06/24/2026
*Rethinking Cause of Death in Mediumship: Spirit Knows Best*
Cause of death.
Those three words sound fairly straightforward at first glance, but in the world of mediumship “cause of death” can be a multifaceted and even controversial topic.
When I first started learning mediumship, I was told to tune into a handful of areas when connecting with a spirit, including personality, age, s*x, relationship to the client, and cause of death. In classes and practice readings, it seemed that everyone would at some point go to the cause of death (likely due to the influence of Spiritualism in mediumship, a topic for another day!).
But I never understood the emphasis placed on this and it always felt a bit problematic to me.
I remember in one class a medium who was demonstrating for the group ended up connecting with one of my friends. She kept pushing to try to get cause of death, but came up empty-handed, and I was so relieved.
For those of us who have lost loved ones in traumatic and/or upsetting ways, we live our lives hoping to steer clear of ending up in the video replay in our minds of what we think those last moments were like. The last thing I want to think about when my friends in spirit are coming close with messages of love and support is the absolute worst moment of their lives and an incredibly painful moment in mine. It would only bring the energy down and weaken the connection and experience.
On the other hand, there are situations where people don’t have clarity on how their loved one passed or they have questions about the situation. In those cases, it can be crucial to tune into cause of death and provide some sense of what may have happened, and to hopefully answer the never-ending loop of questions.
For example, during the first mediumship reading I received, I knew how my friend had passed, but I still had a long list of lingering questions. She answered the main ones, reassuring me that she left her body very quickly and didn’t suffer as much as people feared. But then she said that she wanted me to remember her with all of our other memories and not by the way she had died. Since then, her passing has never come up in any of our other contacts.
When loved ones in spirit do bring up their passing to me, it’s not usually to dwell on what caused their death, but instead to express gratitude for the presence of family and friends at their bedside; to show me how much stronger and better they’re feeling now; and, to reassure loved ones that they did all they could.
As with so much of this work, I’ve come to trust that spirit (or my clients) will take me there if there’s a reason to and if not, there’s no need for me to seek out that info. Because ultimately, the way someone dies says nothing about who they were or who they are, and we do them and ourselves a disservice by staying too stuck or focused on that place instead of on the many beautiful qualities, experiences, memories, and more.
