I may send for a copy, but I am in no rush to pay money. I tried to find out all I could for free, and I found his name and the place and date of his death. But everyone wants a credit card number for more information.
I'm sorry it costs money. Here (in the U.S.) it costs money too, and because of privacy laws you have to demonstrate a need for the information unless the records are very old.
Go find your local Mormon church and tell them you're doing genealogy research -- which isn't at all a lie. You're well armed with a name and birth date and place. Chances are they microformed the parish (or whatever) records long ago and have a separate record of it they'll let you examine and photocopy or print out for free.
In any case I believe my mother...
I've given you reasons why your mother's story is implausible. Part of "re-evaluating" your beliefs, as you say you do, would be to weigh those reasons with the reasons why you hold your beliefs. "I believe my mother" is not good enough to convince other people you've evaluated this story critically and that it therefore constitutes solid evidence of a true medium.
...and the certificate will not say there were no oxygen tents. It will probably say he died of respiratory failure, or something like that.
I am prepared to believe that's substantially what it will say. I doubt that any public registrar believes it his duty to go into that much detail regarding cause of death and all the reasons behind it. My father's death certificate simply lists "complications from leukemia," and that's not even especially medically accurate since his official diagnosis was acute myelodysplastic syndrom (what Carl Sagan died of).
But that's not the point. The point is how much detail someone can have gleaned from a public record and what one can infer from it. Simple arithmetic tells her he died at a very tender age. Cause of death informs her there may have been some element of tragedy to it, and therefore ripe pickings for a reading the subject will have strong feelings about. As Pixel42 has said, this may all actually have been researched by the local leaders of your church. And then when the medium shows up, they say to her, "Scorpion, that quiet kid in the back, had an infant brother who died in the war. I'll bet he would be very happy and relieved if you were able to contact him." And no, that's not too far a length to go for a church centered on communicating with the dead. That would be their stock in trade.
The medium, according to you, mentioned only "equipment." You don't remember enough of the reading to be sure any specific kind of hospital equipment was mentioned. According to you, it was your mother who identified it as "oxygen tents." (No, we're not done with that.) And now you seem to have credited that back to the medium, such that you're wondering whether she could have gleaned it from the death certificate. She didn't glean it at all. From the basic arithmetic showing he died in infancy, to the cause of death being (provisionally) "respiratory failure," to the place of death being (hypothetically) "St. Duodenum's Hospital" during wartime, it's not hard to go out on a limb and say that equipment shortage contributed to the unfortunate and untimely passing of a distressed infant. See what happened there? The medium made a vague inference, and your mother -- who had the actual knowledge -- is the one who focused it down to a specific claim. That's not a miracle on the part of the medium. That's just how all mediums work, whether they admit being fake or not.
Okay, back to oxygen tents. Yes, I just improvised one in my house yesterday using only equipment on hand -- a card table, a wet bedsheet, and a tank of oxygen that i use for welding. I got a 32-percent oxygen concentration (and rising) before I stopped the experiment for safety reasons. And I'm not even running a hospital. Not that I would trust an infant's survival to it, but if it's all I had then I would certainly give it a try.
The real issue here is that the exact type of equipment that allegedly lacked, according to your story, is not an important detail. Your mother, recounting the incident some 30 years after it happened, might simply have misremembered it. Or she might have been told the wrong thing by the attending nurses. Quite a number of explanations come to mind that could answer the implausibility of the story as you tell it, yet still let you believe that the medium supernaturally came to know your brother died for want of "equipment."
So the implication is why you're reluctant to question even the tiniest details of the stories you tell here. Even on relatively insignificant matters you dig in your heels and insist that your beliefs must be true to the letter and that you cannot possibly be mistaken. Acknowledging that the equipment in question was probably not something the doctors could have effortlessly improvised would make your story
more credible according to the facts. But instead you err on the side of refusing to grant skeptics even the smallest quarter. You won't allow them to win even a small victory in principle.
Far from being a seeker of truth, or even a defender of mediums, your approach seems more consistent with a rattler of cages for some reinforcement of ego. If we put this into the context of all the threads you've abandoned and pretend don't exist anymore, the picture emerges of someone trying so very hard to show how his mode of thinking is so much better than skepticism, and failing spectacularly. You can't bring yourself to say, "Okay, you guys may be right about the oxygen tents; that's one detail someone along the way got wrong." It's you who's nit-picking the details, not us.
