My mother phoned me after midnight. I’d been asleep. After years of suffering, my father had finally stroked out. "I heard a thump," she told me, "and I knew right away what happened." Doc Costello often wondered how my dad stayed alive as long as he did. He’d gotten up to smoke, but only burned the tip of his cigarette before slumping to the kitchen floor. She told me to meet her and Doc at the hospital morgue. During my early years as a young college instructor, if my father became very ill, I would suffer a huge anxiety attack. In spite of our differences, we had a psychic link that seemed unbreakable.

The body lay rigid under a white hospital sheet. Doc, a short man with a large paunch, stood at my father’s head. My mother and I waited at the other end of the table. Blue-black feet stuck up in front of us, and the horned toenails appeared as those of some strange animal. There was no odor, and my mother, fat but small, clung to my arm, her eyes deep and wide. She did not cry, and I felt nothing.

Even before talking about things psychic, about seeing outlines of spirits, about all the so-called paranormal things I was into after spending fifteen years working my way up as a poet and university professor, my dad and I had been estranged. If he’d had any idea that I was going to give up teaching to become a psychic consultant, speaker and media personality, he’d have blown a fuse long before he did. He liked having a young son, but an adult son was a different story. He was uneducated, a working man, withdrawn and bitter, and I took my first degree in Philosophy after earning the GI Bill. We no longer agreed on much. In fact, had he known it, even as a kid growing up I didn’t see things his way. Attitudes toward race, for example.

We rarely spoke. When visiting, I caught up on things with my mother, or I visited buddies, and only said hello and goodbye to my father. We were totally estranged. The last time we had an exchange, I was telling my mother about seeing images of ghosts. He was making himself a peanut butter sandwich at a side table in the kitchen. "There ain’t no damn such thing as ghosts!" he blurted. My mother shook her head behind his back, indicating that I should not answer. That was the last time he spoke to me directly.

My mother always gave me progress, or "regress", reports over the phone, about what Doc said, and about how long my father would probably live. Hardening of the arteries of the head, and more. He’d attack her about things that happened thirty, forty years before. He mixed his medications and washed them down with bottles of cheap wine. She never knew what she’d come home to, so after work as a clothing store clerk, she escaped to Bingo every evening. No telling what condition she’d find him in when she got home. For years the pressure was near-constant.

When Doc pulled the sheet off the body, I saw my father’s sunken mouth. His dentures had been removed. His eyes were closed, but the body did not look peaceful. It looked rigid and tense, as if frozen. His body wasn’t degenerated, but he was nonetheless dead. My mother began a quiet whimper, but I did nothing to comfort her as she clung to my arm. I’d had my issues with her while growing up as well.

Strange that I had moved back to Detroit temporarily during that period. To be at hand when my estranged father died. The next night I did not stay at the house with my mother and sleep in my old room that he had taken over. Instead I went back to my rented room and went to bed as usual. Then it happened. Sometime after midnight, I woke easily. I came fully awake. I knew I was not dreaming. At the foot of my double bed stood a figure of a man. He wore a dark cloak as he hovered there. Psychic events no longer frightened me. I enjoyed them.

I assumed immediately that it must be an apparition of my deceased father. I’d heard about foot-of-the-bed appearances. But that figure’s shoulders were broad, and my father had been a slim man. Also, the hair of the apparition, distinctly male, was long like that of a hippie. Even in the dark, light of the night sky and street lights brightening the room a bit, I could see the eyes staring at me. They were serious but lacked expression. Being well-versed in things psychic, and since the figure did not speak, I tried telepathy. Repeatedly I sent thought-forms to the apparition but no response. Nothing. He only hovered there staring at me with a serious look in his eyes, then slowly faded and disappeared. Who it might have been I never knew. It is said that the dead see the light of a true psychic and they are attracted.

The funeral was a farce. I hired our Unity minister to conduct the service because I wanted it to be positive. My father’s fundamentalist Christian family grumbled about the lack of a proper Hell and Damnation sermon. It wasn’t long before my father’s body was in the ground, and my mother and I back at the empty house to begin rearranging things for her to start her new life, alone and freed from burden. Of course she grieved, but at the same time she was relieved. Of that I am certain, even if we didn’t speak of it.