The New York Times recently published one of the most beautiful testimonials to the healing powers of mediumship (and signs and spirit communication and all the good stuff!) that I have ever read.
Because I love the piece so much and want to make sure you read it, I set my journalism ethics training aside and pirated it to avoid you being blocked from it by paywalls.
Sorry not sorry — it's too good.
"ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE." — Nikki Mark
Thank you, Nikki Mark, for this breathtakingly powerful story — for sharing your son with us, for sharing your heart.
Thank you to my dear client C.B. for drawing my attention to this piece.
My Son Is Gone. Our Conversation Goes On.
Three days before my son died, he primed me to keep living.
Written by Nikki Mark
Art by Brian Rea
Every night before I go to sleep, I write in a journal to my 12-year-old son, Tommy, and continue a conversation we started on April 13, 2018, just three days before he unexpectedly passed away.
Tommy was particularly chatty that Friday afternoon as we drove from Los Angeles to San Diego for his weekend soccer match.
“Remember my plan, Mom,” he said. “First, I’m going to be a professional soccer player in Europe. Then when I retire, I’m going to be a coach of a midlevel pro team. After that, I’ll be a soccer commentator on television.”
I told him that sounded like a great plan. And I wondered if he knew himself better at 12 than I did at 48.
“At some point, I’ll have two kids and a fashion line,” he added — just like his favorite pro players did.
“Nothing is impossible,” I said, echoing a belief I routinely share while helping inspire entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.
But then, Tommy asked me something I’ll never forget: “Mom, is it possible to go to sleep and not wake up?”
My response was quick and light: “Only if you’re really old. It’s the best way to go, by the way. No pain. No drama.”
After that he said something even more surprising: “It must be hard for a parent to lose a child.”
I looked at him in the passenger seat. “That’s not going to happen here. I go first. You go second. That’s how this works.”
When I pass away in my 90s, I told him, I would send him a sign to let him know I was always with him. We laughed about the birds I might be and the music I might play. Tommy jokingly suggested I play the Grateful Dead because neither of us were fans but my husband was always blasting their music, driving us crazy.
We were not a religious or spiritual family, so I thought Tommy was just being curious, and we were having fun. By the time we arrived in San Diego, we had reviewed his whole life. I expressed how proud I was of him for going after his dreams in ways I didn’t as a child. And I let him know how much I loved him, how much I believed in him, and what an honor it was to be his mother.
Three days later, on April 16, 2018, Tommy went to sleep after his regular Monday night soccer practice and never woke up.
There was no chance to save him. The paramedics said he likely died shortly after going to sleep. Doctors still don’t know why. They think it was his heart. He had a myocardial bridge — a mostly harmless condition that in rare cases can lead to cardiac arrest. But they didn’t know if that was the cause. We may never know.
In an instant, the person I thought I was, and the story I thought I was living, vanished. The pain was beyond words; I saw no way to survive it. For the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to want to die.
So much of that morning is a blur. Once it registered that Tommy could not be saved, I felt as if every circuit in my body disconnected at the same time, my head started pounding, my ears began ringing. I could barely speak, much less hear.
But even as I fell apart, the conversation that Tommy and I had on the way to San Diego replayed in my mind. I asked myself: “Is it possible that while Tommy and I were having one hypothetical conversation, our souls were having a private one?” I had never thought about my soul before.
“This is some kind of plan,” I said to my husband. The person I’d been before Tommy died would have rolled her eyes at me. My husband was also shaken by the coincidences, but he hadn’t experienced them as I had.
Later, as my house filled with a community I didn’t even know I had, my husband grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “We will not be a tragic family, do you understand me?”
I stared into his eyes, which looked as empty as I felt, and agreed. Our younger son needed his parents and deserved a beautiful life. We would get through this together.
The inner voice that started guiding me that day told me that talk therapy and prescription meds were not going to work fast or deep enough. I needed something different. And to survive for my younger son, I needed it fast.
To satisfy both my M.B.A. brain and entrepreneurial spirit, I searched for a belief system about life and death. I researched and tested every alternative healing method I could find, from meditation and breathwork to mediums and mushrooms. And the more I opened myself to new possibilities and ignored the voice of logic, the more I began to hear, see and feel things I never had before.
There was the hawk that stared at our home the entire day Tommy departed, and the other hawk that circled overhead when I spoke at Tommy’s memorial. There were the hummingbirds that suddenly danced in our faces and sang in our ears, which were flashy, friendly and unusually athletic like Tommy was — a breed that happened to only live a maximum of 12 years, too. And often there was a baby sparrow that stood for hours on Tommy’s soccer ball that sat in the middle of our backyard where he used to play.
I knew I was trying to make meaning out of something I couldn’t otherwise comprehend or endure. I had always been super logical, but I couldn’t think my way out of this. As I felt old parts of me dying and new parts awakening, I couldn’t deny that these mystical moments gave me hope.
When lights started flickering in my home, televisions turned on seemingly by themselves, and I was awakened in the night by Grateful Dead music despite our stereo system being off, I got the sense that Tommy was talking to me. And if I was open to it, I believed our relationship could keep growing and transforming between our two worlds — and so could our love.
These moments lifted my spirits and made me smile. And when I was really lucky, Tommy would pass through my dreams at night, flash his bright smile, and give me a quick “Hi Mom!” or an update from his world, like the time he said, “Don’t worry, Mom, I got the meaning of life before I left.”
A few weeks after Tommy died, I met with a medium who said, “Did your son ever tell you he wanted to be a pro ballplayer, and then a coach, and then a TV broadcaster?”
I had told her none of that. She knew nothing about me or Tommy, not even our last name.
The medium went on to say that Tommy talked to me about his dreams and goals because he trusted me, and I believed in him. She described a specific pep-talk that Tommy gave his younger brother in my presence the night before he died, and how he had told his brother to spend less time playing video games and more time outside playing sports with his friends. And she concluded by saying what very few people even knew at the time: “Thank goodness you two had that conversation before he left.”
I thought the conversation we had in the car about the signs I would send him after I was gone was just for fun, but in retrospect it had prepared me to receive these signs from him. The lights, televisions, birds, dreams, his father’s music — they all comforted me in ways I had hoped would comfort him. And no matter how much my brain dismisses them as wishful thinking, they fill my heart with an inner peace and sense of wonder that I wish for everyone.
The more I stretch my imagination, the more I believe that the conversation Tommy and I had in the car that Friday afternoon didn’t end when we got to San Diego. Nor did it end when he passed away three days later. It continues — at night when I write to him in my journal before bed and during the day when I talk to him about our family, share my new dreams and thank him for helping me not only survive for his younger brother but truly live again for him too.
And as our conversation evolves and our love keeps growing, so does our relationship as mother and son. In this lifetime. Between our two worlds. Because as I told Tommy on the way to San Diego, anything is possible.
Nikki Mark, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and president of the TM23 Foundation and the author of “Tommy’s Field: Love, Loss, and the Goal of a Lifetime.”