Did I really just speak to my dead mum?

What happened when I went to see a medium...

I could start this by telling you how there was a tree in the shape of a small mushroom bomb, right outside his house. How I was twenty minutes early and stood outside trying to find metaphor in it. How inside his house there were huge blocks of crystals that were sludge green and ugly, when they were supposed to be beautiful. 

But all of that would be a distraction. From the way my body feels right now, how it felt then. Like my brain, my being was… concrete. Rigid. Frozen in confusion as to how I should feel. What I should type.

I could have made this easier for myself. Had I been smarter I could right now be transporting myself back a few days, using a portal comprised of my cracked iPhone’s voice recorder. I could be hearing his exact words, I could just transcribe them. There! Newsletter done! But when he asked me if I wanted to record the session I had said “no” hurriedly, afraid he would know I was a journalist, that I’d be writing about this.

I was thrown, could he see what I had planned already? The £50 an investment for my newsletter… for ‘content’? Could he look forward to this very moment, as I sit now, kitten at my slippered feet, my thoughts and words as tangled as my hungover Sunday hair? 

But no, this isn’t part of his service. He simply asks everyone if they want to record their sessions. Many do. They want to listen back, reflect and find further connection in his words. Even if it would have made writing about those 30-minutes easier, I am still glad I said no. Because going there, writing about my experience with a medium who claimed he was channelling my dead mum, wasn’t/isn’t just content. It’s… conflict. An experience I would not want to relive.

Maybe I should start at the very beginning. How, after a bout of small talk (“not a bad journey, no… where you live is lovely etc etc etc”) he told me my parents had had a difficult marriage. That he’d connected with my mother straight away, that this was the first thing she wanted to tell me.

There are many things he got wrong. My husband is not an artist, it has not just been my birthday, there is no discernible reason why my mum would want to give me a birthday cake. October means nothing to me. She did not wear a lot of jewellery. In fact, she wore no jewellery at all. Not even a wedding ring. 

There are many things he got right. My parents did have a tumultuous marriage. A loving one, but one that was tricky - to say the least - at times. My dad struggled with identity. Dad is happier now. My mum wore bright, patterned clothes. She loved to host and she loved her garden. New York means something to me. I am a writer. I am writing a book.

But… 

Aren’t all marriages difficult? At some point? Don’t we all struggle?

I was wearing bright clothes. He said I looked like her. All daughters of dead mothers want to be told they look like them. We will agree, even if it is not true.

Women, of my mother’s generation, hosted. They gardened. These are common hobbies. 

New York is the most famous city in the world.

The word ‘writer’ is in the email address I booked the appointment with. 

I could keep doing this. Find the rational in every single piece of information he gave me. I’d joked beforehand that I was a special case. You can’t cold-read a transgender parent. If he got that piece of information right, then I’d be a believer. He didn’t. Referred to dad by ‘he’ throughout (she now uses she/her). Case closed, right? But… 

It’s so easy to be sceptical. So much harder to believe. And, the thing is, I want to believe. I want to believe that she sits with me each morning when I write. That she’s deeply proud of me. That she sees how people respond to me when I enter a room, that I’m the person people want to see. That my next book is going to be a success. (All things he said she knows and feels.) I want her to be aware of how I exist today. 

I kept trying to succumb to it. To sink into the soft words, but all the while the rational hissed things at me. “He’s hardly going to say ‘your mum isn’t proud of you’, ‘people don’t like you’, ‘your book will be a flop.’ His reviews wouldn’t be so great then, would they?” 

This cynical, internal whispering annoyed me. Whenever I have a massage and I try to relax into it, my brain reminds me of old arguments, tensing my body up. It was like that, but much worse, as I felt I was chasing away something precious. “Stop trying to ruin the only few moments you have with your mother, by questioning it” I scolded myself. 

I am someone who likes to believe in magical thinking. It’s cruel, I believe, to tell someone there’s no heaven, no afterlife, no fairies… If someone gets comfort or joy in something, let them. No one can actually prove that none of those things exist. Just like we can’t prove that they do. Some people find comfort in cynical thinking (they might say ‘realistic’) others find comfort in magical thinking. I am the latter. Neither is right, or wrong. We exist in the ways that help us to survive. 

But the thing is… I’m strong. I went to see that medium in a strong place. And I still left so shaken,  I couldn’t speak for a few hours. So it isn’t just as simple as “if you find comfort in it, believe it.” As if I’d been in a weaker place, freshly grieving or grappling with an internal and all consuming war I wanted answers to, then how would I feel now? The experience - and the things I heard - had the potential to be incredibly damaging. 

It’s the marriage thing, that I keep going back to. Why did he tell me that? Later, he told me mum is happy for dad. He softened the initial blow that they had struggled was the first thing she wanted to tell me. She can see “he’s” happier (again, I feel this conflict of rationality and belief… I tell myself mum would have told the medium dad is now ‘she’ and that many marriages of my dad’s generation probably resulted in the man keeping a secret side to himself.. but then I think, mum died before dad transitioned. She might still refer to dad as a ‘he’… circles, circles, circles). BUT… AGAIN… WHY DID HE TELL ME THAT? Is it my business to know? Should a child know the intricacies of their parents marriage? 

If it wasn’t him (the medium) telling me that… but her, (my mum) then morally I guess he thinks he’s just a mouthpiece. If the information he hands on causes pain, that wasn’t his decision. But what if it’s not that, what if he always begins with something negative, so that his clients are more likely to believe the rest? If you open simply with “your dead mum is proud of you” it feels false. Regurgitated crap that he tells everyone. But begin on something negative and each client does what I am doing now, and thinks “well why would he tell me something like that if it wasn’t true?” It could be a very clever marketing ploy. 

In which case, I wasn’t sitting on the sofa of a kind-faced, softly spoken man. I was sitting in the company of someone purely evil. Who cashes in on vulnerability, and uses that vulnerability to purchase multi-million pound North London homes (and a collection of questionable crystals.) That’s the thing I really don’t want to be true, I like to see the best in people, always. Like I said… magical thinking. 

So what do I believe? Rationally, I believe that the medium was incredibly empathetic and that is a super power all on its own. He understands what makes many people tick and uses that - along with a mix of making presumptions and selecting details - to put together a session that is bespoke enough to feel special, but vague enough to fit almost anyone.

But (and I believe this thinking is also rational, in its own way) I also believe that mum was there. That certain things he said were from her. He just needed to pad out the rest, to fill the time. 

As I typed this, rain battered the windows. Then, it cleared. When I looked up, the most perfect arc of a rainbow stretched across the expanse of the sky. It confirmed the belief I had, that I have always had, of her ongoing presence in my life. I didn’t need to pay someone to remind me of that therefore I didn’t ruin my time with her by questioning it. She’s always here. And if she’d been in my shoes, sitting with a medium she’d have done exactly the same, spending the time trying to outsmart him and figure out his false moves.

How do I know that? I’m pretty certain she just told me. 

What do you think? Have you ever seen a medium? Is New York a special place to you? If you’d sat in on my session, could you have seen yourself in it? Let me know in the comments!

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