A mother’s grief sends her on a journey—one that is both literal and figurative—to a psychic medium and leaves the encounter with more questions than answers. Erin Jean’s “The Traveler’s Stone” is an exploration of grief, of grief through time, and of one family—one mother—trying to find her son as well as a way to live without her son.
My husband and I are in the middle of the Long Island Sound with our two-year-old daughter, surrounded by shades of blue. We’re on a ferry, and I’m crossing to see a famous psychic medium whose book taught me that butterflies are signs from the dead.
This was many years ago. But also, yesterday. And by yesterday, I mean happening now. Again and again and again.
* * *
Pulling up to the cottage I rented online, the late afternoon light flickered through the pines, and a kaleidoscope of butterflies descended from the sky, dozens of them, all black with a silvery sheen. The winged welcoming party swirled around the car and our things before returning to their dance in the place where sky meets land. Behind thick-framed glasses, my husband’s eyes said, Wow. Isla shouted with delight, “Wow, mumma, look!”
I immediately thought of Felix—not of him, but of him. Felix. This welcoming committee, this moment, these butterflies, were him. Unequivocally him.
* * *
Black Swallowtails, I’d later learn, are common to Long Island.
* * *
I bought a $266.85 ticket to a gallery reading in Long Island to sit in the same room as a psychic medium with 180,000 Instagram followers—of which I was one—so she could maybe point at me amongst the crowd and say, “I’m sensing young male energy, a baby with fragile skin.” Those words, like a spell, would, I hoped, help me believe he was somewhere, somewhere safe.
* * *
In Greek mythology, Charon ferries souls across the River Styx. Passengers must place an obol under the tongue of the deceased for safe passage to the underworld. Obol comes from the Greek word obelus meaning a symbol used to mark the deceased or to mark a word or passage as spurious, corrupt, or doubtful. With inflation, I paid $184 for the round-trip ferry on the ferryman’s website using a credit card.
* * *
I’d been reading the psychic medium’s book about signs from the spirit realm since I found it in an overpriced homeware shop in a neighboring town. I happened upon the boutique after I reentered the world in the weeks following Felix’s death. My son’s body, shrouded in a patchwork quilt and placed in the back of a hearse, is a memory that lives forever in my periphery. The psychic medium’s book was the first thing I cradled in my arms after his death that didn’t feel like a lie. I bought the only copy in the store, along with a hat that resembled the one worn by Curious George’s adoptive father, The Man with the Yellow Hat. People told me Felix was “in a better place,” that “everything happens for a reason,” that “I was a good mom.” They told me the hat looked good on me, too, after I posted a selfie with it on my head on Instagram. The psychic medium convinced me that our loved ones aren’t gone, just out of sight, in another room, and are trying to reach us if we’re willing to listen. Me and my wide-brimmed, felt hat were listening.
* * *
The most common signs from the dead, according to the psychic medium, are coins, butterflies, birds, deer, electronic glitches, flickering lights, songs on the radio, and sequential numbers. So when the butterflies surrounded the cottage, I knew it was Felix instantly—just as I’d known he was mine when his warm, gooey body was placed on my chest seven months earlier. Had I been trained to look for butterflies? Maybe, but does that mean they weren’t signs from Felix?
Seconds collected into minutes, into hours, into days, and I stood in the backyard of the cottage holding my daughter’s hand, surrounded by butterflies, each of them like miniature night skies holding but a single star, thinking of Felix and of the family reunion that I hoped awaited me at the psychic medium’s gallery reading that evening. Tonight I’ll hear from Felix, and this dark cloud, this despair, will be lifted. The psychic medium will confirm what I already know. Felix is here with me. This, the butterflies and the book and the trip and the deep knowing, is him manipulating space and time to say, “Hello Mom, I love you.”
* * *
On the roof deck of the ferry, Isla and I sat together and contemplated the open water on a metal bench. It was hot, the middle of another August heatwave. We pointed at seagulls and wispy clouds resembling teddy bears and crocodiles with top hats and bow ties. I adjusted Isla’s shark-patch baseball hat to shade her buoyant cheeks. Her eyebrows were splotchy and red; she was exhausted. We all were. Still, we were in motion, life pulling us.
We looked like a young family taking a summer vacation. But I was crossing the Long Island Sound in search of the dead, my dead. I brought my family with me, but the truth was I was heading for Long Island, to find my son, Felix, not to spend time with them. I was Persephone descending, Orpheus singing, knowing I’d turn around too soon, knowing I’d lose him all over again. Again and again and again.
* * *
Afternoon transformed into night, the gallery reading mere hours away. Travis was getting Isla ready for bed—bath time, story, and song—while I fidgeted with my clothes and face in the bathroom mirror. My skin didn’t feel like mine anymore.
“I’ll be back in a few hours. I love you guys,” I said, heading for the door.
“Good luck, I wish I could be there with you. Be safe,” Travis replied. “We love you, too.”
* * *
I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now if he meant it. Not the love, not the being safe, but the wanting to be there with me. We’ve known each other so long, slept in the same bed for millions of nights, lived through the same excruciating trauma, the loss of our son, but there was a silence between us that was born before Felix, and after Felix died, when it became our matrimonial silence, I could feel its muscular hands begin to squeeze the air out of my chest. I wanted to believe that my husband meant what he said—this day and all the days of our lives. I wanted to believe that he believed our son was somewhere out there, just as I did. But I can’t penetrate his mind. I can’t get him to tell me how he really feels, and that’s an unknown I vowed, for better or for worse, to live with.
* * *
As I drove down the dimly lit street, in a place I knew nothing about, a man began to knock on the door of my mind. He was a memory. “Let me in,” he wailed, though it was clear he had already managed to force his entry, for he was here now, just as he was this morning, just as I knew he would be stored somewhere inside of me forever. I recognized him immediately. It was the man from the ferry.
I saw him on the stairwell that led to covered seating, a haven from the morning heat. His skin was red and blistering, burnt from the sun and the lack of shade on the top level of the boat. I felt myself retract inwards upon seeing him, pulling Isla closer to me, appearing, I would imagine, to be a mother who feared that the man was dangerous or perhaps that his skin was contagious. But it wasn’t the catching or potential for being caught that made me withdraw; it was the familiarity of his flesh.
I knew that exact color of red. I had seen it dozens of times before. The inflammation, the tautness, and ooze of his shoulder blisters, and the sloughing skin where his flesh suit began to break open, creating thin edges that curled like little white cocoons before drying out and scaling off his body like giant sea salt flakes.
Felix’s skin.
* * *
The drive to the retreat center where the gallery reading would take place took thirty minutes, just as I had accounted for. I don’t remember much of the ride, just winding, country roads in a place unfamiliar to me, the GPS voice telling me where to turn and when I had reached my final destination. I sat in the car, talking to Felix. I begged him to show up for me, urging him to connect with the psychic medium, to let her know where he was and if he was safe, to tell her if he was mad at me for the decisions his father and I made while he was alive. I remember crying and the tears stopping when I caught a glimpse of the glowing moon through the trees. A waning gibbous. Clear and present. I remember contemplating turning the car around and heading home. I remember thinking, I can leave. I can go back, curl into a warm bed with my daughter and husband like a normal person. I can pretend that this never happened, bury it down deep, move on, stay in the present, plan for the future. Take the antidepressants.
I texted my husband, “I’m here,” when I decided to head inside. I’d crossed the Long Island Sound. I’d come this far. I’d paid the ferryman. I’d packed up my living family to journey with me and left them safely shielded in the cottage. I went inside because my son had been dead for five months and I still didn’t know if I’d made the right choice and maybe, impossibly, hopefully, unbelievably, or even believably, this psychic medium, this New York Times bestselling author, this mortal woman, this mother, would have the answers I needed to keep going without my baby in my arms.
After climbing two flights of cement stairs, I approached a small folding table. A young man, mystic-looking in his own right, with blonde shaggy hair and a heavy smear of eyeliner, asked for my name and made a note of my attendance. Turns out a single check mark is all it takes to enter the gates of the underworld. It’s the trip there that costs you. He ripped a raffle ticket, damp from the humidity, off the oversized roll, handed it to me, and pointed with a bony finger to the windowless double doors at the end of the outdoor hallway. I was certain the ticket would dissolve in the palm of my hand, not unlike the way Felix seemed to fade in the crux of my arm—there one moment, then gone, ice cold and stiff.
The room smelled like palo santo and grief. The walls were papered in two-dimensional pine trees, ferns, moss, and rocks. An artist’s interpretation of an infinite evergreen forest, commercialized for retail use on Amazon. It was enchanting as much as it was childish. A backdrop, an altar, a portal to the afterlife, hidden amongst a world of fake trees. Folding chairs formed a half circle in the center of the room, and a skinny passageway cut the half circle in two. I tuned into my energy, or tried to. I wanted to see, to know, to be called by something or someone other than myself, to find the chair that would become the landscape of my destiny. Energy would pull me in the right direction, the universe would provide, or so I’d heard during the countless podcasts I listened to with the psychic medium behind the microphone. I sat on the edge of the passageway on the left side of the half circle in hopes that the psychic medium would notice me, my dark circles, baby hairs, and bald spots, front and center. The room began to fill in around me: families, couples, women, men, a mixture of the young and old. The seats to the right of me were occupied by a mother and her daughter. Behind me were two sisters, both beautiful and glowing, which I can only believe was from an abundance of hope.
The psychic medium entered the room, with long blonde hair and her body draped in a linen maxi dress. She floated up the passageway, a big stone necklace hung from her neck and bounced chaotically off her chest. She greeted the room in a calm voice, very talk radio-like, and began to explain the rules of the gallery reading.
“I’ll deliver messages as I receive them,” she said, clasping her hands. “I can’t guarantee who will come through. Some of you will receive messages, others will not. It is often the loudest spirits that capture my attention. The universe decides who comes through, not me. I’m merely a channel, a conduit. But you don’t need me to talk to your beloved. You, as my book suggests, can do it yourself.”
I looked around the room, every chair filled now. There were ninety people in the evergreen forest with me. In two hours, maybe the medium could deliver twenty messages. The odds: 22.2 percent, my cellphone calculator told me. The percentage struck me. The fact that I did math in the middle of a gallery reading struck me. The string of numbers, the sequence—there is little in this world that doesn’t remind me of Felix, that doesn’t make me think of him, including 22.2 percent. I had read about angel numbers after he died, and 222 is considered a spiritual sign representing faith, trust, and harmony. Seeing the number is often believed to signify that you’re on the right path. What is 22.2 percent trying to tell me? What is Felix trying to say? I’m listening.
The psychic medium closed her eyes, as if instructing the room to hold its breath. It does, we do, I do.
“I’m getting a mother’s energy,” she said. “Does this resonate with anyone here in the room? I’m getting pulled over here.” She pointed to the young girls seated behind me. The girls, in unison, mentioned that they lost their mother, and the medium validated that their mother was in the room now, beaming and whole, at peace. She told the sisters that their mother was proud and wanted to congratulate her eldest daughter. The girls looked at each other, stunned, their jaws hanging from a rusty hinge, moments from release. They began to cry, a sweet, sad song.
“I just found out I’m pregnant,” the eldest daughter shared with the room.
“Your mother was with your baby, handpicked. Your mother says it’s a boy.”
The daughter nodded her head in agreement and collapsed into her sister’s living arms. Mouthing the words, “It’s a boy,” over and over again.
Bile rose up my esophagus, swallowing forced it back down. I picked at a hangnail on my thumb, attempting to ready myself for the next reading, for the possibility that it could be me this time.
“I’m feeling a sudden passing. There’s regret. A young male is with me now,” she said.
Arms all over the room shot up, as if the higher and more aggressively they waved their hands, the more likely the spirit would be theirs to claim.
“I’m getting pulled to this side of the room,” the medium floated down the passageway and lingered on the right side of the room, tracking towards the middle back rows, waving her arms in sweeping circles.
A woman with dark hair began to cry as the psychic medium drew near her. The medium invited the woman to speak with a silent nod.
“I lost my son. It was sudden, a car accident,” she wept. “I told him not to go…”
“He wants you to know it was quick, painless, and that he wishes he didn’t have to leave you so soon. He wishes he were more careful, less reckless. He loves you.”
My chest tightened as I wondered if Felix could even speak, if he had language at all.
The psychic medium continued to make her way around the room, validating and assuring the grief-stricken and skeptical. She spent thirty minutes talking to a woman who refused to believe her boy was okay, despite her reading that her son was at peace and wanted his ailing mother to live—even though he knew that she wanted nothing more than to die and join him.
When the psychic medium addressed the chosen ones, aside from the one stubborn woman, they seemed to be absolved, cleansed, cured. Plugged into something bigger than themselves. I returned to my hangnail, my leg bouncing uncontrollably. Please, Felix. I need you. Please.
* * *
8:40pm.
There were twenty minutes left in the reading, and the odds of being picked, now, this late, to hear from Felix, felt slimmer and slimmer, reminding me of the chances that his rare genetic skin condition would be treatable, curable before it ravaged every piece of him. Silent tears began to trickle down my sunken cheeks. He’s not coming through. And if he’s not coming through here, in a room designed for the dead to speak, will he ever? It’s as if everyone in the room had a breakthrough except me. Did he not want to speak to me?
The psychic medium bowed her head and thanked everyone for coming and silently floated down the passageway the same way she arrived, the windowless double doors closing swiftly behind her with a click. The mystic-looking man manifested at the center of the half circle and announced it was time for the raffle. Anger stiffened my muscles. Sadness tried to dissolve them. I wanted to sink into the carpet and disappear. I could no longer contain my tears; a leak had sprung from the corners of my eyes. The dark clouds had finally broken open. I cracked a smile at the mother and daughter next to me, congratulating them on their reading. I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, but I wanted them to know I’d witnessed their reading, too, that it was real. That the mother’s son, the girl’s brother, was with them, always with them. I explained to the mother that I, too, lost a son; he was two months old when he died, but he hadn’t come through. She cocked her hand to the side, her deep brown eyes spelling come here, and pulled me in for a hug. She rubbed the space between my shoulder blades, explaining just how sorry she was for my loss.
The mystic in dark eyeliner read a series of numbers aloud. His voice droned. Monotone and unimpressed by the evening’s revelations. I grabbed my things and looked down at the vanishing ticket in the palm of my hand. I hadn’t realized that I had been holding it, pressing it firmly into my hand, for the duration of the two-hour reading in silent desperation. My ticket number was called. Repeated and called again for a third and final time. I approached the mystic to claim my prize, a signed copy of the medium’s book—the one I’d already read, the one that taught me butterflies were signs—and a smooth, oblong-shaped moonstone.
Handing me the gift basket, the mystic said, “It’s the Traveler’s Stone.” He searched my face. “Inside. The rock, see it right there? It’s meant to protect those on nighttime journeys.”
As the room emptied out through the windowless double doors, people returning to their lives, I noticed the mother and daughter hung back, waiting for me with smiles and outstretched arms, tears creating rivulets across their rouged faces.
“See, he is with you,” exclaimed the mother, wrapping me up in another hug.
* * *
I opened the gift basket in the car and held the moonstone in my palm, flipping it over and over again between my fingers like a baton. I rubbed my thumb on each side until the cool edges were no longer. I came for my son, and I left with a rock.
* * *
When I unlocked the door of the cottage, Travis and Isla were asleep, my daughter’s body curled into her father’s chest, both of them breathing in sync with gaping mouths fit for catching flies. I crawled into bed slowly, trying not to let shifting weight wake them. My daughter’s iPad was plugged in and resting on the nightstand next to me, dark and silent. I closed my eyes and said goodnight to Felix.
A song began to play. I shot up, rooted to the bed. The iPad screen glowed with primary colors next to me. I hadn’t touched it. It just turned on, but how? Isla stirred but didn’t wake. Travis peeled open a sleep-heavy eyelid. I mouthed, “Sorry, go back to bed,” as I stared at the screen: Colorful cartoon animals and a family with absurdly large heads held hands and danced to a nursery rhyme.
Felix?
You couldn’t come through at the reading, so you’re coming through now. Are you trying to reach me? I’m listening.
Hello?
Maybe it’s because the iPad is fully charged.
I’m losing my mind.
* * *
Electronic glitches are among the most common signs, phones calling out on their own, random voicemails full of static, car radios turning on, and technology malfunctioning, according to the psychic medium. Souls on the other side of the living world can manipulate electric and magnetic fields more easily than physical objects, she explained. It made sense to me then, and part of me still believes, still hopes, it is true now.
I’d read the psychic medium’s book forwards and backwards. I listened to her podcasts. I followed her on Instagram and on occasion sent her a direct message, even though I knew she’d never respond. She’d given me a container for my grief when I had nothing but condolence cards and casseroles, taught me what to look for, what to believe in. She gave me a rope to steady myself with. She reminded me to believe in magic, to believe in eternal love. Was I experiencing something, or was my grief brain so desperate to find him that it found exactly what it had been told to look for?
* * *
Moonstone, also known as Hecatolite, is derived from Hecate, the Greek moon goddess and Persephone’s companion in the underworld. A moonstone is believed to offer emotional balance, enhance intuition, and promote new beginnings.
* * *
I held the moonstone in my hand and I listened to my daughter breathe in and out, mimicking the surface waves of the Long Island Sound. What’s the difference between grief and madness, between my son trying to reach me and my brain so desperate to find him that it creates him everywhere, writes stories that may not exist?
* * *
After we checked out of the Airbnb, the ferry back to Connecticut was crowded: weekend traffic, families heading home. Isla fell asleep in her father’s arms, sunburned and covered in melted watermelon Italian ice. I felt the moonstone in my pocket.
Travis turned to me and asked how the reading went.
“Fine. It was fine.” Grief had turned me sharp, short; a razor blade willing to cut and make others bleed.
Our silence continued to grow between us; it grew in the space where Felix should have been. But what else could I have said? That I’d traveled to sit with ninety strangers hoping a mortal woman would point at me and tell me my dead son, our dead son, was at peace?
“I wish I could have been there with you,” he said again.
I looked out at the water. “I went to the underworld and back, and all I got was a lousy stone.”
I drove off the boat and headed north with what was left of my family. Travis looked at his phone and Isla sang to herself in the backseat. I was still holding the questions I arrived with, I could taste them on the back of my tongue; bitter like citrus peels, kale, coffee.
* * *
I don’t know if the butterflies were, are, Felix. If the iPad turning on was my newborn son trying to reach me from beyond the veil, the only way he knew how, or if it was nothing more than a glitch. I’ve talked myself into so many never-ending circles. I’ve trapped myself inside an imaginary room without windowless double doors.
* * *
Who can say what is real, what is true?
Only my son, I suppose.
And he’s gone.
* * *
It’s been years now, almost four years since he died, and I’m still in orbit. Some days, my grief is the only thing keeping me in motion. I don’t know if I’ll ever find Felix, but I keep looking for him anyway. This is the only way to mother my dead.
* * *
The signs are real, or they’re not.
He’s reaching out, or he’s not.
I’m grieving, or I’m insane. Or not.
Maybe it’s all the same.
Maybe that’s the point.
* * *
There is no compass for this journey. No logic. No north, east, south, or west. Only the Traveler’s Stone. Only Felix and Felix and Felix and Felix.
Erin Jean is a mother of three whose writing was reborn from loss—the loss of her newborn son, Felix, to Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare genetic condition called “the worst disease you’ve never heard of.” Her work is melodic and dream-like, mapping grief against the vastness of the universe and the intimacy it carves into a life, into skin. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine and Motherly. She is an MFA candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars.