Multiple people in my household/immediate family have some degree of, like,
spirit communication. Not really within a religious context; they just receive
messages from their dead relatives and encounter strange energies in our old
house that have been known to upend someone's plate of rice, for example, when
nobody's looking. It's just something that's accepted within my family without
any explanation that it be contained or contextualized. The closest I can get to
explaining what it's like is to recommend the movie *Uncle Boonmee Who Can
Recall His Past Lives*. It's something I love about my family and I'm fascinated
by and totally on board with it, but I'm exempt from it for some reason. I don't
have these experiences at all.

My mother recently spoke to a medium who put her in touch with her grandmother,
who had a lot to say about how she has missed the births of new children in our
family, and particularly how she adores my child, her indomitable self-
confidence and incredible energy, her "sass". The departed watch our children, I
guess, but it falls on us, the living, to do the daily work of raising them.