“Am I fucking crazy?” This is what I’m wondering from the ergonomic desk chair in my office as I stare at my computer waiting on my first session with a Psychic Medium. We’ll call her Amy. I’m not surprised that I’m here, per se. I’ve always been a little woo-woo. But I’m not sure what to expect—or what to believe.
I got Amy’s name through Dan, the past life regression hypnotherapist in my new writer’s group. I was brought into the group by a friend. With my basic bitch mom wardrobe and touchy-feely emotions, I am, by far, the most average person in this group, which consists of an atheist chaplain, acclaimed herbalist; tarot expert; a “word witch;” the jack-of-all-creative-trades friend who brought me in; and, of course, Dan the hypnotherapist, who is currently enrolled at Columbia to get a degree in narrative medicine, which is a concentration I could not explain to you. But I like Dan. I trust Dan, and I have a feeling he can help me.
“I’m doing it for the book,” I said one day on a call with him. I explained the memoir I am writing about grief, motherhood, Mississippi, and mysticism. “My friend, Heather, gave me the idea to talk to a bunch of different Mediums, to see what they said, and write about it.” She and I had coffee when my grief was still a fresh wound, and only another writer like her could understand that everything, even—no, especially—soul-shattering grief, is a topic we writers must put on paper.
So I have. I don’t know that there is ever an apex to grief, only a constant ebbing of rocky wave breaks with the occasional reprieve of tender ripples. It’s like spending the rest of your life in the wave pool at the water park. You never know when you’re about to get pummeled. The idea of speaking with different Mediums—you know, for the book—gives me the illusion of control over my grief. It makes me feel as though I am an active participant. You could say I am King Lear raging at the storm, but the truth is, I’m more Lieutenant Dan. My grief is all-encompassing, but I don’t want to be afraid of death anymore.
“I mean, I’m also doing it for me,” I said to Dan, trying not to sound like a walking-talking defense mechanism. “I’m curious. I’ve always believed in this stuff,” I said. That’s when he told me about Amy.
There in my office, tacked to the wall next to my ergonomic desk chair, there is a note from my mother hand-written on a tattered piece of white paper. It reads, “I love you so so so so so…very much!!!!! May this new journey bring you joy and happiness— MOM.”
There have been times since February that looking at my mother’s handwriting sent me to my knees. Her familiar scrawl was too much to bear, as if she was there. It’s a cruel glimmer when I have seen, with my own eyes, the bag of dust and ash that used to be her body.
Now I look at the note every day and rarely cry, which I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t remember when or why she gave me this note. I found it folded up in a desk drawer recently when I was going through old cards. My best assumption is that she wrote it when we left Hudson, New York, in 2019, where I was on the verge of divorce, for sunnier horizons in Los Angeles. I was adamant about the move, and I take my mother’s line about the journey bringing me joy and happiness to mean, “I sure hope this finally works out for you.”
Amy joins the call and she is beautiful. Her hair is like golden threads and her eyes are bright, both wise and childlike at once. Her smile is radiant. She seems like someone I want to be friends with, someone I’d meet for coffee. She is warm, confident. She starts by explaining her intention and says a prayer asking that everything she pulls forward today is for my highest good. She reminds me that no psychic, intuitive, or medium is 100% accurate 100% of the time. She reminds me that we have free will and free choice. Then she explains how this works.
A few minutes before the call, she spent time “connecting” with me. She assessed the thoughts and visuals that came to her before seeing me or hearing my voice. Before she had the chance to make any human assumptions about who I am or what I’m looking for.
“When I’m tuning in with someone, I call upon any guides. These would be your guides, not mine, and this is to get an idea of the support that is around you. It gives me information,” she says. She explains that when she first tuned into my guides, she was taken into water.
“I see a lot of swirls. What this tells me is that you’re in some kind of flow state, that you’re going through some kind of change.” She said it feels like I’m being forced into change, but that it’s a good change. She also said this feels like feminine energy.
“Masculine energy has a lot to do with control. It can feel more stable, it’s very action oriented…which I can see and feel that you’re very good at taking action. You’re very good in your masculine. Your feminine is harder for you to be in because of the uncertainty. You’re learning how to flow between the two, but the feminine is calling you in.”
As Amy spoke, I tried to relax. I wanted to believe everything she said. The cynic in me, though, was whispering in my ear. This is vague. You’re trying to put pieces together where there are none, that’s what human brains do, it said. Also, I write about the details of my life for a living. A quick Google search would give anyone with an ounce of intuition a general idea of who I am. My mind jumped back to something Dan said on our call.
“I feel it’s my duty to caution you,” he said in his very steady, soothing, almost-clinical voice, “that people like you—who are after something, people in such a vulnerable state—will be the easiest to take advantage of.”
I didn’t want to think that Amy would take advantage of me. Look at her! She’s an angel! Maybe I’m programmed to find the good in people, but she certainly doesn’t seem like a con artist. My inner cynic chimed in. No one thought Ted Bundy was a serial killer, either.
But if there were ever a moment to embrace my woo-woo, of which there is plenty, it was now. I pressed on. Amy talked for some 20 minutes with insights about my son and my daughter, a “circuit” that she sees in which my heart is connected to someone else’s, the color purple, a spiritual awakening, my fear of being empathic, etc.
While she couldn’t truly know that every night before I fall asleep, I pray—to God, the Universe, my Guides, my Mom, whoever is out there—that I’ll be led down the path that’s made for me, Amy did seem to know about my desperation to clarify my purpose, and she explained as much.
Then it was my turn to ask questions. I told her about my mom. I tried to be vague. I didn’t want to give too much away (my inner skeptic, again). Amy looks as though she’s receiving information from somewhere outside the room. She is listening.
“She is telling me she could hear. She is using the word ‘awareness.’” Then, in a startled voice, she said, “You cried with her,” and I said, “Yes,” though I thought, no shit. I found her body and attempted to give her CPR nine days after a C-section. I was hysterical. But Amy went on to channel my mother, and I knew I needed to put my doubts aside, even if for a moment.
“She really didn’t want to go,” said Amy, her voice cracking. “Your daughter…that’s how I knew she didn’t want to go. She’s showing me your daughter.” This made sense. My mom’s grandchildren were her world. But I needed more.
“I need to know what happened,” I said. I knew I might never get answers to these questions, but I had to ask. “When my mother had her arrhythmia, I need to know if it hurt. Was it quick? Did she call out for me? Where did she go?”
“Yes, your mom was in that room. She was in her body. There was no pain. She felt the initial pain of the heart attack. She’s describing it like an abundance of electricity that she felt in her chest. But then she was kind of out. She’s showing me like…if you could imagine someone getting an electric shock and then just…and expansiveness.
After that initial electric shock, she was in her body, but not in the way of feeling pain. She’s showing me…it’s an awareness in the body, but also expanded from the body? She is showing me, at one moment, that there was a tear. This is the third time she is showing me the tear. She doesn’t know if you saw it, but that was one moment in which she was able to be there.”
This moment is complicated for me because, for the 33 days my mother was in ICU and hospice, what most people sending their love and well-wishes didn’t realize was that from the moment my mother collapsed, she never spoke again. Her eyes never tracked once she eventually opened them. She never moved her limbs again, save an awful tick in her left arm in which she swatted constantly at an invisible fly, sometimes batting at her hair and face so intensely they put a sock on her hand to minimize the friction. It didn’t help. She was not a peaceful patient in a movie-like coma. She flinched and wretched and stared, without focus, into nothingness. Her brain injury was too severe. It was ugly. She was not my mother. Not the playful, curious, selfless wife, friend, and aunt she’d always been. She was a body in a bed, kept alive by machines and medication, and we were in hell.
Eventually they opened up her throat for a tracheostomy. They stuck a feeding tube in her side. In the end, she was put on ungodly amounts of morphine so as to not feel her organs shutting down. We wanted to ensure she felt no pain—throughout the heart cath and the EEG and the various needles and tubes and intubation. Not knowing what sort of brain activity she did or didn’t have, we wanted to ensure she wasn’t trapped inside her body, unable to speak or gesture. So maybe she shed a tear. But wouldn’t you? I’m not sure if I can believe it was because she was entirely lucid.
Amy continued, “She’s showing me that there is this light, and we have this choice. And that sometimes that choice isn’t all ours. Your mom kept making the choice that she wanted to stay. But it’s almost like she didn’t have it because it was her time. During that time in the hospital, that’s what she was going up against. Like going up against fate.” Then Amy laughs. “She’s funny in this way—she felt that she was stronger than fate. In the end she realized that there was an organization to things. And…”
At this moment, Amy pauses, as she has several times, with tears in her eyes. Beneath her breath she whispers, “Gosh, she’s gonna get me again.” She pauses once more, as if parsing her words. “She’s showing me that…she knew when she left that it wasn’t leaving. It’s that she became everything.”
She became everything. The phrase walloped me across the face before it settled into my broken heart.
“She’s showing me that you keep waiting for her to show up, but she’s been with you this whole time. She doesn't show up like how you’re waiting for her to. It’s funny, but she shows up as the color purple…that any time you see purple in anything, that it’s her. She is around you all the time. She realized that she could infuse herself into the atmosphere that is all of you.”
My reading with Amy continued for another 30 minutes, in which I gained insight into the way my mother shows up for my dad and aunt, among other things. Amy saw that my brother was a great communicator. “He’s a professor,” I said, once again letting my inner skeptic creep back in. That could be easily Googled, I thought. But Amy also knew a few un-searchable things about my sister in law. She knew that my daughter was happiest when she was making people laugh.
Now I’m left holding this information and wondering how to use it. I go back and forth between what I do and don’t believe. When I think I’m crazy for talking aloud to my dead mom, for seeking her out through any means necessary, I think about Christianity. If Christians can believe that a man [checks notes] rose from the dead; that he was, in fact, three entities; that he used, what, magic?, to multiply fish and bread; that we should pray to this invisible entity asking it to save lives and stop school shootings—and they believe it so vehemently that they’ve been starting wars and extricating people who believe otherwise for centuries, then I can sure as hell believe my dead mom spoke to me through a nice lady with a spiritual gift if it means I can sleep at night.
What I’m realizing is that it doesn’t matter if what Amy says to me is real or not. I make a choice. What is real is my obligation to wake up each day and parent my two young children. To be a mother, wife, friend, sister, daughter, and active participant in the world. A contributing partner who shares the financial obligation of this household. A woman, a worker, a writer. I’m OK with ambiguity. My grief isn’t going anywhere.
