Three weeks later, I drove to the liquor store where my mother and sister had seen the Elvis license plate to pick up a bottle of wine. This time, I didn’t see or hear anything that had to do with Elvis. Music played in the store, but it was all more recent songs. As I stood in line to pay, the song “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen came on.
In a too-loud voice, the cashier turned to his co-worker and blurted out, “Hey, is this song by Elvis?”
“Dude, what?” his friend said. “Why would you ask that? Everyone knows this is Queen.”
“Oh yeah,” the cashier said. “I knew that. I don’t know why I thought it was Elvis.”
But I did.
Even when my father couldn’t send me an Elvis print or an Elvis license plate or an Elvis song, he found a way for me to hear the name Elvis. It was weird, unlikely, even embarrassing (for the cashier, that is), but it was also incredibly powerful.
Thanks, Dad, I thought.
I realized my father was a better communicator on the Other Side than he ever had been when he was here.
* * *
—
There were other signs beyond Elvis, songs from the 1950s, and eight million dollars.
The day after my father crossed, my mother texted me, asking if I thought my father’s issues were all gone now that he was on the Other Side. As I texted back, I started to type “involved.”
But my phone autocorrected and wrote the words back to her “I am okay.”
Then there were the penguins.
My father loved all animals, and all things National Geographic. An hour or so after he crossed, just as I was about to leave the hospital, my friend Nancy D’Erasmo—who is also a psychic medium—texted me telling me my father was showing her penguins for me. She asked if penguins had any special significance, but I couldn’t think of any at first. I told her I would remember the message and try to figure out what it meant.
Driving home from the hospital that night, I had a moment of what I call knowing.
I felt pulled to go home and look in the top drawer of my dresser. I understood that I had to look for a certain letter that was there—a letter from my dad. I don’t know why that thought popped into my head. I didn’t even know what the letter was about. All I knew was that I was drawn to that dresser drawer, and I had to look for that letter.
When I got home, I raced to my bedroom and pulled open the drawer. There were, in fact, two letters there. The first one was from 2010. Inside, my father told me how grateful he was to have me in his life, and how I had been a wonderful daughter to him. I sat down on the bed and started to cry. Then I looked at the next letter. I pulled it out of its envelope and gasped.
It was a Mother’s Day card, and it showed two penguins—an adult penguin with its baby.
And suddenly I remembered my dad telling me how penguin fathers actively care for and protect their young, how good they are at taking care of their babies. Seeing the card brought it all back to me.
And inside the card, my father told me what a great mother I was, how I always kept my kids safe and warm and surrounded by love. I had saved the cards, and now they were back in my hands on the very night my father crossed.
My father sent me penguins.
It wouldn’t be the last time, either.
Nine months after my father passed, I flew to Tokyo to appear on a Japanese TV program. To say that I was out of my comfort zone is an understatement. Although I was thrilled and honored to have been invited to appear on the show, I was a bit worried. I would be trying to deliver messages from the Other Side while wearing an earpiece and having a translator go back and forth with my statements to the sitters. While my prayer to the Other Side has always been, “Use me however I can be best used as a vehicle of love and healing in this world,” I guess I never expected to be sent to Japan, jet-lagged and wearing an earpiece to share this message of love and healing through a translator. It felt like there had been some kind of cosmic mix-up.
Just before leaving for the studio, my husband, Garrett, who was traveling with me, assured me that everything would be okay.
“You are here for a reason,” he said, “and it’s going to be great.”
I got to the TV studio, and the producers filled me in on what would happen. I’d be taken to a room that was designed to look like an office in New York. Then I would be beamed into the segment during the Japanese show—as a way of tricking the host and audience into thinking I was being Skyped in from the United States—before I was brought on set to everyone’s surprise. I followed the producer to the room where they had set up the fake New York office.
As the producer walked me into the room, I said a little prayer that the Other Side would come through loud and clear, and I asked my Team of Light for support.
In the room, I noticed they had dragged in a generic bookcase as a prop for the office, and they’d put a few knickknacks on the shelves to give it a homey touch.
The knickknacks? They were all little ceramic penguins.
Okay, Dad, I said to myself. I get it. You’re here with me. It’s going to be okay.
My whole energy shifted. The show went really well. The Other Side came through loud and clear, and the translations were fluid. The penguins reminded me I wasn’t alone. They were just what I needed at just the right time.
But my father wasn’t done. Not only was he there to send me signs of support, he made sure to send me a message letting me know that he was proud of me. When I was finished with the show and got into a cab to go back to the hotel, something shiny on the floor of the cab caught my eye. I saw that it was an American dime. I had been randomly finding dimes ever since my father crossed, whenever I was having a hard time with his passing, or making a difficult decision, or just wanting to feel him around me. Wow, Dad, I thought. An American dime on the floor of a cab in Japan! Well done.
We should always be on the lookout for signs from our loved ones who have crossed. Signs that they are supporting us, being there for us, and loving us, just when we need them most. Could be penguins, could be Elvis, could be dimes—could be anything.
Our loved ones on the Other Side will always find a way to get through.
* * *
—
I could go on and on about all the signs my father keeps sending us.
For example, he loved anything that was made with lard, so we kept seeing things that had to do with, of all things, lard. I spotted someone wearing a T-shirt from a restaurant called The Larder when I was in Los Angeles. My brother, on a plane, saw that he was flying over a town called Manteca—Spanish for “lard”—and when the guy in the next seat got up to use the bathroom, he had a big tattoo on his arm that said, IN LARD WE TRUST.
Whenever one of us gets one of these signs, we text everyone else to let them know. These funny, joyful, loving texts bounce back and forth all the time, and each one brings us closer. I have not the slightest doubt that these signs are my father’s way of reaching out to us and letting us know that he loves us and is watching over us. The truth is, after he crossed, it would have been easy to get stuck in my own sadness and miss these signs. But my father was so persistent, and so good at sending them, that I didn’t miss them after all. And because I finally opened my heart to receiving them—I was transformed. I was lifted out of my crushing grief. I was able to connect with my father in a new and beautiful way.
Through signs, our loved ones can be much better communicators than they ever were on earth. My father has become the chattiest soul in the universe! In many very real ways, he is more present for me now than he was before. He is more loving. He is more attentive. He is more responsive. If I send my love for him out into the universe, he will bounce it right back to me, and more.
And if I ask him for help with something, or to send a sign to let me know that everything is okay, my father will respond in won
derful, magical ways.
My father helped me understand that we need to open our minds and our hearts fully to receiving these powerful messages. It was only when I went through the traumatic process of losing a parent myself that I truly realized how hard it was, and how important these signs could be—if we allowed them to sink in. From the Other Side, he became not only my protector but also my teacher. We were not done with each other. Our relationship continues to grow and evolve.
It wasn’t too late for my father and me, because it never is.
It is never too late to heal and grow the relationships you have with your loved ones who have crossed.
12
1379
BRANDON Hugo lived in a small town in northern Iowa—so small, a sign on the border read: POPULATION 95, MORE OR LESS.
He was born on April Fools’ Day, which turned out to be a fitting birthday, because Brandon could always make everyone laugh. “He loved practical jokes, but no one ever got mad at him,” says his mother, Angela. “He was everyone’s best friend, because he was so loving and sensitive and sincere.” Brandon had a special magic that drew people to him—he was a good listener who helped you with your problems, a matchmaker who successfully set up several friends, and a peacemaker—the boy who was popular with both the Hicks and the Preps.
“He connected people,” Angela says. “He bridged gaps. People gravitated to him and he brought them all together.”
On the evening of January 31, just two months before Brandon’s twenty-first birthday, he and a friend drove five miles out of town to check on a farm scale the friend was interested in buying. On the way back home, they stopped in a tiny bar in the middle of nowhere. “He wasn’t old enough to get in, but he got in anyway,” his mother says. “He was so responsible, as far as people drinking and driving was concerned, but that night he just decided to have a few drinks.”
Brandon and his friends finally left the bar at two A.M. About that time, his mother was startled out of a sound sleep. “I didn’t know why,” she remembers. “I just had a strange feeling.”
A few minutes later, the telephone rang.
* * *
—
Numbers give order to our lives—what time we get up, how much we weigh, our monthly budget. They are among the very first things we learn in life and they are signifiers of the most meaningful things in our day-to-day existence. Birthdays, anniversaries, lucky numbers—we tend to give numbers more meaning than statisticians and mathematicians will tell us they have. We might take note of numbers that always seem to come up when we randomly check on the time—6:31, 2:22, 11:47—or we might tend to spot the same sequence of numbers as we go about our lives. We’re not alone in this.
St. Augustine of Hippo, around the year A.D. 400, established himself as an early proponent of the power of numbers. “Numbers are the Universal Language offered by the deity to humans as confirmation of the truth,” he stated. The way we arrive at that truth, he believed, was by investigating the numbers that appear in our lives and discovering their secret meaning. Through the ages, numerology has suggested that numbers have mystical correlatives in our everyday lives.
In my experience, numbers are one of the most powerful tools used by the Other Side to communicate with us. The key, as St. Augustine of Hippo believed, is being open to the hidden power of numbers, and to their ability to reveal truths we might otherwise not see.
* * *
—
Brandon grew up a good country boy, working on the family farm. He loved getting under the hood and fixing engines, and he had several demolition derby cars in the workshop that he loved taking apart. In high school he was voted the Spring Week King, among many other achievements. He was a sports star, a volunteer fireman, and a mentor to his friend Bert. Bert idolized him and loved him like a brother.
That night at the bar, Brandon drank more than he should have. Bert had plans to look at some organically raised pigs with Brandon the next day, and he was worried that Brandon might be too hungover to keep the appointment. So he and another friend drove to the bar to make sure Brandon was okay.
At two A.M., when the bar closed, a neighbor agreed to drive Brandon and Bert home in his pickup truck. Unfortunately, that neighbor had also had too much to drink. Bert asked for the keys, but the neighbor refused to hand them over—nobody drove his truck but him. It was less than four miles from the bar to Brandon’s home, but along the way the neighbor wanted to show them how fast his pickup truck could go. When he drove over a steep hill, he lost control of the vehicle.
He drove the pickup into a ditch, sped another 150 yards, hit a field drive, and rolled end-to-end until it came to a halt on its top. The driver had been thrown from the truck, and did not make it. Bert was badly hurt—broken pelvis, broken ribs, collapsed lungs—but managed to crawl out of the wreckage and call Brandon’s mother.
“You have to come here,” he told her in between gasps for breath. “The worst thing has happened.”
Angela and her husband headed to the scene, not knowing if Brandon had been in the truck or not. When they arrived, there was no sign of their son. Firemen and sheriffs from other towns arrived, and Angela heard one of them say, “There’s someone under the truck!” The firemen grabbed wooden posts and used them to lift the truck. Brandon’s father went from fireman to fireman, asking, “Is it Brandon?”
It was Brandon, and he had crossed.
The crash itself hadn’t damaged Brandon that much—he only had two broken ribs. But he’d been thrown backward and gotten stuck in the cab window, and with the weight of the truck on top of him, he suffocated.
More than five hundred people showed up for his visitation at the funeral home, and the next day seven hundred people packed the church for his funeral—the largest funeral ever held in the town. “Everyone was in tears,” Angela says. “Grown men, people I didn’t even know, they walked in crying. It was the hardest thing in the world to have to say goodbye to Brandon.”
Bert was devastated. After the crash, he somehow made it all the way up to the top of a hill in a cornfield, something the first responders said seemed impossible, given his injuries. Bert believed that Brandon had helped him up the hill—and, in his grief, he began to believe that Brandon could still be alive. “He started leaving all these messages on Brandon’s phone, about how he was going to find him,” Angela says. Brandon’s girlfriend, Lanae, knew his cellphone security code and listened to the voicemails. She grew concerned and told Brandon’s parents about them.
Then Bert decided he wanted to erase the messages he’d left for Brandon so no one else could hear them. But he couldn’t get into Brandon’s phone without the security code—and no one knew the code except for Lanae. A week after the crash, Bert called Lanae and told her he knew the code.
“How do you know it?” she asked him.
“Well, I tried everything,” Bert said. “His football number, basketball number, license plate, but nothing worked. Then I had a dream. Brandon and I were driving in a demolition car being chased by cops. It was like I was outside the car, looking at us driving. And then I noticed the number on the license plate, and when I woke up I knew it was the code.”
“What was the number?” Lanae asked.
“1379.”
She gasped.
1379 was Brandon’s passcode.
* * *
—
Brandon’s mother, Angela, had always believed in God and Jesus and the afterlife, and she, too, had had dreams that she believed were signs from above. So when she heard about Bert’s dream, she didn’t discount it.
The day after Bert had his dream, Angela took Brandon’s teenage sister Lys to see a counselor. “We all needed guidance for how to cope with this loss and how to move on,” Angela says. Afterward, they drove to Target to do some shopping.
Afterward, in the parking lot, Lys pointed at the
ground.
“Mom, look!” she said.
There was a small, rectangular piece of hard white plastic, with four numbers on it printed in red: 1379.
“How in the world could it be possible?” Angela says. “Of all the parking lots in the world, we park in one where we find a piece of a sign with the exact numbers that Bert saw in his dream fourteen hours earlier? Four numbers that were Brandon’s cellphone code? It was incredible.”
On the ride home, the song “I Believe” by Diamond Rio played on the radio. Brandon loved Diamond Rio and had attended many of their concerts. “When ‘I Believe’ came on, that’s when we knew that Brandon was still with us,” Angela says.
Angela and I met a few months after Brandon crossed. She and her second husband, Martin, signed up for a grief retreat sponsored by the Forever Family Foundation. The first night, I addressed a group of around sixty participants about what I do and how I do it. More intimate gatherings of ten or so people, where I could really zero in on messages from the Other Side, were scheduled for the next night.
But that first night, soon after I started talking, someone pushed through. Actually, two souls pushed through. They were insistent. I was immediately drawn to where Angela was sitting with Martin. I looked at Angela and told her that her mother was very eager to talk with her.
But at the same time, I told her, “A young male is trying to push through, and he is saying he wants to be first. He is telling your mother, ‘Sorry, it’s my turn now.’ ”
Brandon told me to tell his mother that his favorite color was green, and that he still wanted her to paint his room green, as she’d promised to—even though he knew she wanted a different color. He also asked why Martin had the big Christmas tree, while he had the smaller one. “That was true,” Angela says. “We had two Christmas trees in the family room, a big twelve-footer that Martin put up, and another small one on a cabinet. The smaller one was Brandon’s tree. I’d bought it for him when he was little.”
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