Grief, Mediumship, and What I Won't Promise You

Of everyone who contacts me, the bereaved are the group I screen most carefully — and the group I most often ask to wait.

That surprises people. Surely mediumship is exactly what grief needs? Sometimes. But grief in its early weeks is not looking for information. It is looking for reversal, and no one on earth can supply that. Sitting with a medium too soon can quietly become a way of not beginning to grieve at all, and I will not be part of that.

The promises I do not make

I will not promise contact. Not before a session, not during one. Nobody can honestly promise that, and anyone who does is selling something.

I will not promise that what comes will be what you hoped for. Sometimes what surfaces is mundane — a phrase, a habit, an object, something small and domestic. People sometimes arrive wanting absolution, or a final message that resolves everything unsaid, and that particular shape is rare.

I will not tell you your person is at peace as a matter of routine. It is the standard line in this field and it is offered so automatically that it has stopped meaning anything. If something genuinely comes through to that effect, I will tell you. If it does not, I will not manufacture it because the room feels heavy.

What I do offer

Time, and a great deal of it. Bereavement sessions are unhurried by design; there is no version of this that works on a clock.

Care about what I pass on and how. Not everything that surfaces needs saying at that moment, and part of the work is judgement about timing and phrasing. This is not withholding — I will tell you if I am holding something back and why — it is the same care you would want from anyone handling something fragile.

And plain honesty about the limits of the whole enterprise. I can sometimes offer something that helps. I cannot offer the thing you actually want, which is your person back at the kitchen table.

When I say wait

If someone contacts me within the first few months of a loss, I will usually say gently that I would rather see them later, and mean it. Occasionally I am wrong about that and we talk it through. But the default is patience.

I also say plainly, in the screening call, that a reading is not grief counselling and I am not a therapist. Some people need a bereavement counsellor far more than they need me, and telling them so is part of the job — even though it means turning down the booking.

Why I still do this work

Because when the timing is right, it can be extraordinarily good. Not a cure, not closure — I distrust that word — but a genuine moment of connection that people carry with them afterwards.

That possibility is exactly why it deserves to be handled carefully rather than promised freely.