Mediumship and Grief: Solace, Lies, and the Need for Closure in Buckeye

Thematic Claim

In Patrick Ryan’s novel Buckeye, the theme of mediumship and grief intertwines to reveal a central paradox: the ability to contact the dead offers undeniable solace to the bereaved, yet it demands ethical sacrifices—most notably, the need to lie in order to provide the closure the living desperately require. Through Becky Jenkins’s psychic work, the story questions whether comfort is worth the cost of deception, and whether the human thirst for resolution can ever be fully satisfied.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

1. Comforting War Widows in the 1940s

During World War II, Becky begins offering séances to mothers, wives, and widows desperate for contact with their lost soldiers. She becomes a source of genuine relief for people like the young woman who drives from Port Clinton with her mother, hoping to learn whether her husband is “in Heaven.” Becky tells them the truth as she understands it—she cannot confirm Heaven or Hell, only that the dead communicate from a kind of neutral place. Yet her honesty does not diminish the comfort she provides. The novel shows that even without definitive answers, the act of being heard and the belief that the spirit still exists helps the grieving carry on. This early depiction sets up mediumship as a healing practice, even as Becky privately wrestles with the limits and potential for fraud in her field.

2. The Lie to Everett Jenkins

A deeper ethical dilemma emerges when Becky must comfort her father-in-law, Everett Jenkins. Everett, a haunted WWI veteran who hoards and struggles with his own losses, cannot bear the weight of his son Cal’s rejection or the deaths of his other children. To give him a measure of peace, Becky fabricates a positive message from the spirit world—a lie that satisfies Everett’s need for closure. This scene crystallizes the theme’s complexity: the lie is compassionate, but it also corrupts the medium’s sacred trust. The novel never condemns Becky outright; instead, it asks whether the end of relieving grief justifies the means of deception. Everett’s gratitude highlights the vulnerability of the mourning, while Becky’s guilt reminds readers that even well-intentioned falsehoods carry a cost.

3. The Failure of Mediumship After Skip’s Death

The thematic arc reaches its most painful turn when Becky and Cal lose their son, Skip, in adulthood. Despite decades of helping others contact the dead, Becky finds herself unable to reach her own child. In the months following Skip’s death (see chapter twenty-two of the outline), she stops holding séances altogether, canceling her long-running advertisement and refusing to even attempt contact with Skip. She tells herself that “the idea of doing what she did—for anyone—with Skip gone was unthinkable.” This breakdown reveals the contradiction at the heart of mediumship: Becky can summon spirits for strangers but cannot command her own grief to be soothed. The loss of her son becomes a wall she cannot push through. Eventually, on her sixtieth birthday, she does hear Skip’s spirit in a humble message of love and forgiveness (chapter twenty-five), but only after years of silence. This slow reconciliation suggests that genuine closure cannot be forced or conjured; it arrives only when the living are ready to receive it.

Complexity and Contradiction: The Ethics of Spiritualism

Ryan does not portray Becky as a fraud. She openly despises the charlatans of the past—those who faked ectoplasm or used cardboard cutouts—and she refuses to claim she can “see” spirits. Her power feels authentic within the novel’s world. Yet the story deliberately blurs the line between gift and manipulation. The researcher Casey LaGrange idealizes her, but his presence also highlights how easily mediumship can be commercialized or turned into performance. Even Becky’s most sincere sessions with grieving clients, like Felix Salt, yield only partial results: she senses the lost men of the sunken Teague but cannot make contact without a name. Her “membrane” metaphor—a thin but strong barrier between living and dead—acknowledges that communication is imperfect, tenuous.

The most troubling contradiction emerges from the lie she tells Everett. It is an act of kindness, but it also violates the truth-telling that Becky insists on with other clients. The novel refuses to judge her, instead exposing the immense pressure that grief places on the living—pressure that sometimes makes false comfort the only tolerable option. Becky’s internal conflict, and her eventual reconciliation with her own grief through Skip’s final message, suggests that mediumship can be redemptive, but only when the medium stops trying to control the outcome.

Character Connections

Becky Hanover Jenkins: The medium who navigates the tension between providing solace and maintaining integrity.
Cal Jenkins: The skeptic who learns to accept Becky’s work yet struggles with the intrusion of the dead into their home.
Everett Jenkins: The grieving patriarch whose need for closure forces Becky to lie.
Margaret Salt: A figure of abandonment whose own grief (over giving up her son) remains unaddressed by mediumship.
Felix Salt: A wartime survivor who seeks spiritual contact but remains half-skeptical, embodying the universal wish for reassurance.
Tom Buckeye Salt: The son who, upon learning the truth of his parentage, experiences a different kind of grief—one over lost identity.

Symbol Connections

The Buckeye Tree: The tree in the Jenkins yard stands for rootedness, protection, and the persistence of life despite loss—a quiet counterpoint to the transient nature of séances.
The Séance Parlor: The room where the membrane between worlds is tested; it becomes a sanctuary for the grieving but also a site of ethical strain.
The Basket: May evoke the harvested buckeyes or the gathering of emotions; the precise role in the text reinforces ideas of containment and vulnerability.
The Kapok Life Preserver: A relic from Felix’s sunken ship, symbolizing the failure of physical safety and the lingering burden of survival that no mediumship can fully alleviate.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Becky’s refusal to predict outcomes (like the end of the war) contrast with her mediumship?
Becky insists she cannot make predictions, only relay messages from spirits. This refusal draws a clear line between genuine mediumship (which she believes is about comforting the bereaved) and fraudulent fortune-telling, preserving her integrity even as she bends the truth in other situations.

2. Why does Becky stop holding séances after Skip’s death?
Her own overwhelming grief makes it impossible to concentrate enough to contact anyone—even her son. She feels protective of the dead and cannot bear to “use” her gift on strangers while suffering personally. The break demonstrates that mediumship cannot thrive when the medium’s own heart is broken.

3. What ethical dilemma does Becky face when she lies to comfort Everett?
She must choose between honesty (which would leave Everett in despair) and a compassionate falsehood that grants him peace. The novel does not condemn her, but shows that this choice tarnishes her own sense of professional honor and exposes the human desperation for any form of closure.

4. How does Felix Salt’s skepticism affect his sessions with Becky?
His refusal to provide a name, and his later hesitation to believe fully, prevents a clear connection with the spirits of his lost shipmates. His doubt mirrors the reader’s own uncertainty and reinforces the theme that belief is necessary for mediumship to function—even if the comfort it provides is partly a psychological illusion.

5. What does the buckeye tree represent in relation to grief and mediumship?
The tree is a living, stable presence in the yard—rooted, seasonal, and enduring. Unlike the fleeting and uncertain séance, the tree offers a natural, quiet continuity. It symbolizes the idea that grief, like the tree, can be weathered without needing to contact the dead.