Wilder Within

Or, How the Woodpecker Knocked and I Finally Knocked Back

The night after my mother dies, I wake at 2:17 AM in my childhood bedroom to the surgically sharp taps of an overeager woodpecker.

Jet-lagged and wide-eyed, I freeze, listening closely as the perfect ratta-tat-tat hits the outer wall just behind the headboard — in the exact spot woodpeckers (not nocturnal birds, by the way) plagued our siding for years.

“Mom? Is that you?”

***

Before getting into bed tonight, I quietly sob a prayer to my newly dead mother—a white woman survivor of the too-many-things targeting women and femmes, and yet who, for all of my adult life, was also a fundamentalist Christian and staunchly anti-LGBTQIA+. This last piece hid inside her, like her eventual Parkinson’s Disease, until I came out at seventeen — revealing her depth of judgment and rejection that rocked both me and my sister. It changed our lives.

It’s strange enough when a parent dies. Certainly that first time — when she cut herself off at my vulnerable age, and stayed cut off, from reality itself, for decades. It’s even stranger this second and final time, when I’m just barely forty and her dying feels like she got on a plane — with no guarantee she’d landed at her chosen destination safely.

Just off into the clouds, no clear sense of to where, or to whom.

“Mom, I’m over the moon that you’re no longer imprisoned by Parkinson’s. If you want to say hello, you’re welcome to. But I don’t want to see anything or feel anyone touching me, okay? That would freak me out.”

I truly don’t expect anything. I’d heard spooky stories over the years, and believed something might be possible. I’d had a number of passing clairvoyant knowings and direct encounters my whole life, that I’d just pushed to the side and let live as mere campfire stories to inspire goosebumps and giggles.

But at midnight, I feel the unmistakable pressure of someone sitting at the end of the bed — only to wake and find no one. Just a strong, warm energy and closeness near my feet, like what one feels in a Reiki session when the healer’s hands hover just above the skin — so close, but not touching. I note this, and exhausted, fall back asleep — until:

Ratta-tat-tat. Ratta-tat-tat. Ratta-tat-tat.

I freeze and listen until the clock shifts to 2:18 AM. My breath catches in my chest, then blossoms into a deep, shuddering exhale.

“Mom, if that’s you… I’m starting to get scared. If it’s you, I’m so glad to know you made it. You can stop now.”

Mid-peck, the tapping halts.

I stay awake and speak aloud — describing my hope for the freedom she may now find, no longer in the grip of a torturous neurological disease or a rigid religious cult. I affirm that she can thrive, learn, and maybe, finally, see how wrong she was about the hate she chose — the hate that stole any semblance of connection between us from far too early in my life. I tell her she’s welcome to visit me — but she must make her own life now, wherever she is, beyond the role of emotionally entangled, immature mother.

Mostly, I thank her. For calling to say she made it. And for answering the question I’d shared months earlier: what sign would we send one another, if one of us crossed over first?

“Woodpecker, woodpecker,” she’d then wheezed through laughter, her body rocking with tremors even the strongest will couldn’t stop.

Woodpecker — because my friend’s medium had said, “eh, woodpeckers are kinda dumb and easy for spirit world to control,” and upon hearing this story, months before dying, my mother’s funny bone was tickled like no funny bone had ever been tickled before.

Woodpecker — because when we cross over, the world expands beyond individual ego and the primitive survival demands of a limbic brainstem, which so often lead to tribalism, violence, genocide, and exile in the name of protection (the only actual Hell that exists).

Woodpecker — because life after death is a gift to all. A stopping place between lives that need not be earned, but simply exists, a grand expression of the particle physics animating all that is.

Woodpecker — because whatever we expand into, in whatever quantum field, with however many dimensions beyond corporeal life… natural law is merely an interstellar atomic flow called love.

Woodpecker.

Because it turns out I’m not just early diagnosed Gifted kid and late diagnosed Autistic adult; not just a queer poet and aspiring writer; not just a former preschool teacher-turned-somatic psychotherapist.

I’m also a medium. And it’s time to listen.

***

P.S. In a session with a trusted medium two months after this, my mom appeared — radiant, youthful, her bright blue eyes sparkling, asking to hold the medium’s hand. The very first thing she said was something that, according to this medium, often takes others years to realize.

My mom said that she was unequivocally wrong about being anti-LGBTQIA+ and about the brand of Christianity she clung to in life. Her sorrow, woven into her joy - as all true sorrow is - animates her learning now, and so, she walks with me.

Or rather, flies. Not as a woodpecker, but as a mourning dove, which I see everywhere: the first bird whose song I remember, first while lying in my crib, waiting for her to get me up from a nap, back when she was bright and smiling and bravely loving as a parent should be, with enough support. And as she is again, now.

Welcome to you, seekers of the ephemeral — whose own intuitions, gut knowings, dreams, and sensations may already hint at your connection to everything, everywhere, all at once.

While I’m not yet offering mediumship professionally, you’re welcome to join my Volunteer Sitter List for a chance to receive a reading as I hone my practice and prepare to launch publicly — entirely separate from my therapy private practice*.

However I can serve as a bridge and translator to and for your loved ones who’ve crossed over, I’m honored to. Just know: they’re already with you — listening, loving, protecting, guiding — as close as a woodpecker’s peck, and even as close as the air you breathe. ❤️

*If you’re an existing therapy client of mine, I’m not able to offer mediumship to you at this time.