ATHABASCA — Death may be one of life’s few certainties, but Calgary-based medium Jennie Ogilvie is working to change how people experience it by using humour, intuition, and straight talk to bring comfort and clarity to the grieving.
“A lot of people say death is heavy, but death doesn’t have to be heavy. Death just has to be understood,” said Ogilvie.
Canada’s unconventional medium, Ogilvie brought her intuitive talent and sharp sense of humour to the Nancy Appleby Theatre April 3, where a crowd of Athabasca women — and a handful of husbands — saw her unorthodox approach to modern mysticism firsthand.
Ogilvie said she became aware of her ability to connect with energy at six years old. After a life spent leaning into her gift, Ogilvie offers one-on-one, group sessions, and travelling shows as a way to show others how to do the same.
“Everybody, not just most, everybody can connect,” said Ogilvie. “Love is intangible, so is faith, hope, passion and purpose, and we all strive to connect to what that looks like for us. Why do we have to separate that one piece?”
“If energy exists, then why does it only have to exist in a body? Love doesn’t live in a body.”
A proponent of intuition, Ogilvie calls the energy she connects with ‘spirit,’ and while skeptics may be ready to roll their eyes, her work with clients is grounded more within the self than the ‘other side,’ albeit in a raw, unfiltered way.
On-stage, Ogilvie asked for audience questions, and was met with a gamut; some wanted to know how late loved ones passed, others wanted reassurance of their continued presence, and one woman was curious what kind of cars her friends and family were driving, and whether or not they vacuum.
Ogilvie explained she doesn’t see energies existing in the same form and with the same chores as the rest of us, cannot answer questions about specific moments or share loved ones opinions on looming decisions, but instead said connection, clarity and closure come from within.
“On a subconscious level, everyone wants to find some type of reason or a way to look at grief and handle it,” said Ogilvie. “When you go through grief, it makes you show up an have to handcraft what that looks like for you.”
Between jokes at her own and her audience's expense and deep truths about the way we process death individually, Ogilvie did crowd work connecting energies she felt to locals in the theatre and provided a handful of guests with specifics and stories that hit close to home.
But for anyone interested in connecting with a loved one or leaning into their innate intuition, Ogilvie has a warning: beware of the unscrupulous Walmart medium.
“Walmart always has sales on, so never go to the cheapest one because you’re going to get the cheapest quality,” said Ogilvie. But beyond prices, she said Walmart mediums thrive on keeping clients in need of outside validation rather than teaching tools for internal introspection.
“The idea (is) all you do is sit there and hope to get something externally from somebody. But I honestly think every medium needs to understand the purpose of why they do this work,” said Ogilvie.
“How do you want to help people? Because it’s one thing to just connect them to their loved ones, but then what?”
Beyond making connections to energies for clients, Ogilvie’s why is re-shaping our relationship with life after death in order to live as fully as possibly before the final comes for us all, and she said it starts with conversation.
“That’s the biggest hurdle I see for people, because we don’t talk about. When my grandfather died, everybody was there for my grandmother, but nobody really talked about the death,” she said.
She likened challenging the social norms of silence around death as putting down an old book, and leaning into connection both before and after a funeral as picking up a new one.
“If that concept doesn’t work for you, then you have a choice to change it, and it doesn’t have to be a process. It just has to be a choice.”
