Becoming Psychic After a Partner Has Passed

Can a partner's passing make someone psychic, or would the tendency have been there all along but just been awakened?  I ask this because it seems to have happened to my Dad after my Mum passed in 2006.  Dad would ridicule Mum and I if we had known anything was going to happen or had seen anything, but he doesn't since Mum passed. In my parents house we had always periodically heard heavy footsteps walking across the living room ceiling, but he said he'd always assumed they were coming from next door neighbours, in spite of there being stairs and a landing before the bedroom floor began, so you'd have to start walking from the stairwell, then through the bannisters before you got into the bedroom.  Shortly after Mum passed in March 2006 things started moving in the house, clothes disappeared from the bedroom and turned up draped over the radiator in another room, keys would vanish and turn up under cushions on one of the chairs for instance.  Then Dad started seeing Mum, sometimes he'd turn round and she'd be sat in an armchair, one time she said "Let's have a cup of tea."  Sometimes he'd see her lying on the bed and when she got up her imprint was still on the duvet.  A few times he saw Mum with a lady with long black hair and a long black dress, (I'd seen Mum with her as well, and she told me it was my 2 x great grandmother who I'd never met.  A telephone reading later confirmed this.)  Mum stepped over his outstretched legs and he felt the hem of her skirt brush against them.  He also saw Mum reflected in the door of a glass cabinet, it was is if she was standing behind him looking over his shoulder, but when he turned round there was no-one there.  He has since seen his elder sister once and twice seen a man in a dark coat (I don't know if it's the same man I saw as a teenager, I ran upstairs and had to grab the bannister to stop myself falling as I took action to avoid crashing into him as he came down).  He can't understand why he's started doing this as he never did before.  "It's not in our family" he said.  (He did have a couple of aunts who were Spiritualists, so it could be, but then everyone is psychic to some degree, aren't they?)  Would Mum's passing have woken it up perhaps, or would it have happened eventually anyway?  He would have been 77 when Mum went, but I suppose it's never too late.