that heaven is actually a duplicate Earth on a higher dimension, where we get to choose exactly how we live. Neither of these two books sound like they were written by the breezy, irreverent author who wrote the book thousands of people have found so enlightening.
There have been allegations that Lynn plagiarized the work of Jerry and Esther Hicks, who have written extensively about the Law of Attraction. I choose not to see Lynn’s interpretations as plagiarism. In her introduction to the book, she openly acknowledges the Hicks’ work. She writes, “… in my own prosaic words and style I’ve reissued here the profoundly simple teachings from the Hicks family in Texas, spiced it with my own angles and buzzwords, my own observations and experiences over the past years, and blended it together with my years of study.” That doesn’t sound like a plagiarist to me.
So here’s the mystery: What happened to Lynn that made her turn to her darker side and develop beliefs that even she admitted sounded crazy? And how and where did she die? Someone out there knows the answers to those questions and I hope to hear from them one day.
Did Lynn’s death invalidate her work? In my opinion, absolutely not. On my website, you’ll find four books that I wrote with the intention of helping people to get more out of their lives. Although I believe passionately in everything I’ve written, there are times when I still struggle to apply all the content of those books to my own life. It’s like a doctor who treats patients with tobacco related illnesses, but still smokes a pack of cigarettes a day himself. Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting has helped thousands of people to imporve their lives and I believe it shouldn’t be devalued by what subsequently happened to the author. I urge you to check out this fascinating book and make up your own minds.
