Our teams on the Other Side are ready and eager for us to acknowledge this connection. Yes, they send us signs, and they’re very good at it, but they still need us to engage with them to expand the possibilities of communication by creating new symbols of meaning—and strengthening the cords of light between us.
This next section is filled with stories and insights that will help you co-create your own unique and special language with the Other Side. When you do, two amazing things will happen: (1) You will find it much easier to receive the signs that can so significantly affect and elevate your life, and (2) you will bring tremendous joy not only into your own life, but also to your Team of Light on the Other Side.
11
BRINGING IT HOME
SIGNS can transform us. Signs can take us from one state of being to another. They can take us from despair to hope, from lost to secure, from stuck to soaring. Think about what an awesome power this is! How many things in this world can be so utterly and positively transforming in such a short time? And all without a prescription!
But that’s what signs do—they shine a light on the darkness and give us a new and more empowering way of seeing the world around us.
Signs give us meaning in moments when there seems to be no meaning to be found.
One of the most beautiful ways that signs can transform us has to do with the grief we feel when we lose someone we love. It’s very easy for us to get stuck in our grief—to feel overwhelmingly sad and empty and lonely. But our loved ones on the Other Side do not want us to feel that way, so they send us signs that can transform our grief into something quite profound—the feeling that we continue to be, and will always be, connected to those we love, even after they cross to the Other Side.
That’s not all. I have seen how individuals who had a hard time communicating with their loved ones here on earth become much better communicators after they cross. Which means that our relationships not only continue, but can also improve. Think of that! We can find new levels of closeness and contentment with our loved ones after they have crossed. We may even feel their love more purely than we did when they were here.
We can forgive old hurts and heal old wounds.
This is the extraordinary power of signs—and why I say that they have the potential to transform us.
I know this is true, because I experienced it myself not long ago.
* * *
—
A parent’s passing is a profound loss, and it is one I experienced in 2016, when my father crossed. The question was, would being a psychic medium, and knowing all I’ve learned about the Other Side, help me in my own process of grief? I was about to be tested—everything I’d learned was about to be brought home.
My relationship with my father, John, was difficult. I loved him profusely and unconditionally, but he had a lot of issues. He drank too much, and he could become angry and isolated. When I was growing up, he would spend many weekend nights in the basement, playing his guitar. Of his three children, I was the one who’d creep downstairs to see him, drawn to the sounds of his electric guitar. My father loved to put music on and record himself playing and singing along to his favorite songs. That became something we did together. It became our thing. We sang and laughed and sang some more, until my mother would have to come down and fetch me for bed.
As the years went on, my dad drank more and grew more distant. After I moved out and went to college, I’d still call him often and visit when I could. But over time, the calls slowed down. Life got so busy. Days, then weeks, went by without us speaking.
Then one day, out of the blue, I got a very strong download from the Other Side: Call your father. That was it, just call him. And in the chaos of every day, I’d be on the go, doing chores and running errands, and forget to call him. I had a sense that there was a reason why the Other Side kept telling me to call my dad, but I pushed the feeling away.
Around that time, one of my father’s golfing buddies called my mother.
“There’s something wrong with John,” he told her. “He doesn’t look good.”
My mother drove to my father’s apartment (my parents were divorced, but remained friends). His friend was right—he looked awful. My mother took him to the doctor, who sent him straight to the hospital. But the doctors there were unable to determine what was wrong with him. They kept him overnight for observation, and I went to visit him the next day.
Walking into his hospital room, I could instantly tell that my father’s life energy was off. It was diminishing. He wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital. His soul was getting ready to cross. I stayed with my father for many hours, and even though his body was weak, his mind was still sharp. His topics of choice while lying in the hospital bed? French literature and the meaning of life.
As the hours passed, he became less and less coherent.
The doctors ran tests, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. At this point, my father was no longer conscious or communicating. Even so, one nurse told us she was certain my father would rebound and be released, but that seemed totally wrong to me. My overriding thought, my knowing, was, He’s not getting out of this hospital. He is getting ready to cross. Still, I hoped the nurse was right.
The very day after the nurse made her prediction, my father took a turn for the worse. His vital signs plunged. He was rushed to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator. I was at home when this happened, taking a shower. As I was getting out of the shower, as often happens, the screen in my mind went on and my father’s best friend appeared. I called him Uncle Nick and he had crossed a few years earlier. It was great to see him, and to see that he was positively gleeful. He said he was so happy and excited that he’d get to see my father again. Another of my dad’s close friends, Uncle Lee, appeared on my screen, too, and he was just as joyful.
My father’s old friends wanted me to know that they would be there to receive him as he crossed.
Just as they started to fade away, I wondered if they could tell me when my dad would be crossing, so I could prepare my family for that time. I asked them, Wait! Can you tell me when my dad will cross? A very specific answer came back: This Thursday. And then they disappeared. Thursday was four days away.
That same day, I had to appear at an event at a large theater on Long Island that had been scheduled months earlier. Hundreds of people had bought tickets, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Plus, now I knew that my father, who was no longer conscious, wasn’t going to cross for four days. The manager of the theater, who knew my father was ill, said, “Are you sure you can do this? I know you want to be there when your father crosses.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “He is crossing Thursday.”
That’s how sure I was.
I called my brother and sister, who both live out of state, and told them that they needed to come see our father because he would be crossing on Thursday. That night, right after the show, I went to the hospital, and the nurse told me she felt my father was improving and might even be released soon. I told her I didn’t think this was true, but she told me I was wrong.
“He’s doing fine,” she said. “He’s going to recover.”
The next day, my father’s vital organs began to shut down. Tests came back showing there was no hope.
* * *
—
Because of the Other Side’s message, we were all with him in the hospital that Thursday—my brother, my sister, my mother, my father’s sister Ann, and me. His body was failing and he could no longer breathe without a respirator. The ammonia levels in his blood were sky-high. He was suffering. We all knew my father wouldn’t want his life to be artificially prolonged, so we made the painful decision to remove him from life support.
We took turns having a private moment with him, so that we could all say our final words. I told my father how much I loved him and how much I had always love
d him, and how I forgave him for everything there was that might need forgiving, and how I understood how hard he’d tried to do the right thing for his family. We all told him that he was loved and that it was okay for him to let go.
But my father didn’t let go.
The doctor told us that once the breathing tube was removed, my father would probably cross within twenty minutes. My first thought was, Well, you don’t know my dad. He’s not going to go that easily. We all gathered around his bed, and my mother held his hand. My father’s vital signs didn’t change at all. We sat around his bed for the next hour, and then two hours, but his condition remained the same. Finally, we decided to do something to show him how much we loved him—we sang to him.
My brother pulled out his iPhone and we played all my father’s favorite songs. We sang along to “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys. “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash. “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly. Singing and listening to music with my father was one of the ways we connected with him—maybe even the best way. We all used to sing together as a family on long car rides. And now, once again, we were singing as a family, and it was so loving and joyful.
We were singing my father home.
“You should play something by Elvis,” my mother said. “Your dad loves Elvis.”
Almost in unison, my sister, brother, and I said, “He does?” None of us could honestly remember my father ever listening to Elvis. So instead we kept playing songs we remembered that he liked.
About an hour after my mother’s Elvis suggestion, I got a text message from my friend Bobbi Allison. Bobbi is also a psychic medium, and quite often we’ll get messages for each other. That’s the way it works when psychic mediums become friends and hang out together—we wind up in each other’s business quite a bit. Bobbi knew my father was dying, and she knew I was in the hospital with him that night. She also knew that the Other Side had told me he would cross that night. I figured the text would just be Bobbi sending her love.
“I know this is really odd,” the text began, “but your father is coming to me. He is getting ready to leave his body, but he’s not ready to go quite yet. He keeps giving me a song. I keep hearing this song. He is saying this song is a message to your mother.”
It was amazing enough that my father would come through to Bobbi and give her a song precisely when we were all sitting around his bed singing to him. But Bobbi said it was a specific song, and I wanted to know what it was.
“Love Me Tender,” she texted back. “The Elvis song.”
“Play ‘Love Me Tender’!” I nearly yelled at my brother. He put the song on, and I watched my father’s face for any reaction.
I saw a single tear form in the corner of his left eye.
None of us children had shared an Elvis song with my father, but that wasn’t the point. Elvis’s songs were something he shared with my mother. Elvis was their thing.
“Mom, this is his message to you,” I told my mother.
When the song ended, we were all quietly weeping. We’d witnessed such a powerful moment. Within a minute of the song ending, my father’s vital signs began to crash. His heart rate, his breathing—everything—shifted. We laid our hands on him. His heart rate dropped to zero, spiked all the way to one hundred, then stopped altogether. With all of his family around him, touching him and enveloping him in love, my father crossed.
Elvis had been his last hurrah. It had been his final, breathing message of love for my mother—an affirmation that despite all of the hardships, he loved her deeply and always had. My father held on desperately until he could deliver this final message, and with Bobbi’s help he did. Then he finally let go.
And in that beautiful moment, my father did something else, too. He established a sign he would use to communicate with us from the Other Side.
His sign would be Elvis.
* * *
—
He didn’t wait long at all.
The morning after my father crossed, my mother, sister, brother, and I went to the funeral home to make all the necessary arrangements. It was a pretty difficult time for us all. Despite the miracle of my father’s last gesture, and all the love we felt, losing him was terribly painful. We all had relationships with him that were unresolved in different ways, and that made the sense of loss even more profound. We all felt a certain sadness and emptiness. Our next task was to pick out flowers, but we decided that we’d all go to lunch first, just so we could catch our breath.
“Where should we go?” my mom asked.
“How about a diner,” I suggested.
There were several other restaurants that were closer, but I felt strongly pulled to go to a diner, and to one diner in particular—the Dix Hills Diner. When we arrived, it was packed, as usual. We got the last parking spot in the lot. Inside, we expected to have a long wait for a table. Instead, the hostess came up and said, “We have one booth left, in the back. Would you like it?”
We smiled at our luck and followed the hostess to the one empty booth. We sat down and started talking about all the other things we needed to do. I went back to feeling sad and bereft, and I could tell my mom, brother, and sister did, too. The four of us sat in that booth with a terrible heaviness upon us. We shuffled the silverware and looked absently at menus and kept our heads down and fought off the tears.
And then I heard my sister say, “Oh wow. Look up.”
My sister was pointing at the wall right above our booth, where there was a big, framed print called Heaven’s Diner. It depicted a restaurant with three famous people in it. Marilyn Monroe. James Dean. And Elvis.
Elvis—just when we needed him the most! And in Heaven’s Diner!
And instantly we were transformed. I could see it in the faces of my family. My father had shown us he was still with us. It was his way of saying, “I’m okay. I am here. Don’t be sad for me. I love you all.”
But my dad, who hadn’t been the best communicator in life, didn’t stop there. He wanted to make sure we all knew he was still with us.
One day later, my mother and sister were driving to a liquor store to get wine for the funeral reception. The liquor store happened to be my father’s favorite one. Just as they were about to pull into the parking lot, a car screeched out in front of them and cut them off. They both got a good, clean look at the license plate:
Elvis4U
At the very same time my mom and sister were at the liquor store, I was in my kitchen directing my thoughts toward my father and having a little conversation with him. We had all wondered what my dad would need to do, karma-wise, to make up for how hard he’d been on my mother for so many years.
I don’t know how you can fix it, I thought. You’ll have to do something dramatic, like make her win the lottery.
Just then, miles away in the liquor store, my mother was checking out. Her purchases totaled ninety-seven dollars. She handed over a hundred-dollar bill, the cashier punched in $100 in cash, and the register, instead of showing the three dollars in change my mother was owed, showed that she should be given eight million dollars!
“Whoa, this has never happened before,” the startled cashier said with a smile. “Well, I guess I have to give you eight million dollars now.”
Everyone laughed, and when my mother got back to the car she called me to tell me about the Elvis license plate and what had happened with the cashier.
Then I told her about my conversation with Dad.
Maybe he didn’t arrange it so my mother won an actual lottery. But, as best he could, he sent her eight million dollars anyway.
And he always had a sense of humor.
The day after the funeral, I had to fly out to California for scheduled work. During the flight, I was miserable. Everything still felt raw and painful. I buckled my seatbelt and sat there in a daze. The monitor on the seatback in front of me was on, and the screen showe
d a map of the United States. On the right side of the screen, it listed the songs being played on the music station it was tuned to “ ’50s on the 50.”
As I stared at the screen, I noticed that the songs that were playing were all my father’s favorites: Buddy Holly. Johnny Cash. Song after song he had loved. I looked around at all the other screens I could see, but none of them were tuned to this station.
I knew the songs were another sign from my father, and I thanked him for sending them to me. One of the last songs to come on was “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton. It’s an obscure song, but my father and I used to sing it together all the time when I was younger. I even remember my father singing to me when I was a toddler. Hearing it again brought back happy memories and filled my heart with love and peace.
“Dad, I’m really impressed,” I told my father. “This was quite a display.”
The plane started its descent, and just before we landed, the radio station played one last song.
“Don’t Be Cruel,” by Elvis.
After returning from California, I was back home for just one day before I had to fly out again to Florida, where I was volunteering for the annual conference of the Forever Family Foundation. My friend and fellow medium Joe Perreta was there. He knew my dad had crossed, but nothing more.
“Um, Laura,” he said at one point, “I have a message for you from your father, but I don’t really understand it. He’s not expanding on it. He says just to tell you, to validate, that he was on the plane with you.”
I laughed.
“I know he was,” I said, and then I told Joe all about the songs.
Things had shifted. I felt an instant contentment, and an instant sense of connection, with my father. In a way, I felt closer to him than I could ever remember feeling when he was here on earth. And that was incredible!
“I hear you, Dad,” I told him. “I’m okay. I understand. I know you are with me.”
Signs Page 9