A Medium Reflects on Unspoken Truths
The air in Jocelyn Mare’s office is thick with the scent of old wood and beeswax. It’s quiet. Not the sterile silence of a clinic, but a heavy, waiting kind of quiet, the kind that presses in on you from all sides. There are no crystal balls here, no velvet curtains swaying in a manufactured breeze. Just two mismatched armchairs and a small table between them in a modest Brooklyn walk-up.
This is where people come for ghosts.
But Jocelyn Mare isn’t interested in spooky theatrics. She’s a medium, but she carries herself like a librarian of emotions, a translator for things left unsaid. The work, she explains while pouring tea, isn’t about fortune-telling or parlor tricks. It’s about untangling the knots of the past that keep people tethered. “People think they want lottery numbers,” Mare says, her voice low and even. “They don’t. They want permission to feel what they’re already feeling.”
So they come. They sit in the other armchair, clutching faded photographs or simply their own nervous hands. A young man, Mare recalls, recently came hoping to connect with a father he hadn’t spoken to in a decade before the man’s sudden death. He was braced for anger, for old arguments to be rehashed from beyond the veil. He wanted a fight. What he got was a quiet, insistent message about a shared memory of a fishing trip, a feeling of pride that had never been spoken aloud.
The client sat in stunned silence for ten minutes. He wasn’t ready for forgiveness.
That’s the core of it. The messages that filter through Jocelyn Mare are rarely grand pronouncements. They are specific, small, and almost painfully human. A mother wanting her daughter to know she remembered the name of her imaginary friend. A grandfather, a stern man in life, apologizing for not being “softer.” These are the unspoken truths that haunt the living far more than any specter.
Mare’s process is disarmingly simple. She uses no tools. No cards, no runes, nothing to interpret. She just sits, closes her eyes, and listens. “The silence is where the information is,” Jocelyn Mare insists. “My job is to get out of its way.” She describes the sensation not as hearing voices, but as a sudden, complete knowing—a packet of information and emotion that arrives fully formed. It’s a feeling, a scent, an image, and a sentence all at once.
And she’s acutely aware of the skepticism. She welcomes it. “Doubt is healthy. It keeps the channel clean,” Mare states, without a hint of defensiveness. “I don’t need anyone to believe me; I need them to believe their own heart when they hear the message.”
This framing resonates with experts who study belief and grief. The sessions provide a space for what Dr. Lena Petrova, a psychologist specializing in bereavement, calls “a functional ritual for processing unresolved emotional data.” Whether the information comes from a spirit or from the client’s own subconscious, Petrova argues, the therapeutic effect is the same. The medium acts as a catalyst, allowing a person to construct a new, more peaceful narrative around their loss.
But for Mare, the experience is anything but academic. It’s draining. A woman came in last month, consumed with guilt over a lost family ring. She spent the first twenty minutes describing the heirloom in frantic detail. The message that came through for Mare, however, had nothing to do with jewelry. It was from the woman’s grandmother, a simple, clear thought about how the woman had held her hand in the hospital. The unspoken truth was a thank you, not an accusation.
Jocelyn Mare had to deliver that message. It’s a weight she carries with a strange mix of reverence and professional detachment. “It’s not my truth to carry,” Mare says, looking out the window at the bustling street below. “I’m just the delivery service, and sometimes the package is heavy.” The cost of postage, it seems, is a piece of her own quiet.
