The sisters were in shock. It didn’t seem possible.
“All I wanted to do was fly back to Pakistan so I could see him before the burial,” Priya says. “But in the Muslim faith, burials happen quickly, so that wasn’t possible. I went home anyway and stayed there for two months. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t really process it. But when I came back to the U.S., I had a breakdown—I took off from work and didn’t get out of bed for a month.”
On Shahid’s birthday, Priya and her family would get together and toast his memory with a shot of Johnnie Walker Black, one ice cube—their father’s favorite drink. “We would also go to Costco to buy flowers—which he loved—and eat one of those one-dollar Costco hot dogs, which he also loved,” Priya said. “That was our ritual, and that was how we kept him alive—by remembering and telling stories and laughing.”
Still, her father’s absence weighed heavily on her, especially after she started dating a co-worker, Dave, and the two eventually decided to get married. “I just had all these moments when I would think, What would Abba say about this?” Priya says. “What I wanted was my father’s reassurance, just the way he had always given it to me.”
* * *
—
I have a connection to Priya—her sister Natasha is married to my brother John. When Priya’s mother came to visit, I offered to give her a reading. The morning of the reading, something startled me awake at five A.M. Something strong. It was Shahid, who could not wait to be connected with his family. “Your husband has a really powerful personality,” I told Priya’s mother during our reading a bit later in the day. “He’s been harassing me all morning.”
In the reading, Shahid was very clear about what he wanted to convey to his family. He wanted them to know that when he crossed he felt no pain, that it was over very quickly, and that, in fact, he had been feeling tired, and—though he was dearly sorry to leave his family—he was in a good place and surrounded by people who loved him. He was happy. Shahid’s niece had died young, and Shahid was now reunited with her on the Other Side.
Hearing this was a great comfort to his wife. Priya herself, though, was more of a skeptic. “I guess I’m not such a spiritual person,” she says. “I didn’t have the belief that we could connect with the Other Side.”
Priya never asked me for a reading, and I never gave her one, but the family was gracious enough to invite me to her wedding. It was held in the sunken rose garden of a beautiful old mansion in Fremont, California, on the day of an astonishing blood-red moon.
Just before the ceremony began, Priya’s mother approached me. She was very happy for Priya, she told me, but she also felt a heaviness because Priya’s father wasn’t there.
“I miss him so much,” she said. “It’s just so sad.”
Then she lowered her voice and asked me, “Is he here?”
And boom—his energy pushed through forcefully on my screen.
I told her that Shahid was definitely present. Not only that, he was telling me he was going to make his presence known during the ceremony. “He is not letting me know how,” I said, “but he is so excited because he says he will be putting on a show. But he wants it to be a surprise.”
Priya’s mother’s face filled with excitement. To be honest, I was excited to see what Shahid had planned for us, too. Some of the guests overheard my conversation with Priya’s mother, and soon the word was out—Shahid had a wedding surprise in store. We were breathless, waiting for the show to begin.
The ceremony itself took place under a cloudy sky. An imam presided over the service. In his speech, he talked about the Islamic view of the afterlife, and compared it to a cone. If you had made many connections and brought light to many lives, in the afterlife you would be at the top of the cone, where the most light reaches. He spoke of the intense connection between Priya and Dave. He said that they were beams of light that had connected before this life, connected again in this life, and would be together in the afterlife.
Listening to the imam speak, I was struck by how closely his words resonated with the lessons I’ve learned from the Other Side—what I call the light between us, the brilliant cords of light that connect us. The belief that we are light bodies, traveling through time and space, spanning worlds, eternally connected to one another and to a vast, higher energy force.
As the imam spoke, Priya and Dave stood facing each other, hands clasped together. All of a sudden the clouds shifted in the sky and the sun’s rays burst through. “I felt it before I saw it—I felt the heat on my skin,” Dave recalled. “I looked up and I saw a single beam of light shining directly on Priya. She was shimmering, while everything else around her was dark.”
It was true—the sunbeam landed on Priya and no one else. Photos taken during this part of the ceremony confirm it—everything was dark and shadowed, except for Priya, who was resplendent. “I felt the sun shift, and then I realized it was shining right on me,” Priya says. “I didn’t attach any significance to it right away. But that was only the first amazing thing that happened.”
Just a few moments later, while Priya and Dave were still facing each other, some of the guests began to gasp. At first, I couldn’t tell what was happening, but soon I saw it, too.
In the space above where Priya and Dave were standing, maybe just six inches above their heads, a beautiful hummingbird danced and flitted and finally stopped and hovered, floating in the warm air for what seemed like forever.
The hummingbird’s arrival at the ceremony, at the precise moment that Priya and Dave were to be married, and the way it lingered there, watching, waiting, blessing the couple—how could that not be a sign?
“I started bawling,” Priya recalls. “In that moment, it really hit me—my father is here. I could feel him. He is here with me now. And for that hummingbird to show up right when it did? You could call it a coincidence. But to me, it wasn’t a coincidence. It was my father, telling me, ‘I love you. I am here.’ ”
* * *
—
Since that remarkable day, Priya and Dave—but especially Dave—have seen hummingbirds everywhere. “Not two days go by without me seeing one,” says Dave. “The day after the wedding, I noticed a hummingbird fly right up to me, look at me for two or three seconds, then dart away. I can’t remember that ever happening before.”
In this way, hummingbirds became a sign from Shahid to his daughter and her husband. It is his way of letting them know he is watching over them. “I see them all the time,” Dave says. “On trees, bushes, benches, in the walkway behind my apartment, everywhere. They’ve become a mainstay of my life. People are sick of my stories about them.”
“It became this running joke between us,” Priya says. “When we saw hummingbirds, we knew it was my father checking out Dave to make sure he approved of him.” And Dave isn’t the only one who sees them. One day, Dave was walking arm in arm with Priya’s mother when a hummingbird shot right in front of them and hovered for several moments.
“That’s him,” Priya’s mother said. “That’s Shahid showing us he’s with us.”
When Dave and Priya were looking for a new home, they went to see a house for sale near Natasha and John. The neighborhood was desirable, but Priya and Dave didn’t love the house. Then Dave walked out on the balcony, and a hummingbird flew right in front of his face and hovered there for five seconds.
Count out five seconds. It’s a longer time than you’d think. Dave ran inside and told Priya, “This is a sign. We need to buy this house.”
They had to switch real estate agents, juggle finances, and basically jump through hoops, but in the end they bought the house, and they are very happy they did.
“We are so close to my sister and her family,” Priya says. “My father would have wanted us to be together. Family was the most important thing to him. He always said, ‘A family sticks together.’ And so he made sure we got that house.”
/>
* * *
—
Not long ago, Priya and Dave attended Burning Man, the annual weeklong gathering in a section of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. They were sitting at their campsite with ten or so friends when the subject of their wedding came up. “We told them about the hummingbird, and how we see hummingbirds everywhere, and someone said how great it would be to see a hummingbird that day.
“But we were in the middle of the desert,” Dave says. “There were no trees or bushes. Basically there was no chance we’d see a hummingbird.”
The group got on their bikes and rode the short distance to a nearby encampment, the Skinny Kitty Teahouse. “I went up to the counter and asked for some tea, and then I looked up and let out a giant squeal.”
The rest of the group came over to see what Priya was squealing about.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Dave. “The camp had all this taxidermy stuff all over, and right there at the counter was a little stuffed hummingbird. Everyone was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ And it was crazy. I mean, we found a hummingbird in the middle of a desert.”
Dave understands some people won’t be quite as impressed by all those hummingbird appearances as he is. “I’m used to people sometimes rolling their eyes when I tell them my stories,” he says. But he doesn’t mind the skepticism. “I can’t argue with people who say it’s a coincidence. All I know is that to me, the hummingbirds mean so much.”
“When people tell me they don’t believe in that stuff,” he says, “I always think, Okay, but if you’re not at least a little open to it, you could be missing out on something really amazing.”
For Priya, those tiny, fluttering creatures have become a significant part of life. “You may say it’s a coincidence, but it’s not a coincidence to me,” she says. “It’s my father letting me know he is with me and watching over me. And that gives me so much comfort.
“What I would say to people who aren’t so sure is to stay open to the possibility. Stay open to your loved ones. There is much more at work in the universe than we know.”
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
—MITCH ALBOM, Tuesdays with Morrie
9
GIRAFFES, EIFFEL TOWERS, AND A SONG ABOUT CATS
WHEN Alexander was a boy, he had a strange curiosity about what happens after we die. “It was an odd thing for an eight-year-old kid to be doing while playing basketball—thinking about where we go when we die,” he says. “Yet that’s what I did. I thought about it a lot. I grew up afraid of death, afraid of losing my parents, and afraid of not being able to play basketball with my dad anymore.”
Over the years, this curious obsession stayed with him. He read books about the afterlife and near-death experiences. He never really understood why he was so intensely interested in death and dying, but then, in 2013, it suddenly became clear.
“If you look at the arc of my life, it was like the universe was preparing me from an early age for what happened in 2013,” Alexander says. “It was the darkest year of my life.”
Alexander grew up with the most loving, supportive parents anyone could wish for. “My mother was my heart,” he says. “She was the most extraordinary, selfless person, and she had an incredible zest for life and passion for learning.” His father, a very successful businessman, was his mentor and his best friend. “I spoke to him pretty much every day,” Alexander says. “He was an enormous part of my life.”
Alexander went to college and on to law school, but even then he knew he wanted to follow his father into the world of business. So Alexander, too, became a successful businessman, inspired by his parents at every step. When he got married in early 2013, his mother and father were there to walk him down the aisle.
A few months later, Alexander called his mother to say good night. “We made plans to see each other the next day,” he says. “I remember she didn’t sound right, but I didn’t think it was anything too serious. The next day she had a massive stroke and fell into a coma.”
His mother came out of the coma for only a few hours ten days into her hospital stay and then reverted to a minimally conscious state. Five months later, she passed away.
In the months that followed, Alexander and his wife tried to conceive, but were unsuccessful. After a few months, the couple began fertility treatments. On the day they were supposed to drive to the airport to fly to the beach to spend the weekend with Alexander’s father, they had to cancel because of the IVF schedule. “I called him and told him I was sorry we couldn’t make it, but we were going to try to bring him a grandchild,” Alexander says.
That night, the phone rang at ten-thirty. It was his father’s assistant calling to tell him that his father had been on a plane, and the plane had crashed. His father was gone.
“My wife and I would have been on that plane,” he says. “And now my father was dead.”
The news brought him to his knees. “It was devastating,” he says. “It destroyed me. It destroyed every fiber of my being. Nothing made sense, and I cried myself to sleep every night. It was an incredible amount of pain.”
A close friend connected him to me, hoping a reading would bring him some comfort. The friend withheld all information about Alexander, and in fact only gave me the wrong initial of his first name—a test I had to pass to overcome Alexander’s skepticism, I suppose.
My reading with Alexander was extraordinary. His loved ones on the Other Side must have known that he would need a lot of affirmation to be convinced that he was connecting with his parents.
His father came through first. He told me how he had crossed to the Other Side and gave me the first names of the other people who had perished on the plane along with him. His father let me know that he had not one funeral, but two. He even gave me the name of one of the political dignitaries who spoke at the funeral.
Still, Alexander needed just a little more affirmation.
Over the next few months we spoke and texted on and off, and in one of our talks, Alexander asked for a very specific sign from his dad.
“We had a song,” Alexander says. “It was our song. Maybe five people in the world knew that we shared this song—my wife, my sister, two people who crossed, and me. Not even my best friend knew it. So I asked my father to send Laura the lyrics to that song—it would be a sign that he was with me.”
Alexander asked me to contact him again when I had received the lyrics to their song.
Weeks passed, then months, and nothing happened. No song came to me. Alexander’s father came through several times, including in readings I was doing with other sitters that I had no idea he’d known—until he showed up in their readings, that is. He always burst right through, as if he had VIP status. My spirit guides—or, I guess, my spirit “bouncers”—clearly couldn’t keep him outside the ropes. He’d also come to me at random times on random days. He was such a forceful, beautiful presence, it was like he became a part of my life. I’d tell Alexander when his father had visited me, and he loved hearing about these welcome intrusions, but still, no song.
One evening, after a rough day, Alexander and his wife went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I happened to text him while they were at dinner, because I’d gotten a message of encouragement from his dad that he wanted me to pass on to his son. Alexander read the text and smiled and then handed the phone to his wife.
She read the text and began to cry. “Did you see this?” she said.
“See what?”
When Alexander first read the text, he’d only read the opening lines—it was in fact a long text. The part he could see ended with an arrow, which opened up the rest of the text on his phone. So he only read the top portion of the text and missed the arrow. But his wife had read the whole thing. The text contained the lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin—the song Alexander and his father shared!
I’d felt
Alexander’s dad around just as I was falling asleep that night, and I got the song lyrics in my head. I googled the lyrics and copied them into a text to Alexander.
Ever since, the song has become a sign for Alexander of his father’s presence. One day, Alexander had an important business meeting—he was connecting with three people he’d never met before at a coffee shop. On the way there, he was anxious. As he slid into the booth, he had the thought that he wished he could have talked to his father before the meeting.
At that very moment “Cat’s in the Cradle” came on over the coffee shop speakers. It arrived just when he needed to hear it. Alexander lowered his head as tears filled his eyes. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and cried.
“It was just such a beautiful moment of connection with my father,” he says. “It was my father letting me know that I was doing the right thing, doing a great job, and that he was there, watching over me.”
Alexander’s projection of his need for his father’s support, and his dad’s instant response—playing that exact song at that exact time—is precisely how the secret language of the universe works.
* * *
—
After his mother’s crossing, Alexander also created an unusually specific sign for her to use.
“My mother’s favorite animal was a giraffe,” Alexander says. “She loved giraffes, and we’d always joke about giraffes. And her favorite city in the world was Paris—she spoke fluent French.” So what was the sign he asked for? A giraffe and an Eiffel Tower together. Not separately, but together, at the same time.
Signs Page 6