Signs Read online

  Our relationship with them is uncomplicated. They are simply there to help us, and that’s it. They ask nothing in return. They have no other mission. They are a part of the vast, loving energy of the universe, and they have been specifically assigned to us. They are connected with the purest, highest form of the love and energy that constitute the universe, which encompasses both this side and the Other Side. They are tasked with, and devoted to, making sure everything that happens in our lives is geared toward our soul’s development.

  As I noted earlier, spirit guides together with God energy and our loved ones who have crossed make up our Team of Light on the Other Side.

  If the concept of spirit guides sounds a little strange to you, you should know that it’s not a new concept—it’s been around since the dawn of humanity. Different cultures have different names for them, but they have always been a part of the tapestry of human existence.

  In Christianity, they are called angels, or guardian angels, and they play a prominent role in the Bible.

  In Hinduism, they are called devas or devis, and they are considered heavenly beings that cannot be seen by the human eye, but can be detected by those who have opened their “divine eye” and been awakened.

  In Islam, a belief in angels who are made out of light and function as Allah’s messengers is one of the six pillars of the faith.

  The ancient Greeks, too, believed in angels. In fact, the word angel comes from the Greek word ἄγγελος, or angelos, which means “messenger.”

  Can we know who our spirit guides are? Yes. One of my spirit guides came through to me in a flash vision while I was taking a shower, and I was able to hear her name and feel a connection to her. But that doesn’t always happen. I think we need to be in a highly receptive and open state of consciousness—much more than we normally are in our busy, chaotic lives—in order for that kind of interaction to happen.

  But we don’t need to know who our spirit guides are, because they know who we are. Ultimately, it will always require a measure of trust for us to fully and entirely accept and appreciate our spirit guides—even if, like me, you know her name. What’s important is that you know you can call on them at any time to help you (yes, even to find a parking spot!).

  I have been open to the Other Side for so much of my life, and I have seen the impact spirit guides have had on the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people. My experience has helped me appreciate the intense devotion and power of our Teams of Light on the Other Side.

  We are connected to God energy. We are connected to the angelic realm and to our spirit guides on the Other Side. And we are connected to our loved ones who have crossed. Together, these forces of love make up our Teams of Light.

  And our Teams of Light send us signs and messages all the time.

  * * *

  —

  People will come up to me at events and share their stories of connection, because they know I am a “safe place”—I won’t scoff or laugh; I will honor their stories. In fact, this doesn’t only happen when I am at an event—one of my doctors recently confided something to me in the middle of an exam.

  Dr. G had been my doctor for years—he even delivered one of my daughters—but he never knew I was a psychic medium. When he heard I was writing a book, he asked me what it was about, and that’s how he learned what I do. He paused, got a bit pensive, then almost reluctantly shared the story of something “strange” that happened to him.

  He told me that a number of years earlier, he’d been out fishing on a boat in Florida when, all of a sudden, he felt an overwhelming rush of energy pass through his body. A torrent of electricity that swished right through him. When it happened, he immediately felt his father’s energy and presence. He felt a deep sense of love for his father rushing through him, right there in the middle of the water. None of it made sense to him.

  His first thought was, Am I crazy or was that my father coming to say goodbye to me? His father had been ill, but no one felt his passing was imminent. Then he looked at his watch and noted the time. He tried to call his mother, but he couldn’t get a signal out on the water. About an hour and a half later, he reached the shore and called his mother again.

  Before he could say anything, she gently told him that his father had just passed.

  He asked her what time, exactly, it had happened. He learned that it was the very moment he felt the swoosh of electricity on the boat.

  “I never told anyone that story,” he said. “Not a soul. I didn’t think anyone would believe it really happened, and I struggled to accept it myself. But it was so powerful that it happened at the exact time my father passed. I think it was my father saying goodbye.”

  “Believe it,” I told him. “It was real. What a beautiful goodbye your father gave you.”

  I encouraged him to share the story with others, starting with his mother. It was a gift that was meant to be shared.

  Sometimes when we get signs from the Other Side, we dismiss them or let our logical minds talk us out of them. We don’t mention them to anyone because we’re afraid they’ll think we’re crazy.

  But deep down, we recognize that they are real. These are stories to share and honor and celebrate. Once you accept these stories as your truth, your life transforms.

  4

  I CARRY YOUR HEART

  JUST before a little boy named Caleb turned six, he asked his mother a strange question.

  “Mommy,” he said, “how much life do I have left?”

  His mother, Eliza, took a deep breath. She knew her son had a kind of obsession with turning six. She knew he didn’t want to turn six. Something about it frightened him—he’d spoken about it before. Eliza pulled up the right sleeve of her blouse and stuck out the length of her arm.

  “This is your life,” she told Caleb, pointing to her whole arm. Then she pointed to a spot near her shoulder. “And this is where you are right now,” she said. “Your life is just beginning.”

  Caleb asked her what happened to people when they died.

  Eliza told him that people had different beliefs about this. She chose to believe that the people who pass away come back in a different form.

  “How would you like to come back?” she asked Caleb. “Would you come back as Salami?” Salami was the family cat.

  Caleb thought about it for a moment.

  “I wouldn’t want to come back as a cat,” he finally said, “because then I’d have to lick my own bum.”

  Eliza and Caleb made a deal: When she came back, she would return as his mother, and when he came back, he’d come back as her son.

  “We shook hands on it,” Eliza says. “It was like a contract.”

  * * *

  —

  “Caleb, oh, well, he’s just a really special kid,” Eliza says when describing her son. “Early on he stuck really close to us, he was very shy and a little anxious, and he was either on his father’s shoulder or in my arms all the time, cuddling, very affectionate, very physical, very sweet and loving. Around other people he could be quiet and reserved, but around us he talked a mile a minute. He was so full of ideas. He was bursting with ideas. And he could tell stories, made-up stories, really elaborate, and he built little worlds with his blocks, with any building material, and he’d build these big fire stations and movie theaters with seats and moving parts, and he always had an explanation for everything he built—for why the helicopter had to come down in case the bridge might break, and so this is where the helicopter lands, and all of that. He just loved telling stories and building things. A really amazing boy.”

  When he was five years old, Caleb was just learning how to write. But he had a big story he wanted to tell, so his parents bought a little notebook with a canvas cover, and they sat with him as he dictated the entire story to them. It was called Llama and the Dominina, and it unfolded over many days and nights. It was about the
family cat, Salami, and Caleb’s rubber bathroom animals going on a camping trip together. Eliza and Tim recorded the story just as Caleb told it. Every word was his.

  By the end, they had filled all ninety pages of the notebook.

  When Caleb was six and a half, his parents took him to the dentist. He had an extra tooth among his adult teeth, and it had to be removed. When the dentist told them he would need to drill through the bone in Caleb’s palate to remove the tooth, Tim and Eliza chose to sedate him for the surgery. The dentist put Caleb under general anesthesia—but something went wrong.

  All of a sudden Caleb’s heart stopped beating.

  “The dentist finally realized what was happening, but then he failed at all the basic lifesaving techniques—CPR, intubation,” says Eliza. “They resuscitated Caleb, but he experienced organ failure.”

  Caleb spent the next two days in the hospital. His heart repeatedly gave out, and doctors repeatedly revived him. Other organs were failing, too, including his lungs. “He failed every neurological test,” Eliza says. “By the morning of the third day, the doctors were saying we had to let him go.”

  That’s when Eliza called me. We had a mutual friend who urged her to talk to me. Finally she called me from the hospital. As soon as I got on the phone with her, I saw Caleb, and I saw where he was.

  “He is already on the Other Side,” I said. “I am trying to walk him back into his body, but I’m being stopped. Is his body on ice?”

  In fact, the doctors had surrounded Caleb with ice, to try to lower his temperature. During the call, I tried to coax Caleb to come back, but nothing was working.

  “What can I do for you, Caleb?” I asked him. “What do you need me to do?”

  For a moment, I thought Caleb might come back. In his hospital room, Eliza noticed that Caleb’s pupils, which had begun to appear uneven, had suddenly evened out. It was a moment of hope—a tiny indication that Caleb might be trying to come back. But it didn’t last. Caleb slipped away.

  “It became very clear that Caleb wasn’t going to make it,” Eliza says. “Not much later, we lost him.”

  * * *

  —

  The loss was devastating. The only thing that allowed Eliza to keep going was the need to take care of her daughter and her family. I told Eliza she could call me whenever she wanted, but I didn’t hear from her for a while. I hoped she might reach out when she was ready. “I was stuck in black mud,” Eliza later told me. “I felt like I wanted to die. All I could think about was Caleb’s world going black. Was he trapped somewhere? Did it all just end? Where is he? I went through weeks of this intense, desperate sadness and depression. I was searching for Caleb in all this blackness, and I just couldn’t find him.”

  What Eliza didn’t realize was that Caleb was searching for her, too.

  He was coming through. He was trying to send his mother a message. I had our mutual friend forward Eliza a text from me. I wrote, “Caleb is not gone. Souls go on. They continue to grow on the Other Side. Caleb crossed surrounded by love, and he was not alone, and he is okay and he loves you and he’s trying to send you messages.”

  When Eliza read my text, she stopped cold.

  “It was like, in the midst of all that blackness, a light suddenly came on,” Eliza says.

  We spoke soon after. Eliza explained that she already suspected that Caleb was sending her messages, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe they were real. For instance, Caleb had always been very interested in specific numerical sequences, particularly 1111—four ones in a row. Whenever he came upon a clock that read 11:11, he made his parents take a picture of it. Two weeks after Caleb passed, Eliza met a friend in the park. After talking for a while, the friend left to buy lunch. She texted Eliza a photo of her lunch receipt: $11.11. The next day, that same friend went to a new restaurant. She sent Eliza another photo, this time of the restaurant’s address number—1111.

  “Everything was coming up 1111,” Eliza says. “And then I was having these very vivid dreams of Caleb riding on Tim’s shoulders—so, so vivid. It felt like Caleb was really happy, like that’s what he was trying to tell me. But I didn’t know what to believe.”

  Our reading was powerful. Caleb came through so forcefully. All of the energy and passion that had marked his life on earth was still there, only amplified. He was brimming with love and excitement.

  “He wants me to explain to you what it feels like on the Other Side,” I told Eliza. “He says it feels like the most love you can ever possibly feel, multiplied by eight billion percent.”

  There was so much more—a steady stream of impressions and ideas.

  “Mommy, Daddy, it is amazing here,” Caleb said. “It’s like outer space, but better. I can be everywhere at once. I can be both dark and light. You wouldn’t believe how incredible it is.

  “I am home now,” Caleb told his mother. “And it’s your home, too, you just don’t remember it.”

  Caleb’s message was very specific. He wanted his parents to know that their job had been to give him unconditional love, and that they’d done their job beautifully and completely. He said his time on earth was supposed to be brief, and that he was never meant to suffer, which he didn’t. He kept saying how dying was like falling asleep and waking up in the best dream ever. Most of all, he wanted his parents to know that he was okay—and that they would be okay, too, because they hadn’t lost him after all. He was still with them, and he always would be.

  “After the reading, some of the grief and the terror went away, because I truly believed Caleb was in this beautiful place,” Eliza says. “The loss was still devastating beyond words, but I now understood that we were all part of this profound karmic thing that happened—this plan for us and for Caleb. The realization that we are all connected, and that because we are, we can never really die. What happened was supposed to happen, and it happened with no pain or suffering, and that made it possible for me to let go of the anger.”

  Yet Eliza was, by her own admission, “still hesitant.” Still not ready to fully trust in her lasting connection with Caleb. And Caleb knew this. He knew he needed to do more.

  So Caleb decided to send more signs.

  * * *

  —

  They came through in my reading with Eliza. Specific signs designed to convince his parents that he was still here. At his memorial service, Caleb’s parents released six hundred balloons. Eliza never mentioned this detail, but during the reading Caleb had me tell Eliza that he got all the balloons—and that he was going to send them back to her as signs.

  “He says he even got the red balloon,” I told Eliza. “Was there a red balloon?”

  Eliza didn’t understand. The balloons were all different colors, so why would Caleb mention just a red one? And then it hit her—the memory of a younger Caleb getting a red balloon from a salesman at a car dealership, and letting it slip out of his hand, and crying as he watched it float away, and weeping for hours because he’d lost it.

  “I have it back now,” Caleb said.

  In the days and weeks after the reading, Caleb sent back his balloons. Eliza and Tim were sitting on their backyard deck one evening, thinking of Caleb and crying together, when a balloon slowly floated past.

  “It’s Caleb,” Tim said.

  A few days later, on a weekend drive, Tim and Eliza took a detour on a street they’d never driven on before. When they turned a corner, they saw an enormous mural painted on the side of a building—a mural depicting giant, colorful balloons. The next week, another balloon floated into their yard, hovered for a long while, then slowly floated away.

  “No matter where we go, we see bunches of balloons or single balloons floating right by us,” Eliza says. “They are everywhere.”

  I also told Eliza that Caleb was sending her a poem.

  I couldn’t make out what poem it was, but it was clear that it wa
s a poem. Eliza said that in the weeks after Caleb passed, they’d received many gifts from friends and family, but a book of poems, or even a single poem, wasn’t among them. A few days after the reading, Caleb came through to me again and asked me to send his mother a bracelet for Mother’s Day, which was coming up. He wanted a line from a certain poem inscribed on the bracelet.

  The line was, “I carry your heart with me.”

  I got the bracelet and mailed it to Eliza, with a card explaining what had happened. “You may have already received this poem from Caleb,” I wrote. “He said he already sent it to you.” Eliza thought long and hard, but still couldn’t figure out how Caleb had sent the poem.

  Then it dawned on her.

  Eliza ran to a bookshelf in the hallway of her house. She scanned the shelves and then pulled out a book. It had been a gift from a friend in the days after Caleb crossed. The book was an illustrated children’s book featuring a well-known poem by E. E. Cummings, called “I Carry Your Heart with Me.”

  i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

  i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done

  by only me is your doing,my darling)

  i fear

  no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

  no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

  and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

  and whatever a sun will always sing is you

  here is the deepest secret nobody knows

  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

  and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

  higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

  and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

  i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)