In late spring 2024, I received an unexpected text message from a cousin. She asked: What did I think of psychic mediums? She had recently spoken with a medium, she said. In the session, our shared grandmother and my 14-year-old daughter, Orli, who had died one year earlier, had — how else to say this? — offered messages. In recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost. Contact, for lack of a better word, can be sensory, auditory, visual, a sense of presence, or smell. Some studies put the proportion of people who have perceived the presence or signs of their lost loved ones at around 60 percent. It turns out that asking if any of this is real or not isn’t necessarily the right question. A better question might be: What do these preternatural experiences do for the bereaved? In study after study, the sensation of contact with a deceased loved one plays a rather remarkable role in alleviating grief. In one recently published review of 14 psychological studies across seven countries, spanning over 1,900 participants, researchers found that a majority of those who reported experiencing the sensation of their lost loved one had had some “emotionally restorative experiences that contributed to coping with their grief.”