These convention people did not want to hear about our methods or about grief management. They wanted to know how to harness their own energy, their own power to speak to the dead. To cut out the middleman, so to speak. I left her room early, too. I was woozy or dizzy, perhaps still in the throes of some kind of hypnosis aftershock. I wandered into another room, where a couple was standing together, nodding along to a woman onstage who was talking through a smile.

“I used to be a corporate HR manager. Could you imagine?”

She laughed at the absurdity of it.

“I was scared of my gift, a gift my grandfather gave me. I remember once, when I was a kid, I said, ‘Grandpa, do you hear dead people?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, do you?’”

She smiled warmly at everyone.

“And even though I spent nearly my whole adult life trying to keep my gift under wraps, I finally ‘came out’ of the spiritual closet a few years ago. I’m a medium, damn it!”

The crowd cheered. At least she wasn’t telling us that we had to buy anything to receive her gifts. The couple standing up among the rest of us was waiting patiently for her to refocus on them. And when she did, they clutched each other as if in a storm.

“You lost a daughter,” she said.

“Yes,” the father said, so quietly we had to lean in to hear. I took a seat.

“She was young. It was abrupt.”

“Yes, and yes,” his wife said. They were a handsome couple, not yet retirement-age, but gray from grief.

“I see something with the head. Is it something with her head?”

They searched for some clue that would link them to her, to the correct answer.

“Cancer,” the medium said.

“Yes,” they said.

“You know, she barged right in through a dozen spirits waiting to talk to their loved ones. They’re all hovering above us—attached at the hip, almost.”

I looked at the ceiling. It was a pale shade of yellow. I felt strangely compressed in my seat. I didn’t want the dead strangers floating above us to attach themselves to me. Others looked up and smiled knowingly. The medium kept asking leading questions, and the bereaved couple kept answering as best they could until they filled in all the blanks for her.

“She wants to tell you that she’s happy. That she’s okay. That she knows this is hard, but you will meet again and it will be glorious,” the medium finally said.

The couple squeezed each other. This is what they were after. This is what they came all the way from Salt Lake City for. She was providing them with a service, and I understood her function completely.