One of my brother’s friends from rehab recently looped my mom into a pyramid scheme (they live in the Canadian equivalent of North Dakota) that involves magic air purifiers. The magic part is that if you can convince two friends to watch an hour-long presentation, you get an air purifier for FREE! I have no idea how they make any money and I haven’t pressed anyone for details, but the rehab friend shared a photo of one of my high school classmates on his MLM Instagram page holding the purifier, and that’s how I found out he survived his fentanyl overdose!
My mother, who I love dearly, has never said no to anyone in her life, and that’s how she found herself entrenched in a codependent friendship with a woman who is a career psychic. The woman, who we’ll call Ellen, hosts parties where she talks to the deceased contacts of middle-aged women. This is how she met my mom. Since we have experienced an unusual amount of people not dying in our family, I’m not sure who Ellen talked to, but my mom was hooked on the psychic shit.
One summer I went to visit my mom and found my room was full of plastic tubs filled with beads.
“Those are Ellen’s,” my mom told me. “They’re for her jewelry line.”
The jewelry, which was called Radiant Toes (name changed for privacy but only just), was a line of anklets and toe rings meant to be worn on the beach with flip flops. Ellen handmade each pair and charged out the ass for them. She had more luck charging people to chat with their dead relatives, so she let the foot jewelry sit in boxes for nearly a decade. A conversation with my mom inspired her to relaunch the line — and she needed somebody to help get her name out there.
“Hi! Thanks for accepting my friend request. Your mom told me you do social media :)”
What followed was a nightmare. She wanted me to run two sets of socials — one for foot jewelry, one for her psychic services. She wanted original content, shot by me, collabs with influencers, and giveaways. She wanted me to schedule psychic dinner parties. She wouldn’t pay for scheduling tools — she wanted me to log in to each account individually on my phone. She was not interested in paying me. After weeks of negotiations, I finally told her to stop texting me.
When I went to Israel on Birthright, she took my mom on a medium retreat to Arizona. My mom told me she was the only one on the trip who wasn’t psychic, “except the bus driver. He could talk to aliens. I don’t really know why he was there.”
One evening, around a campfire, two women got into a fight because one (“an attention whore”) kept crying about her dead son, who was involved in gang activity, and a woman who claimed that the son was a “dark presence that’s been following us the whole time.” They screamed at each other and cried. The attention whore asserted, “My son has passed into the light,” and the other woman replied, “No he hasn’t! He’s here! He’s right behind you!”
From out of the darkness, a tiny cluster of Javelinas approached the fire. This calmed everyone down. Ellen explained that these were spirits of love and light, and their presence purified the space. My mom snapped a photo on her phone. Everyone was embarrassed by the evil dead son thing and went to bed early.
That same year, Ellen released her first book. The tagline? “Henry Ford came to her and told her to write a book. So she did.”
It was a collection of interviews with historical figures and celebrities — all deceased, of course. Suspiciously, each character spoke with the same familiar tone, as if both Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra and Jesus were all of the same middle-aged lady brain. There were no shocking revelations in the book — Marilyn didn’t tell us if she meant to kill herself, Cleopatra revealed no secrets of the ancient world. It was full of platitudes about growing up and loving everyone. Jesus took on a member of the Beatles as an apprentice before revealing that he was also Buddha, but so was everyone, and we just needed to figure it out.
Once, in Montreal, I had coffee with a girl my age whose mother was also friends with Ellen. I asked her if she thought Ellen was crazy and if she actually believed the things she said, or did she think Ellen was a scammer. The girl told me that when she was a kid, Ellen would interrupt her mom mid-conversation to announce the presence of angels. Once she told the girl that there was a ghost watching over her in her room (“I don’t know why she couldn’t have said angel”). Ultimately, she had no idea. Probably a bit of both.
Fentanyl has killed dozens of my brother’s friends. I mean this literally. We thought when his first friend died that would be enough for him to go to rehab and fix himself up. Then another kid died, followed by another. We could tell when somebody died because he and his friends would post photos of them together on Facebook, followed by days of binge drinking and memorializing. Rock bottom has a funny way of shifting its goalposts. Sometimes these people were vague acquaintances, and sometimes they were people close enough that even I knew them. When he finally did go to rehab, the sobriety was but a short-lived experiment. Quitting is too hard.
One of the hardest deaths was his friend David. David was not a stand-up person. He stole cars and got into a lot of fights at bars. He was, however, polite to my mom when he would snort blow in her basement, although she was never comfortable with him in the house. My brother was with him when he died, and it fucked him up. Not enough to scare him straight, but in a way that showed him he wasn’t too desensitized to grieve.
One morning, he encountered Ellen in my mom’s kitchen. She was staying in the guest bedroom. She told him that there was a spirit hanging in the house, and he wanted to talk to my brother. He was the same age as my brother. He had brown hair and kind eyes.
“Is it David?” my brother asked.
“It’s David,” she confirmed. “He wants you to know that it wasn’t your fault. He loves you.”
Cold reading is a technique used by psychic mediums to quickly pick up information about a subject by making guesses and picking up signals in body language, voice, and multiple other factors — and this is assuming they have no prior knowledge of their subject. It’s what makes somebody like Long Island Medium’s Theresa Caputo be able to command a crowd of believers when she asks questions like, “does anyone here have a mother? I’m feeling the warmth of motherly love.”
But Ellen did have prior knowledge about my brother and his situation — my mom tells her everything. She probably thought he needed to hear that. If we assume best intentions, she probably truly believed she was comforting him, like all the suburban moms who pay for her dinner parties. Instead, she sent him into a tailspin, and he didn’t come home for days.
In the years that followed David’s death, my brother has oscillated between fine and terrible. He continues to lose friends to fentanyl. Lately, he’s been fine.
Ellen maintains an active Facebook page where she shares QAnon content, mixed with messages she receives from spirits on other planes, validating conspiracies about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden being pedophiles, concentration camps for Covid denialists, and child sacrifice. She hates globalists and loves raising the vibration of humanity by advocating for essential oils and breathing exercises. If you PayPal her $100, she’ll talk to your dead grandmother on Zoom. As for my mom, while she’s internalized a lot of the QAnon junk, she’s a bit sick of Ellen.
“She keeps talking about [redacted local minor celebrity] like she actually knows him. She lies to people and pretends that they’re friends.”
Sometimes I flip through her book when I need a laugh.
“You are like the hippies of my generation, but with a clearer vision and greater resolve to see the changes through the end,” Martin Luther King Jr. told her in 2015.
MLK was not known to speak favourably of hippies. In 1967 he said:
“The hardcore hippie is a remarkable contradiction. He uses drugs to turn inward, away from reality, to find peace and security. Yet he advocates love as the highest human value — love, which can exist only in communication between people, and not in the total isolation of the individual.”
I’ll leave you with that.