Messages from the Deep
A journalist’s journey from fact to faith
Hello, wonderful readers — thank you for being here, for taking in my words, and for helping me live and grieve in a way that feels true to who I am. I hope something in this piece helps you too.
I haven’t officially announced this yet, but I’m writing a memoir (the title is still in progress — though it may end up being Mermaidism: The Religion I Invented to Save Myself). And by writing this, of course I’m trying to manifest it into being!
What follows is a rough-draft excerpt from a chapter about my experiences working with psychic mediums — part of the larger story of how I’ve been trying to make sense of love, loss, and what still connects us. Let me know what you think as it could help me tweak it for the memoir! Much Love, JJF
When love refuses to die
The first message came like triage – quick, urgent and meant to stabilize.
The act of dying was just like dreaming. Ravi didn’t feel any pain as life drained from his body.
Nadine told me that right off the bat. It was my first psychic reading with her, exactly ten months after the machines stopped keeping Ravi alive.
“He didn’t suffer,” she told me. “And he needs you to know that.”.
He didn’t suffer.
More than four years after the accident that broke my understanding of how life is supposed to work, I still summon those words when I need something to hold onto.
The message didn’t come in Ravi’s familiar voice—not the way he used to say “I love you, Mommy,” with a calmness that made everything feel right. But I could feel him there, somehow, inside me.
Then came something harder to hear. It was barely understandable.
Ravi said he knew. The day he died was the day he was meant to go. Somehow, his leaving us would become part of his lasting impact—a light meant to guide me, our family, our community.
“He was in such a good mood, like he was embracing it. And he wants to say he’s sorry that you had to be there.”
Those words hit me in the gut and still do – impossible to unhear. No matter how much spiritual unraveling I’ve done, and continue to do, I think of April 3, 2021, as the worst day of my life. Ravi’s take on it—shared from a spiritual plane that defies logic, through a medium I trust with my heart—is still working its way into my consciousness, finding new ways to surface.
Before Nadine, there had been others, and these encounters served as a kind of an opening act. But I wasn’t ready to fully hear what they were saying.
The two times prior, when I reached out to healers who carry messages from the dead to the living, I found reasons to doubt them. Each encounter left me searching for signs of trickery, scanning for tells. Part of me wanted to believe; the rest was busy dismantling the possibility that belief could be real.
With Nadine—who I like to think Ravi led me to—my brain didn’t fight it as hard, even though I couldn’t take it all in at once.
There was so much to absorb. Not just the widening of the frame—this cosmic lens on an accident that had blown apart all my assumptions about love, motherhood, and meaning. There were also specific things Ravi said through her and the other mediums. Details that landed like truth on something I’d always sensed about why I’m here, but had never quite let myself believe.
Through Nadine, he told me I do my best thinking—and my truest writing—in the water. In hindsight, it feels like he was predicting Mermaidism: the instinct to dive deep, to make the unseen my method.
Even with free will—the wild card that can derail divine plans, as Ravi explained—I’m meant to write something that helps people heal, maybe even earn from it. (Hard to picture, given I’m currently sweating over a self-published book on Amazon.) He said that this work—turning inward—could draw my husband and me closer.
Some of that was even fun to take in, to let myself imagine—tentatively at first—turning dreams into an action plan.
But the idea that my firstborn son—the beautiful soul who taught me how to love—came here knowing his time would be short is still the one I struggle to take in. I can consider the possibility that his death might hold meaning, but it doesn’t always stop me from bargaining with God for a do-over.
Still, that’s progress. It took months before I could begin to let most of these messages sink in. And when I could, they came in fragments—like pieces of a language I didn’t yet speak but was trying to learn through a spiritual version of Duolingo (alongside the French and Spanish I practice daily).
Cue Houdini
For most of my life, the newsroom part of my mind ran the press. Even as I turned to mediums hoping to reach Ravi, I treated the messages like quotes that needed sourcing. The readings were like news tips that might not hold up under scrutiny. The journalist in me didn’t want to risk publishing fake news.
I also didn’t want to be fooled. My heart was already raw from loss—open, vulnerable, experiencing vertigo. Maybe that’s why my mind kept circling back to Harry Houdini.
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by him—the escape artist who could slip out of anything except death. And now, thanks to modern technology, I can summon him from the ether: grainy clips of Houdini writhing free from a straitjacket, hanging upside down above a crowd, turning live entertainment into a kind of temporary escape from fear itself.
The Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant’s escapes still astonish me—but what holds me now is his crusade against fraudulent mediums in the 1920s, the ones who preyed on people like me, the newly grieving, desperate for a sign. He exposed their tricks to protect the living from being deceived not by the dead, but by those pretending to speak for them.
Houdini even made a pact with his wife: if there were life after death, he’d send her a secret message no one else could know. She waited for years. Nothing came.
For most of my life, I took that silence as proof. My journalism brain—trained to verify, to demand sources and documentation—felt safe inside that worldview. Facts were facts. Everything else was wishful thinking.
Losing Ravi didn’t instantly change that, but even before the shock wore off, I knew my old ways of coping had collapsed. I’d hit the limits of what could be controlled, of how many feelings could be shoved down and labeled “manageable.”
In the months and years that have followed our tragedy, I’ve been reading and listening to everything that feels relevant on the path to discovery — self-help books, spiritual talks, any voice that might help me make sense of what had happened, even if it strays far from the factual world.
And somewhere in all that searching, I began to feel what I hadn’t been able to think my way into: the love Ravi and I shared wasn’t gone. It was still alive, even if his body was underground, less than five miles from our home.
I trusted Ravi—his wisdom, his goodness and creativy—more than I trusted my own mind.
And still, belief didn’t come easily.
Looking back now, the first two mediums were largely spot on. I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.
You are spot on! The love never dies. It’s what forms our grief, and finally overcomes our grief with the acknowledgement that grief is love. Thank you for a tender and heartfelt essay.
Just beautiful Jayne ❤️