I was raised to believe in proof. But some things in life—like death—refuse to cooperate.

I come from a family steeped in science—my father, a theoretical nuclear physicist; my grandfather, the doctor who once treated Anne Frank’s family; my uncle, knighted for his work in genetics. My mother stood apart, a former Swiss figure skating champion, six feet tall with auburn curls and a charisma that made her everyone’s favorite. She was grace amid minds of logic. Both of my parents fled Nazi Germany as children. That shared trauma—more than love or likeness—bound them in a way neither spoke of, but both carried.

Skepticism ran in my blood, encoded like an inherited trait. So when I met Sophie—a chain-smoking psychic—I was fully prepared to debunk her.

But at her kitchen table—covered with a red-and-white plastic tablecloth, miniature saints scattered around, saucers doubling as ashtrays—she upended me. She wore sweatshirts, spoke in a gravelly Boston accent, her white hair cut like Dorothy Hamill’s. She shuffled a worn deck of playing cards, some held together with tape, and then told me that my great-aunt had been killed in Nazi Germany for being mentally ill—a family secret she couldn’t have known.

In that moment, something shifted. A crack formed in the rigid structure of my disbelief. It was the beginning of a thirty-year relationship I never could have predicted.

For a long time, Sophie existed in a compartment of my life I never dared open around my family, especially my father. But secrecy has a half-life. Eventually, I told him. “There is not a shred of evidence that these people exist,” he scoffed. But as I recounted specific incidents, he surprised me. “Collect data,” he said. “Study it for trends.”

He was a difficult man—German-born, mostly English-raised—who had moved our family to America shortly before the assassination of JFK. He carried a nervous energy like an electron stuck in an excited state, his mind chasing muons and quarks and collapsed nuclei. His hunger for knowledge defined him— if there was something worth studying then he believed it should be pursued, with rigor.

Sophie became my guide as I taught chemistry and raised my daughters, her insights filling in gaps logic couldn’t.

My mother visited Sophie a few times, and even my brother Eddie—gruff and contrarian—began to wonder if there was something to her predictions.

*

In 2007, my mother called one afternoon. “Mein Schätzli, my dear,” she began, her Swiss accent stretching each syllable into a soft, sing-song lilt, as if trying to smooth out the edges of what she was about to say.

She had cancer—multiple myeloma. I sobbed. The thought of losing her was unbearable. She was our matriarch and our glue.

Metal rods were placed in her legs to keep her mobile. She lost weight; her once-strong frame diminished. During a stem-cell transplant, she came dangerously close to death. Yet even in her weakest moments, when we visited her in the hospital, she remained vibrant—charming us and the doctors with her stories and laughter, as if willing her body to catch up with her spirit. She never spoke about the possibility of death.

Sophie didn’t speak of death either, not directly. But she described an enormous gathering—a beautiful party, not a service—with food, music, and people traveling from all over the world. I knew what that meant.

A week before my mother’s death, I sat at Sophie’s kitchen table, seeking comfort in the familiar rhythm of her cards and her cigarettes. She assured me that my Omama and Opapa—my mother’s parents—would be there to help my mother cross. I nodded, but deep down, I didn’t believe it. I had allowed myself to trust Sophie’s psychic insight, but anything beyond this world—anything resembling an afterlife—felt like a step too far.
Sophie sensed my doubt and wagged a finger at me. “You need to pay attention. She will need your help. She will be frightened when she doesn’t see her parents. You need to assure her they will be there.” Sophie had been firm before, but this was different—more forceful. A command.

Two days later, I sat on an antique handwoven cane chair beside my mother’s bed. Eddie, my older brother, slumped in a black office chair, and my father lay silently on a twin bed pushed up against hers. Though frail and thin, my mother’s high cheekbones still stood out, and her thick white hair, streaked with gold, remained luminous. When she opened her eyes and smiled at each of us, my tall, made-of-honey mother had never looked more beautiful.

My father, usually argumentative, stared at the ceiling, emptied by fear.

I held my mother’s hand, which felt like tissue paper and bone. It was May. A cherry tree with its bright pink blossoms stood outside the open window. A lull descended as my mother slept. We were all in partial comas. But when she woke, she jolted her head up, and her eyes shivered. Eddie lunged forward.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re not here,” she whispered. “My mother and father.”

“They will be,” I told her. “I promise.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Sophie told me.”

She sighed, relieved, and closed her eyes. Eddie raised an eyebrow at me, and I told him exactly what Sophie had said. Despite his skepticism, he was open enough to consider it.
The following day, while we were with my mother, he decided to test the waters.

“Is Aunty Airplane with Omama and Opapa?” he asked, referring to a family friend who had passed away many years ago.

My mother’s brow furrowed into a bed of wrinkles. “Are you sehr verrückt?” she asked, (quite crazy). “She’s dead.”

“Fascinating,” Eddie whispered. The fact that my mother recognized Aunty Airplane as deceased yet spoke as though Omama and Opapa were vividly present, seemed to validate her vision for him.

In the coming days, my mother slept more. Her breathing grew shallow, and she only managed to eat a soft-boiled egg. One afternoon after Eddie left to pick up my younger brother, Richard, at the airport, Anne, my sister, and I sat with my mother. My father looked like a long wooden board, devoid of emotion. A soft breeze wafted in. I felt its tenderness and closed my eyes. I envisioned my mother as a little girl—cherubic, golden-brown curls, wearing a dirndl as she ran to her parents, my Omama and Opapa. They waited for her with open arms on the veranda of the Swiss chalet she grew up in after they fled Germany.

“She’s gone,” my sister whispered, pulling me from my reverie.

It was the first time I had been with someone when they died, and I was grateful for the perfect moment of grace.

My father didn’t move. He appeared utterly confused. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He was supposed to die first. I didn’t know how to comfort him. We had never talked about love or loss or faith or grief. Or funeral plans. The emotional chasm between us felt vast. When Eddie and Richard arrived, we all stood around the bed in silence. We didn’t cry, we didn’t hug, we didn’t hold hands, we didn’t pray. We waited. Waited for someone to lead us now that she was gone.

I stepped out of the circle and carefully closed my mother’s eyes.

After my mother died, we didn’t know how to grieve—not together, anyway. We stood around her absence like strangers at a bus stop, unsure of what to say, unsure of where to go next. I found myself drawn back to the only place where I felt seen and steady: Sophie’s kitchen table.

*

A year after my mother’s death, my father slipped on black ice in my sister’s driveway and suffered five brain bleeds. The doctors warned he might never recover beyond the mental capacity of a five-year-old. What could be worse for a scientist of his caliber?

He didn’t make a full recovery, but his brain healed faster and more fully than anyone expected. But he couldn’t travel as he once had or keep up with paperwork and taxes. He yelled less, and much of the anxiety and depression that had plagued him—though he’d never admit it—seemed to lift. He became a gentler version of himself, more able to show his children that he liked having us near.

During the next ten years, as he suffered from debilitating arthritis in his hips and could no longer climb stairs, his brain began to regress. At times he forgot who his grandchildren were. He often forgot that his beloved wife had died. He had no sense of linear time. He did, however, remember that he attended Manchester Grammar School as a child.

Sophie, now ninety-one, was fading too. She often repeated herself, forgot when she had last eaten, and as a result, was perpetually hungry—especially for sweets.

They were my goalposts. At one end stood the scientific, at the other, the mystical. Together, they grounded me, each offering their own paradigm, both carrying equal weight in my life.

I still visited Sophie once a week. The ritual grounded me, and even as her memory slipped, her readings stayed sharp. Sophie had taught me to trust my intuition—and it told me to start preparing for another goodbye.

*

In early February 2020, just before the world shut down for COVID-19, I wrote a titration problem on the whiteboard. I was about to explain the concept to my twenty-four students when my phone buzzed. I saw my brother’s name on the screen.

“I have to take this,” I told the class.

They knew my father was ill and were always compassionate about the disruptions. It also gave them a break from chemistry.

I stepped into the back hallway where we kept all the supplies and chemicals.

“Daddy isn’t doing well,” Eddie said. “He can barely talk.”

“Oh,” I replied, caught off guard by the sadness in his voice.

“He said he saw Aunt Laura.”

Aunt Laura had been dead for years. My father was getting visitors to help him cross. And although Eddie still insisted the whole spirituality thing was horseshit, Sophie had opened his mind—at least a little. Aunt Laura had been our father’s favorite aunt. A few times, he had even compared me to her—a rare compliment.

“Wait! He’s opening his eyes. I think he knows I’m talking to you.”

I stared at the cabinet marked nitrates and sulfates.

“Talk to him,” Eddie said. “You’re on speaker.”

“Hi, Daddy,” I said.

“He can’t hear you. Louder.” I glanced around, checking to make sure I was alone.

“Hi, Daddy!” I shouted.

“Hello.”

I didn’t recognize his voice. It was raspy, low, depleted. Where was the man with the German accent who yelled about lights being left on, who argued vigorously about education and politics? The man whose voice had always been warm, strong, authoritarian—with just enough of an English accent to sound polished and smarter than the rest of us?

He was smarter than the rest of us.

My eyes welled with tears. “How are you?” I asked, trying not to betray emotion.

“No questions,” Eddie snapped, holding back a you idiot. Insults were our sibling love language. “He can’t answer. Say something else. He’s listening.”

I rested my hand on the cold metal of the acid cabinet. “Um… I’m teaching about acids and bases today.”

“Not that,” Eddie groaned. “Talk about something else.” He sounded frantic. My heart raced. We were raised to stay rational, restrained. I had long since broken that rule, but it still held Eddie in its grip.

And suddenly, I understood—he needed me to say the things he couldn’t. To speak aloud what he didn’t have the strength, or the freedom, to voice himself.

“Daddy,” I said, no longer worried if anyone was listening. “I love you.”

“Better,” Eddie mumbled.

“Daddy, we all love you. You’ve been a great father.”

“Good,” Eddie whispered. “Keep going.”

“Eddie is there with you. He’s not going to leave. You’re safe. You’re not alone.” I paused. “I love you. Have a safe journey.”

“Okay,” Eddie sighed, relieved. “He just closed his eyes.”

“Is he comfortable?”

“Oh, shit! He just made some weird noise.” A pause. “Never mind. He’s okay. It was just strange. I have to go.”

I returned to my classroom, but I couldn’t concentrate. I dismissed my students early and went to my office to cry. Afterward, I graded a stack of labs, and in a fevered pitch, created lesson plans for the rest of the week—just in case. Later, I drove to a restaurant to meet a friend, and as soon as I parked, my phone rang again.

“Hi,” I said, answering quickly. Eddie didn’t respond.

“Is he gone?” I asked.

“He died,” Eddie said, his voice breaking. “I thought he was just asleep. I mean…he looked like he was sleeping. I was on my computer doing some work, and then I tried to talk to him again, to wake him up. He wasn’t breathing. I think it was when he made that weird noise. I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t have to know,” I said gently. “You were with him the whole time. He needed that. He needed you.”

“Ricky was here too,” Eddie added, as if not wanting to take the credit. Ricky, my father’s beloved Pekingese rescue, had been his constant companion.

“Ricky and you were the two who were meant to be there.” I didn’t cry. I didn’t need to. My father had crossed—his final reaction was one of peace. Eddie and Ricky were with him. I was certain it had unfolded exactly as it was meant to. I also felt sure that my mother had played a part, giving Eddie—her son and heir as she often called him—that final moment. A way to show him how deeply important he was.

After we hung up, I sat in the car, holding my phone against my chest.

Years earlier, my father had written a seminal paper proposing the possibility of collapsed nuclei—a theoretical model in which electrons fold into the core of a supercharged nucleus. Once inside, they eject their antimatter opposites—positrons—that spiral outward and away.
I imagined my father, in death, soaring—a released positron.

Because of Sophie, I was able to give my mother peace when she needed it most. Because of Sophie, my brother recognized the significance of Aunt Laura’s visit and understood that our father was preparing to leave. And because of Sophie, I began to believe that the world might be more than matter and molecules—that there are forces at work beyond what we can measure, perhaps even guiding us with a kind of quiet grace.

I had gone to Sophie seeking answers—wanting comfort, wanting clarity, wanting her to tell me exactly what would happen. But instead, she gave me something deeper: the permission to not know. To believe in mystery. To trust that the dead never really leave us—that perhaps they keep watch, quietly, lovingly, just beyond sight.

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