Signs Page 5

  Calder told his mom that he and his new buddy Caleb had a plan: They wanted their moms to meet.

  After the reading, Carla reached out to Caleb’s mother, Eliza, and the two did indeed become good friends. They had something in common that not many other people could relate to—both having a young son cross. In fact, Calder and Caleb had crossed within months of each other. Carla and Eliza were able to share their feelings and help each other cope with their grief. In a way, Eliza was one of the very few people who could provide this kind of solace to Carla—and Calder saw this and came through, steering her straight into his mother’s path. And of course, Caleb did the very same thing for his mother, Eliza.

  Think about that! These two boys who crossed got together on the Other Side and led their mothers to each other, as a way to help them heal. What a powerful demonstration of the continuing presence and guidance of our loved ones who cross! And what a powerful testament to the interconnectedness of our paths here on earth.

  In fact, I have seen this happen quite a lot—souls teaming up on the Other Side to engineer important events here on earth. They work together in what I call expanded Teams of Light, and they push us to forge and appreciate our connections to other people who can enrich our lives and help us grow.

  Calder was able to engineer his mother’s connection to Eliza through me, but as I’ve said, you don’t need a psychic medium to receive and act on these signs and messages. Most likely, you are already receiving them, because our Teams of Light are relentless when it comes to getting our attention.

  But as I noted above, the clutter and chaos of our busy lives often overwhelm these signs and messages. We don’t see them, or we see them but they don’t register, or we dismiss them. That’s why it’s so important for us to be on the lookout for them—to be in a heightened state of alertness to the loving connections that are available to us here on earth. We need to be open to the people being steered into our paths, because those people may have been sent to help us heal and grow.

  Later on in this book, we’ll talk about how to achieve that state of heightened awareness. But for now, I hope the interconnected stories of Caleb and Calder impress upon you the awesome power of our workers on the Other Side, and how they deliver life-affirming and life-changing messages to us all.

  7

  HEARTS AND PLAYING CARDS

  NANCY Miller was walking through a tiny fishing village in the remote countryside of Vietnam as part of a tour group when she spotted something unusual on the ground. In the middle of nothing but hills and lakes and dense forests, with no villagers in sight, several playing cards were scattered in a small area on a dirt path. Nancy asked her guide why the cards might be there and whether they had any cultural significance.

  “No, no significance at all,” the guide said. “Don’t know what they’re doing there. Makes no sense to me.”

  And then, for some reason, Nancy thought about her mother, also named Nancy.

  “This thought just popped in my head,” she says now. “I thought, You know, if my mother was a playing card, she would be the Queen of Hearts, because of what a loving person she was.”

  The group kept walking, and Nancy forgot all about the playing cards.

  * * *

  —

  Nancy’s parents were junior high school sweethearts who married in their early twenties. They stayed married for sixty-four years. They had four children—Nancy and her three younger sisters, Linda, Kim, and Meg—and seven grandchildren. They were an exceptionally close family.

  “Family was everything to my mother,” Nancy says. “The most important thing in her life was having all of us around her. She loved to cook for us and decorate for the holidays and go on family vacations. And when she went on vacations without us, all she did was shop for something she could bring back for each one of us. We all had a very deep connection with her.”

  A few years ago, Nancy’s mother’s health began to decline. Wheelchair-bound, she had to be attended to by her husband, Kenny, and by hospital aides, in her home on Long Island. Nancy, who lives in New York City, called every day to check in.

  “The morning my husband and I were supposed to go on vacation to Vietnam, I called and asked my father how she was doing,” Nancy remembers. “He said, ‘Not great, but don’t worry. She’ll be fine.’ So we got on the plane for the twelve-hour flight to Hong Kong.”

  During the flight, in the middle of the night, Nancy got up to use the bathroom. When she locked the door behind her, she began to cry. “I had this horrible pain in my shoulder that woke me up, and all of a sudden I just started weeping,” she said. “I didn’t know why I was so emotional.”

  When they landed in Hong Kong several hours later, she checked her phone and saw a text message from her sister Meg. “Call me” was all it said.

  Meg told her sister that their mother was gone. “She passed right when I got the shoulder pain. My father told me that one of the last things my mother did was call out, ‘Kenny, I love you,’ while he was in another room.”

  With a heavy heart, Nancy continued on her tour of Vietnam. When she got to the fishing village and saw the playing cards in the dirt, she thought about her mother and how much she already missed her.

  The next day, the tour group trudged along a dirt path that led to an ancient Buddhist temple about four hours from the fishing village. And there, along the path, was another scattered pile of playing cards. What a weird coincidence, Nancy thought.

  The next day, the group traveled to a remote town several miles away and walked along a path toward a rice museum. And there, just a few feet to the side of the dirt path, was yet another set of scattered playing cards.

  “This time, I stopped to take a look at them,” Nancy says. “My mother’s favorite saying was, ‘Third time’s a charm.’ And this was the third time I’d seen playing cards on the ground.”

  Nancy took a single step toward the cards and then stopped.

  “One of the cards was off by itself,” she says. “All of the other cards were facedown. This one card was faceup.”

  Nancy bent down to pick it up. It was the Queen of Hearts.

  * * *

  —

  The statistical probability of drawing any one specific playing card from a standard deck is fifty-two to one. In other words, there’s a less than 2 percent chance of naming a card then picking that card out of a deck. If you’re a gambler, those aren’t great odds.

  But still, it’s possible. It could happen. Some might say that Nancy spotting the Queen of Hearts in the countryside of Vietnam was just a random coincidence.

  “To me, it was clearly my mother sending a message,” she says. “And when I saw the card, I said, ‘Okay, Mom, I know you’re okay. Thank you for letting me know.’ ” Nancy took a picture of the card, texted it to her sister Meg, and wrote, “You won’t believe what happened.”

  “And Meg just said, ‘Okay, I’m going to ask Mom to send me a Queen of Hearts, too.’ ”

  Back in New York, Meg stayed alert to any sign of a Queen of Hearts. But a week went by with no sign of the lucky card. Meg had forgotten all about her request when she went to her office early one morning—earlier than she usually arrived. She was sitting at her desk getting ready for the day when she heard someone in another office yell out three words.

  The three words were “Queen of Hearts.”

  Meg jumped up and ran into the office a few doors down. There were two women sitting there, and Meg asked which one had just called out “Queen of Hearts.” The woman behind the desk said that it was her.

  “Why did you say that?” Meg asked.

  “Oh, I was just trying to remember the name of this dress shop for my friend Nancy here, and I couldn’t remember it, and finally it just came to me,” she said. “It was called Queen of Hearts.”

  And the friend’s name was Nancy, to bo
ot!

  After that, other family members wanted to receive their signs from Nancy. The Queen of Hearts became their shared language for connecting with her.

  “My sister Kim was shopping in an antiques store, which is something my mother loved to do with us,” Nancy said. “She was just about to leave the store when she spotted a single playing card on top of a bureau—the Queen of Hearts.”

  Kim immediately texted Nancy: “I got my heart!” Soon after, Kim’s daughter Ali drove to the home of one her work clients and was introduced to a woman with a big, bright tattoo of the Queen of Hearts on her left shoulder.

  “I got my heart!” she texted her aunts. Then Nancy’s aunt Sue went to see a Broadway show. She sat close to the stage, and while she was waiting for the curtain to rise, Sue noticed a playing card sewn into the bottom corner of the curtain. It was the only thing that was sewn in, and it seemed totally random—and it was the Queen of Hearts. “Got my heart!” she told everyone. It happened over and over. On the way to her mother’s memorial celebration, Nancy spotted a powerboat in a backyard along the side of the road. Its name—Queen of Hearts. Then she saw her sign on a greeting card. Then a painting. An ad in a magazine. Always, the Queen of Hearts.

  “I understand some people will say it’s all a coincidence,” Nancy says. “What I would say is, ‘That’s an awful lot of coincidences, isn’t it?’ ”

  * * *

  —

  Two months after her mother crossed, Nancy contacted me and asked me to do a reading for her and her dad and her sister Meg on Meg’s birthday. Originally, I was scheduled to travel to an event that day, but at the last minute the event got rescheduled, and I was able to do the reading. In fact, I felt pulled to do the reading. When I sat down with Meg, Nancy, and their father, I told them how strong and powerful Nancy’s mother was on the Other Side.

  “She is really making things happen there,” I said. “I can’t believe how strong she is.”

  Although Nancy’s mother had only crossed two months earlier, she was already a seasoned professional at delivering signs and messages. Immediately she conveyed to me what she’d been using to connect with her loved ones on earth.

  “I am seeing that she is sending a big heart to all of you,” I said. “Hearts, hearts, hearts.”

  “When I heard that, I just said, ‘Wow,’ ” Nancy remembers. “We already knew we were getting hearts from my mother, so when she confirmed it, it was amazing. Even my father was impressed.”

  Nancy’s father was the skeptic in the bunch. Kenny was an internist and scientifically minded. He wasn’t a believer in the family being able to connect with his wife. Yet the more he heard about his daughters “getting their hearts,” the more intrigued he became. When Nancy asked him if he wanted to tag along for Meg’s reading, she fully expected him to say no—and was happily surprised when he agreed. “Whenever we’d tell him about all the Queen of Hearts, he was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Nancy says. “Slowly, he was starting to come around.”

  What her father needed, Nancy believed, was a sign of his own.

  Kenny’s eighty-sixth birthday fell on St. Patrick’s Day, just a few weeks after his wife had crossed. The entire family gathered to celebrate, with a cake, cards, and gifts. The next morning, Nancy came down to the kitchen and found her father sitting at the table, reading. The kitchen was quiet, except for a faint, musical sound. She tried to figure out where it was coming from, but couldn’t quite place it. It sounded like someone singing “Happy Birthday”—almost like one of those greeting cards with a musical chip inside.

  “Dad, do you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?” he said. Nancy knew her father’s hearing wasn’t the best, so she let the matter drop. A few minutes later, her husband, Stu, came into the kitchen. “What’s that singing?” he asked.

  Kim came in and heard it, too, but no one could figure out where it was coming from—nor could Nancy’s father hear it.

  Finally the group decided to track down the source of the faint, mysterious chorus of “Happy Birthday.” They opened every drawer and every cabinet. They opened the stove and the refrigerator. Eventually, someone opened the cabinet beneath the sink.

  “All of a sudden the singing got louder,” Nancy says. “And my father said, ‘Oh, now I can hear it.’ And just after he said that, the music stopped.”

  Nancy and her sister pulled out the trash can and looked through it to find the greeting card. But it wasn’t in the trash. It wasn’t anywhere else in the cabinet, either. “We went through every envelope in the garbage, every bit of wrapping paper, everything,” Nancy says. “Finally we gave up. We never figured out where the music was coming from.”

  But that doesn’t mean they didn’t know why they heard it.

  “As soon as my father finally heard it, it stopped, and that’s when I knew,” Nancy says. “It was my mother, singing him ‘Happy Birthday.’ She needed him to hear it, and finally he did. It was her special sign to him.”

  The family keeps seeing hearts everywhere. The heart-shaped foam in a cup of coffee. The heart-shaped clapper inside an overhead bell. The heart-shaped etching above the entrance to an old church in Barcelona, where Nancy and her husband recently traveled. The heart-shaped helium balloons each of twelve tourists carried past Nancy’s outdoor café table.

  “At the last minute we decided to stay at this one particular hotel on a trip to Barcelona,” Nancy says. “It was the hotel where my mother and father and I had stayed in 2008. And when we got there, I immediately noticed something in the front window.” There, impossible to miss, was a collection of colorful metal hearts strung around the name of the hotel. “I asked the concierge, ‘What’s the significance of all those hearts?’ And he said, ‘I have no idea, they just arrived yesterday and someone put them up.’ So all these hearts arrived just in time for my visit.”

  For Nancy, all the hearts are part of the beautiful vocabulary her mother uses to remain connected to the family she loves so much. They are their shared secret language.

  “I have no doubt that my mother is always with us,” Nancy says. “Always always there. And when I have a bad day and really miss her and feel like I need her around a little more, I’ll say, ‘Mom, I need you, send me another sign.’ And then I’ll see a heart somewhere. I still miss her every single day. But knowing she’s still with us is a great source of comfort.”

  Even her father is now fully on board, and keeps looking for—and acknowledging—signs from the woman he spent his life with.

  “My mother’s great gift to him was letting him know that dying isn’t the end,” Nancy says. “He’s a believer now. He understands that there is something really, really beautiful waiting for us on the Other Side.”

  8

  HUMMINGBIRDS AND LIGHT

  WHO doesn’t love seeing hummingbirds?

  To me, they are truly amazing creatures, even if I don’t get to see them very often. Hardly ever, now that I think about it. But when I do spot one, I just marvel at it. I wonder how something so tiny can bring so much happiness and joy. The average hummingbird doesn’t even weigh an ounce—in fact, it weighs less than one-tenth of an ounce.

  But in that tiny package comes a big burst of magic.

  Did you know that hummingbirds have been around for forty-two million years? And that a hummingbird’s heart beats more than twelve hundred times per minute? That’s roughly twenty heartbeats a second! A hummingbird’s tiny wings can flap as fast as ninety times per second! All that flapping makes the hummingbird the only bird that can hover in the same spot for a long stretch of time. That’s why, when we do spot a hummingbird, we often get a pretty good look at it—because hummingbirds love to stop and say hello and hang out for a while.

  Maybe that’s why hummingbirds play such a prominent symbolic role in so many cultures. Native Americans, for example, see hummingbirds
as healers and helpers who bring luck and love to those they visit. The ancient Aztecs believed hummingbirds were commissioned by the gods to carry out tasks that required exceptional lightness, such as delivering blessings from one person to another. “Hummingbirds lead from here to there the thoughts of men,” one Aztec saying goes. “If someone intends good to you, the hummingbird takes that desire all the way to you.”

  In my experience, hummingbirds have played all of those roles—helper, healer, messenger, bringer of love—except with a twist: These special creatures are frequently messengers from the Other Side.

  * * *

  —

  Priya Khokhar was one of four daughters of the man she lovingly called Abba—the Urdu word for “father.” Her father, Shahid, had a profound influence on all of his children. “He was just this force to be reckoned with,” Priya says of Shahid, who worked as a landscape designer. “A very strong personality, always in charge. He was also extremely creative and supportive. Many fathers in Pakistan want their daughters to be married by twenty-one or twenty-two, but my father never treated us as inferior or unequal. He raised us to think with an open mind and to be our own people. He never said, ‘You can’t do this.’ It was always, “ ‘You can do this and more.’ ”

  After college, Priya moved to the United States to work in the tech industry. Her sister Natasha lived nearby on the West Coast, and the two spoke just about every day. One day, Priya got an unexpected visit from Natasha and her husband, John.

  “John looked at me and said, ‘Abba was shot,’ ” Priya recalls. “I had trouble comprehending what that meant.”

  “Is he okay?” Priya asked.

  “No,” John said, “he’s not.”

  Shahid had been shot and killed outside his home in Pakistan, in front of his wife.

  “Pakistan is a very violent country,” Priya explains. “Lots of crime, family feuds, politics, bad blood. Our family had experienced our share of litigation and drama over the years, so my father always carried a gun. But that morning, for the first time in forty years, he walked out of his house without a gun. A man dressed in black just came up to him and shot him.”