John Edward crosses over

TV's most famous medium John Edward did not talk to his father - that is, until after he passed away. These days, they are getting to know each other all over again.

As the world's best-known psychic and medium, John Edward is used to reassuring people that death does not have to mean an end to relationships.

But he has only just discovered that death can actually also mean the beginning of one.

"I've always been very, very private about my relationship, or should I say lack of relationship, with my father," says the host of Crossing Over, who spends his working life not just passing on messages from the dead to living believers but also urging the living to cherish their loved ones in life.

"And while he was alive I felt kind of hypocritical about the whole (mantra of) communicate, appreciate and validate stuff when I didn't have a relationship with my own dad.

"Well, not that I felt hypocritical - I think I was concerned more that people would perceive me as being hypocritical," says the New Yorker, whose parents divorced when he was young and who by the time his alcoholic father died in late 2002, had barely spoken to him in years.

"But because I didn't have a good relationship with my dad, I didn't feel the need to communicate, appreciate and validate with him. It was a very conditional relationship in life so I had to remove myself from that."

The 35-year-old had even removed himself from his father's name of McGee, instead taking his middle name as a surname.

But becoming a father himself for the first time to Justin, now aged two and a half, allowed Edward to think more empathetically about his own father for the first time. And just this month, that led to the moment that has proved to Edward that a relationship can truly begin after death.

"I knew that one day I would work on being a son by being a father and that's exactly what's happening now," he says.

"I'm trying to understand maybe what he was feeling at 35 and having a son, and understand maybe why he made the choices and decisions he did.

"So I feel like I'm trying to understand my father differently, now that I have the tools. And I can offer that up to him saying 'I know you're helping to guide me to understand this, so we can heal this relationship, so I can be the best father to your grandson'."

Then just this month, he finally received what he believes is a message back from Jack McGee, known to all as Jacky.

"My Aunt Theresa (his mother's sister) came to pick up my son, because my wife had to go run errands, and as she came in my son walked over to her with a drawing and said 'TT' - that's what he calls her - 'TT, this is a letter for you from Jacky'.

"And my aunt looked at him and looked at my wife and said, 'really, what does Jacky want me to know?'. He said, 'he just wants you and the family to know he's thinking of you'. It was like this one little flash moment.

"And my wife called me up right away and she's like 'oh my gosh you're not going to believe this'." Edward was floored.

"I just think it's awesome. I really feel it's the start of something."

Such deep identification with the issues of loss, and the comfort and hope he clearly gets from his belief in being able to maintain contact with loved ones after their death, is what he suspects makes him able to do his kind of work.

While he discovered his psychic abilities at the age of 15, the interest in developing them and using them to help others did not occur until the death of his mother from cancer when he was 19.

"I can tell you this much, if I didn't lose my mother when I lost my mother I don't think that I would be doing the work in the way that I'm doing it at all," says the medium, who will visit Sydney next month for a special performance to raise funds for the Sydney Children's Hospital in Randwick.

"I think I would be working in a healthcare capacity . . . after I got my degree (in healthcare administration) I thought, 'mmm, I'd rather be doing something with the patients, with the people'.

"But during that course of evaluation my mom died and it became very, very personal and I needed to know on a human level, 'OK, where is she, what's going on with her?'"

Even for people who do not believe he really is communicating with the dead, Edward says his show, books and live appearances answer a need in modern culture.

"I'm just trying to get people to deal with grief and love, and starting that dialogue about death. "Just saying it's OK to talk about, and that there's nothing to be fearful of."