In May 2012, my birthmother Laurie was a medium-in-training, and when the dead co-operated, she did pretty well. She took weekly classes at a local spiritualist church on how to hear those who have “passed the Great Divide,” but who all now pile into an auditorium to be heard. After learning to discern one voice from the many dead who might be speaking, she then had to learn how to locate the right someone in the audience for this word from a loved one. As her final test, she had to go on stage and relay at least seven good messages to the folks who’d gathered to hear them. The dead, for their part, arrived eager to talk, and enunciated well. My birthmother passed the test.

“I had a hard time hearing their names—sometimes I just heard the first part. It starts with an M, I’d say, or call out several similar names until someone claimed them. It always turns out to be the right people connecting and, well, that’s a relief. When I relaxed, it all got much clearer.” She was so relieved and happy at becoming a spiritualist, helping people through their grief with these further messages, the ones that might be lost without someone like her.

She delivered messages like “You’re going through a hard patch, but it’s going to get better. Stay strong.” Or, “You’re not listening to an opportunity that’s been given to you several times.” People were so thankful to hear from their wife or sister or mother or friend. Oh, that sounded just like Michael, they told her.

She was going to be a great spiritualist, I could feel it. She had a knack for being able to talk and connect with anyone. I could understand her excitement. After all, it was our story all over again, every night on stage.

For every adopted kid out there, a birthparent connection is not a sure thing. We struggle with not knowing if we’ll ever reconnect, or feel afraid that if we do, the influence of one person on another may be too great. A new mother, or new child, could take over, upset the balance of our lives, change the dynamics of our own “previous” families. Some searching mothers are rejected by their children who already have fulfilling lives, and some find that their children have already died. The path ends before it can begin again. Why start such a difficult journey? And yet, for many birthmothers, as Laurie learned, not ever finding their children is too much to bear.

An anonymous person put Laurie on my trail thirteen years before, and I think, maybe, for her, that becoming a medium—a go-between—was a re-enactment of that re-pairing. For her, giving me up and never knowing what had happened to me was akin to a death she couldn’t fully recover from, even though I might be living, because she didn’t know: she didn’t know how life had turned out for me. Adoption was a lingering mystery that was rarely solved. If only there were messages someone could deliver to all those mothers. Or perhaps, if their messages, from far away, could find their child of another timeline.

I often think about the first message she sent to me, the card that my own mother had opened and read aloud to me over the phone—how similar it was to the messages Laurie now relayed to others from the dead. I’m here. I don’t want to interfere. I just want to be a part of your life.

When my birthmother started getting into spiritualism more seriously, I was living in Whitehorse, Yukon. Laurie lived in Indiana. We were about 6,500 kilometres apart. We’d not seen each other for several years, mostly due to the cost of travel. Nevertheless, we were having a good conversation on the phone—which meant I was offering up my heartache for her advice, and she was getting to play Mom.

“He wasn’t the right person for you, honey. You need to let him go. Trust me, the right man is not going to suddenly stop communicating.” She talked about her own past relationships with partners who were not the right person for her—and how she had discovered that. This, I think, was important to her. She relished the chance to tell someone all the stories she’d saved up, dispense the kind of advice that mothers did. I was someone she could pass that wisdom down to.

“The problem is, you’re like me, sonny boy. You go for the ones who don’t talk much in the first place and think you’ll get them to open up. Then you’re surprised when they shut up. You have to learn to appreciate their silence, hon.”

Unfortunately, we’d found each other so late in life that we didn’t have many of these conversations in person. I’d moved from Texas to the far north two summers after we’d met, initially for a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing, and fell in love with Whitehorse, something I hadn’t expected. I didn’t make it easy for her to get to know me by moving so far away.

For her day job my birthmother was a cashier at Lowe’s hardware store, and she needed another profession, something more fulfilling. I was trying to be supportive. A spiritualist, I thought. She’d found something she really loved doing—why was I having trouble with that?

Maybe I didn’t trust the dead. I didn’t know their intentions with my birthmom. What did they have to gain? What did they want to say to the living? And why did they want us to listen?

Laurie made it sound as if we, the living, were merely people the dead were charged with encouraging along our paths, and spiritualists were Western Union—conveying those messages to loved ones as they could. I’ll admit my bias—my adopted folks raised me as a Baptist, so spiritualism made me nervous. Especially when she talked about channelling. She wasn’t sure she felt good about being possessed. I certainly didn’t like the idea of someone else speaking with my birthmom’s voice. It would make me question everything she said to me. Is that you or Gerald speaking?

Even after thirteen years, sometimes I feared our relationship might be broken if I wasn’t more open-minded. Religious differences can break any relationship—not just people who are dating, but any two people. I tried to be more enlightened. I could do this. After all, I was very close to Jesus, a dead person who spoke to me. So we had something in common.

The cold of the lingering winter crept through my triple-pane glass and formed frost inside my apartment windows as we talked. Laurie was telling me about her Viking spirit guide. Seven feet tall, bearded and broad-shouldered, a bit rough around the edges, he sounded like someone’s World of Warcraft avatar. He cared about her; he sounded warm, living, real. But, of course, he was real to Laurie. Her multiple spirit guides helped her cope with life. They comforted her, advised her, protected her. Since she was over sixty and living so far away, how could I be upset at a team of specialists watching over her? But I got jealous because I was lonely.

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling,” she said.

“You floated to the ceiling?”

“Yes. He needed to prove that he was there. Then he pulled me down from the ceiling—he has very big arms.”

Very big arms.

Back then, the Yukon was brimming with single men. Many of them were burly outdoorsmen, who loved hiking forests, canoeing rivers, and barbecues under the long summer days. However, due to our isolation there were few Out, Single Gay Men over thirty in the Yukon. I could count only five in Whitehorse. “Import, Import, Import,” was the cri de cœur among the five of us.

There were plenty of closeted men who, for various reasons, did not think coming out was a good choice for them here—they feared worst-case scenarios. Loss of friends and family. Loss of jobs. You needed your friends so much more in an isolated place.  For emergencies, for entertainment, for company. These fears were well-founded—I knew it personally. But you also never knew who might surprise you with a welcome.

I’d had a very loud coming out in Whitehorse, which eventually involved a series of sermons in my former church and an article in the Yukon News. That’s the stuff of another story, perhaps. I lost friends and jobs. The rest of Whitehorse, however, took me in. People I didn’t know reached out to me. There were better churches, kinder people, more affirming friends just waiting for me. They had big arms, too.

I still wanted someone to share my life with. As a fantasy writer and Dungeons & Dragons player, I had a soft spot for broad-shouldered warriors. Here my birthmother had her own personal thousand-year-old warrior.

“He literally pulled you into his literal arms?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, aware that my Baptist skepticism was rising to the surface. “You don’t believe me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You want to cross-examine him. Make sure he’s real.”

“Yeah, lady,” I said sarcastically, “I’d like to chat with your hunky spirit guide.”

“Hunky? Well, if you like Conan the Barbarian, I guess so. And you do, I know that.” She made yummy smacking noises through the phone line.

Oh God. I deflected. “I’d ask him his intentions toward my birthmother.”

She chuckled, seeing right through me. “Baby boy, I don’t think you could handle him.”

“I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Riiiight. I’m your mother, I know these things.”

I dismissed that quickly with a pointless wave of my hand that nearly took out my lamp. “Look, I don’t even believe in him. But I am your son, and I deserve a say in which people give you advice. He should at least respect that.”

“I can ask him to come visit you,” she said, with a warmth and an understanding that surprised me. Her sixth sense could read my heart across all that distance.

My birthmother had been into magnanimous gift-giving ever since she found me when I was thirty, her first gift to me. Six months later, she offered to find my birthfather for me. Then she sold a property she owned and used the money to pay for a trip to Ireland so we could spend time together. Partly, I think she was trying to make up for the thirty years we’d lost—she wanted these gifts to be huge, to bridge the years, to prove she was a good mother. She had a good heart.

Sending me her Viking spirit guide was another huge gift. But maybe it was also a chance to prove her spiritual beliefs true to her narrow-minded Christian son.

Laurie had been the first to accept me as her gay son—did I not remember? She’d had less to give up than my folks, and more to gain maybe, but she wrote to me in a letter, I love you whether you are straight or gay. That meant a lot. She’d known from the beginning, she said. “No straight son calls his birthmother darlin’ over and over.” I told her she was confusing being gay with being a Texan who called every woman darlin’.

As my birthmom, she accepted whoever I was because I was coming to her fresh, a first impression. It was easy for Laurie to win that one. My folks had a lot more history to rewrite than she did, and they were still struggling.

Hearing her son was hurting, Laurie reacted like a mother—by offering a gift only she could give. “I can tell him to come to you in a dream first. Because if he came for real, he would scare you.”

She said I needed to open a channel to let him into my mind. This scared me; I’d been warned all my life not to let spirits into my mind, and I was sure this rule applied to hunky Vikings too.

But I was lonely. “Okay, sure. I’m game. But just for a conversation.”

“When you get ready for bed,” she told me, “just say out loud that you’re opening a channel in your mind for him to come.”

I’d never told Laurie about my history with spirits visiting my room at night. Growing up, I was plagued by nightmares. While I felt awake, the room would transform in front of me, strangers would walk in, and heads would move up the wall, watching me. I was always petrified until the experience was over. It was classic sleep paralysis—hallucinations occurring between a dream and waking state—but within our spiritual context, it seemed more ominous. My parents hoped I would grow out of it, and eventually I did, but not before a particularly frightening moment.

I was sixteen. One night, after going to bed—I could still hear M*A*S*H on the TV in the living room—I was consoling myself while lying in the top bunk of the bunk beds. I must have been nervous about something scary happening, but then I said, out loud, in the most religious way possible, “Well, I’m a Christian,” trying to invoke some sort of immunity to spiritual activity outside the movements of God and the Holy Spirit.       

Instantly, a guttural chorus of voices came from the ceiling and swooped past my head, bellowing, “No, you’re not.” The sensation felt like a shark brushing past you in the ocean.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. This was different to my previous hallucinations, which had never responded to my voice before, had never felt so malevolent. I heard the laugh track from the TV filter down the hallway. Frozen, I was aware that although my parents were only in the next room, they couldn’t help me. I was vulnerable, even here.

I didn’t know how to tell my parents what had happened. I couldn’t even begin to put it into words—there was no way I could dismiss this moment as mere sleep paralysis. I still can’t. But I knew what I needed to do. The following Sunday, I walked down the church aisle and rededicated my life to Jesus, and again the Sunday after, and probably five or six more times. It was a public act with witnesses who would keep me accountable for my promise of increased devotion. An extra dousing of the Holy Spirit would protect me in my bedroom.

There I was, almost forty, a part-time English teacher with a deep faith in God, aware there might be more out there than I realized, and actually thinking of opening my mind to a Viking spirit, as if this were DeadMatch.com. 

That night, I turned down the sheets of my bed, thinking about the hairy-chested Viking awaiting me. I tried to keep my thoughts friendly and positive, but that sixteen-year-old’s frightening encounter with spirits slipped back into my head. Surely, I told myself, meeting a Viking in a dream was a harmless fantasy. With the conversation with my birthmom so fresh in my mind, I would probably dream of a Viking regardless, a product of my overactive imagination.

When Laurie spoke of spirit guides, she sounded comforted. He has very big arms, she’d said. When I spoke of Jesus, I always thought of a soul comfort, but not a physical one. Was I disappointed in my religion? Was I frustrated at God for not sending me someone real by now? God wasn’t a pimp. But hey, couldn’t He be a matchmaker?

I was angry at my former church for their negative reaction when I came out to them, how they’d pushed me away. What did I owe to those beliefs, when other people abandoned them so easily? Since I’d discovered that the church had been wrong about being gay, being queer, couldn’t they be wrong about spiritualism, as well? Could my birthmother, so comforted as a single woman by these spirit guides, really have access to something otherworldly that I wasn’t allowing myself to try?

Oh God, I thought, did it really have to be a choice between having no one in my life, or opening my mind to a dead Viking?

I lay in bed with my lamp on, staring at the ceiling, imagining a wider, more spectacular universe than I had been taught to believe in. 

I was ready, in some ways, for anything. I felt vulnerable. “If I open a channel to you,” I said into the room, “you have to promise not to hurt me.”

I heard myself—my voice—pleading. Oh my. That had to be a red flag, even if I’d been talking with a real man. Begging him not to hurt me.

I wanted to believe that God had someone out there for me, and I wanted someone in my bed. But I was afraid and confused. Laurie’s gift was too much. I felt unprepared for what might come into my room, but I knew I’d hate myself if I didn’t try.

The flesh was willing, but my spirit was weak. I turned out the light and the dark rushed in.

Some of us are not ready for magic. Not ready for the unknown to come into our room. We can handle the Holy Spirit because he’s been around since Sunday school. We can handle God—sometimes aloof, often hands-off, a word of wisdom now and then. These are not magic. When the dark gets thick as it does when you turn out the light, when it comes and surrounds the bed like a liquid, rising above it to cover you, and you can’t breathe because you know something could be there, you are not ready for magic, even if it could help.

“Protect me from myself!” I shouted, certain I was the most dangerous thing in the room. I turned my face into the wet pillow and had no dreams of Vikings. No dreams at all.

The next morning, I took a walk outside. The sun rose ten minutes early, and would continue to do so every day until our sky was filled with sunlight all day and all night long. I went scarfless, gloveless into the forest, happy that temperatures were rising. I stepped through the remaining snow, watching the light filter through the narrow trunks of pines and aspen. Two chickadees darted above my head. I imagined they were in love, as you do when you’re not. I rested a hand against one of those pine trees for a moment to stop and appreciate what I had—the forest, the light, the snow, the wilderness, the crisp clear air. A chickadee lit on the back of my hand, only for a second, looked at me, sang and then darted away. I could feel that song resonate through his little warm body on my knuckle.

Brave. Man, they were brave. But then, I was mostly harmless.

I called Laurie when I got back to my apartment. I didn’t want to confess my fear, how I had allowed it to ruin her gift. Or that I was afraid of what had clearly helped her. I wanted to keep our relationship strong, above our differences in faith. How could I explain that the gifts of her faith weren’t ones I knew how to accept?

I blamed the Viking, telling her that he hadn’t come.

“I couldn’t get him to leave me,” she said, disappointed for me. “He’s very loyal.”

I imagined a burly Viking seated at her bedside, full armour, sword at hand, alert and listening, scanning her darkened room for evil. No voices would swoop past her head while he was on guard. That would be the gift I’d give her if I could.

Stay there, Viking. Stay there.

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Image: Jerome Stueart, 2024, watercolour and pen/ink.