Then Brandon conveyed to me that he liked the tattoo.
“I didn’t have any visible tattoos and neither did Martin,” Angela says. “But then Martin got up and rolled up his sleeve, and showed me the tattoo he’d just gotten. He’d had the number 1379 tattooed on his arm in honor of Brandon. So Brandon was telling him he liked it and he approved.”
“Hold on,” I told Martin. “Brandon is also saying that you’re thinking of getting another tattoo, this time on your butt?”
Martin turned red.
“We were joking about it just last night,” he explained. “I told Angela I was going to get a tattoo that says YOUR NAME on my butt, just so I could bet people that ‘I have your name tattooed on my butt,’ and win.”
“Well,” I said, “Brandon wants you to know he thinks that’s funny.”
It was an amazing impromptu reading, with an incredible number of validations from Brandon to his mother. But in fact, Angela didn’t need me to know her son was still around. She didn’t need me to understand that Brandon was still joking, still laughing, still connecting people from the Other Side.
One afternoon, while Angela was cleaning her kitchen, she thought about Brandon and felt sad.
“Okay, kid,” she said aloud, “Mama needs another sign.”
Later that evening, Angela headed upstairs to the kitchen. When she hit the stairway, she heard the Bose radio playing a song. She hadn’t remembered leaving it on.
“It was playing one of Brandon’s favorite songs: ‘See You on the Other Side’ by Ozzy Osbourne,” she recalls. “I knew it was Brandon. I asked him for a sign and he sent it to me right away. I thought, How cool is this! Thanks, B, love you! Then I just stood there on the stairs and listened to the lyrics of the song.”
But I know I’ll see you once more
When I see you, I’ll see you on the other side
* * *
—
Thirteen years after Brandon passed, on the anniversary of his crossing, Angela was driving home at the end of a long day. “I’m always looking for signs, especially on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, and when something special is going on with his friends or family. But I hadn’t noticed any signs that day.”
Then, at a stoplight, she glanced at her trip odometer. It read 134.1 miles.
“I thought, well at least that’s close to our number,” she says. “I kept driving home and kind of kept my eye on the trip meter.”
When she finally pulled up to her home, she stopped at the top of her driveway, by the mailbox.
The odometer read 137.8.
“Oh well,” she thought, “that’s really close.”
Then she pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door, and rolled on in.
“When I finally stopped, I looked at the meter again,” she says.
It read 137.9.
“I sat in the car for a while and said out loud, ‘Good job, B! Love you too!’ ”
Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
13
GHOST CALLS
SUZANNAH Scully had a great job in the corporate world. She’d spent ten years learning the ropes, working hard, impressing people, and getting promotion after promotion. Her future looked impossibly bright. And then—she quit.
“People looked at me like I had three heads,” Suzannah says. “I had achieved success, so why would I just throw that away?”
The answer was simple—curiosity.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Suzannah had lots of big questions—about life, death, everything. “The people around me were all very logical, practical thinkers,” she says. “Meanwhile, I had this great curiosity, and no one could answer my questions.”
When she got older, Suzannah finally found some of the answers in a book—Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, PhD. Newton, a master hypnotherapist, regressed twenty-nine subjects in time so he could access their memories of past lives. His book is about how people in a super-conscious state can describe in detail the journeys their souls have taken between lives here on earth.
“When I read that book, it was like someone pulling back the curtain for me,” Suzannah says. “I remember reading it in bed and turning to my husband and saying, ‘This book explains the whole meaning of life!’ ”
Suzannah read more books about the afterlife and our soul journeys, and began looking at the world in a different way. With her new perspective, she focused on how we choose to spend our time here on earth.
At work, Suzannah was the colleague others came to see with their problems. “They’d come into my office and close the door and tell me their hopes and dreams,” she says. “I found that I really enjoyed talking to them and helping to steer them toward something more fulfilling.” Somewhere along the line, Suzannah realized she could do the same thing for herself.
So she quit her job and became a life coach.
“My life changed tremendously,” she says. “I woke up every day excited about what I was going to do. I was passionate about helping people make a major shift in their lives.”
One of her most crucial skills as a life coach, she has found, is the ability to stay open to signs and messages. “We are trained to tap into our intuition,” she explains. “As a life coach, I have to trust what I feel. So if something pops into my mind while I’m talking to someone about their lives, I’ve learned to follow that something, even if it feels kind of weird.”
An example: Suzannah was in the middle of a session with a client when an awful screeching noise distracted her. “There was this crazy bird squawking and squealing outside my office window,” she says. “It was like this bird was just complaining, complaining, complaining about something. I tried to ignore it, but then I just stopped the session and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to pay attention to this bird—it’s squawking like crazy.’ ”
Suddenly her client began to cry.
“She told me, ‘Today is the seventh anniversary of my father passing away,’ ” Suzannah recalls. “She said that her father would have used the same word—squawking—to describe how much she was complaining right now.”
That led to an important emotional breakthrough for the client. “And if I hadn’t felt comfortable acknowledging the bird,” Suzannah says, “the whole moment would have passed. Sometimes our bodies tell us things before our minds know it. So we have to stay open to signs and messages that are not obvious statements and words. When one of my clients says something and I get the chills, I know we’re onto something really big. I just know. So I say, ‘Stop. What you just said there. Let’s talk about that.’ And then I’ll see the emotion on their faces.”
* * *
—
A few years ago, Scott Dinsmore quit his Fortune 500 job, too.
Scott had read Suzannah’s inspirational blog online and called her for advice. They realized they shared an interest in the road less taken, and quickly became friends. Not much later, Scott and his wife set out on a year-long journey around the world, visiting twenty cities before reaching Tanzania, where they would climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
On the sixth day of the eight-day climb, Scott and his wife were just two thousand feet below the nineteen-thousand-foot peak when they heard a cry from overhead. Someone was yelling, “Look out!”
A boulder the size of an SUV was hurtling down the mountain. Scott’s wife dove for cover, but before Scott could move, the boulder struck him. No other climber suffered so much as a nick that day.
But Scott was killed.
He was just thirty-three years old.
“It was shattering when I got the call,” Suzannah says. “I literally collapsed to the ground. It made no sense. How could someone so full of life, so in love with life, suddenly just not be here anymore?”
Scott’s blogs about his journey, as well as a TED
Talk he gave that had millions of views, made him a star in the world of inspiration and achievement. “He lived more in his thirty-three years than most people do in a lifetime,” his father said. Two months after his passing, Scott’s friends staged an event at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts to celebrate his life.
“That day was so much like Scott,” says Suzannah. “Everyone got up and gave these incredibly inspiring speeches. It was a beautiful, joyous occasion celebrating Scott and his legacy.”
When it was over, Suzannah returned to her car and checked her cellphone, which she’d had on silent for the ceremony. She saw there was one missed call from a number she didn’t recognize, as well as one voicemail. She played back the message.
“Nobody talked or said anything,” she says. “It was just fifteen seconds of the most beautiful, peaceful, ethereal music I’d ever heard. And then it just ended and there was nothing.” Suzannah redialed the number, but a recording told her it had been disconnected.
In other words, the call seemed to come from nowhere.
“I knew immediately that it was a sign from Scott,” she says. “I just knew it without a doubt. We had this very special connection, and we bonded over the fact that we both took unexpected paths. The music on the message was so soothing, and it lasted for just a little while and then it was over. Nothing like that had ever happened to me.”
Since receiving that ghost call, Suzannah has occasionally seen missed calls from strange numbers on her phone, and when she’s redialed the numbers they are always disconnected. “It only happens when my phone is on silent, so I don’t hear the call and pick it up,” she says. “I’ve never gotten another voicemail with music, but I do get a lot of missed calls from nonworking numbers. And I think, Okay, there’s Scott, saying hi.”
Suzannah, who hosts a popular podcast, invited me on as a guest not too long ago. During our interview, she put her cellphone on silent. After we were done, she checked it and saw four missed calls, all from the same disconnected number. “It didn’t even surprise me,” she says. “Of course Scott tried to reach me while I was talking to a psychic medium.”
Today Suzannah always talks to her clients about the importance of staying open to nonverbal signs and messages. Signs, she believes, will help you shift your life to a higher, more fulfilling path. Scott Dinsmore named the inspirational online movement he created Live Your Legend.
“That’s what we’re all trying to do,” says Suzannah. “We feel called to something bigger in our lives. We might not know exactly what that is, but we can feel it in our bones.”
14
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
CATHY Kudlack considered herself a very lucky woman. She and her husband, Frank, had been married for ten years and had three beautiful children. “Frank was a cop, and he had the driest sense of humor, and he made me laugh all the time,” Cathy says. “He adored his kids and he was a great dad. I just loved him so much.”
Then, tragically, Frank was diagnosed with cancer. He crossed two years later, at the age of thirty-nine.
Cathy never remarried—the loss was very hard for her to handle. “I could never find anyone quite like Frank,” she says. “We always had an easy way of communicating with each other and I never wanted anyone but Frank to have a say in raising our children. So I just raised the kids by myself.”
And yet, Cathy says, she often feels that she’s not alone—that Frank is somehow still with her.
“I feel his presence,” she says. “Sometimes it’s just a feeling. Sometimes he finds a way to say hello.”
One morning, while Cathy was getting ready to go to work and her daughter Jeanette—who lived with her—was putting her young children on the school bus, Cathy heard an awful racket outside.
“I walked outside and there was a bright-red cardinal sitting in my birch tree,” she says. “And this bird was screaming. Just squawking about something. Jeanette came out and I said, ‘Take a look at this bird, it’s going nuts.’ And you know, that birch tree—my husband planted it when it was a sapling.”
Jeanette went back inside, but Cathy stayed out front and kept an eye on the crazy cardinal. The bird refused to leave—or to quiet down. It jumped from the tree to the mailbox, where it continued to complain. Then it jumped on Cathy’s car and squawked some more. “It was just looking at me and making a lot of noise,” Cathy says. “Finally I went inside to do some chores. I got the garbage and took it around back. And when I was in the backyard, the cardinal flew around the house and sat on the roof of the garage. Just looking at me and squawking.
“That’s when I said, ‘Okay, that’s Frank. Who else could it be?’ ”
Later that day, when Cathy was at work, she happened to glance at a calendar. When she saw the date, she gasped.
“It was May thirteenth—the anniversary of Frank’s death,” she says. “This was twenty-nine years to the day. And out of nowhere this cardinal shows up and squawks at me for twenty minutes.” What’s more, the cardinal flew off at nine ten A.M., “which was the exact time of Frank’s passing,” Cathy says. “That’s when I knew for sure that it was Frank.”
* * *
—
Two years before he crossed, Frank took Cathy to visit a piece of property on Eagle Lake in Pennsylvania. “He already knew he was sick,” Cathy says, “but he really wanted to buy the land. He said, ‘I want to take my son fishing on this lake.’ Did Frank like to fish? No. But he loved spending time with his son.”
The Kudlacks bought the property, but before they were able to spend time there, Frank took a turn for the worse, and soon after he crossed. In the months and years that followed, Cathy would take the children there every weekend. “Frank wanted us all to be there together, as a family, and when I was there I really felt his presence,” she says. “And when our kids grew up and had their kids, they brought them up to the lake, too. I think we all felt close to Frank there.”
Their next-door neighbor on the lake, a wonderful man named Cliff, became a kind of surrogate father to Cathy’s son, Frank Jr. “He taught him everything my husband would have taught him—how to fix things, how to paint, all the things you need to know when you own a home,” Cathy says. “I think that was ultimately the purpose of our family being there. Even though Frank never knew Cliff, he wanted us there so Cliff could eventually be this wonderful mentor to our son.”
After almost thirty years, when the kids stopped coming as often, Cathy started to think about selling the property. “But it was so hard. I was so torn,” she says. “Frank wanted us to have this place—he wanted us to be a family there. And we were. I needed to know that Frank was okay with it.”
It was right around this time that Cathy’s daughter Jeanette reached out to me. She told me the story of the property on Eagle Lake, and how her mother had just made the painful decision to sell it, but was still uncertain if it was the right thing to do.
I connected with Cathy’s husband, Frank, right away. He was very clear in his position.
“Your dad says to absolutely sell it,” I texted back. “More than anything he wants things to be easier for your mom. So tell her to stop worrying. Also, your dad is joking and saying you can’t get rid of him that easily anyway.”
And besides, he wanted her to know, it was never the land tying him to the family. “It is the love that binds him to all of you,” I conveyed to them. “Trust in that.”
The next day, Cathy sent me a thank-you note in response.
“I’m looking forward to the next phase now,” she wrote. “It feels so good to have the validation that our loved ones still support us. I believe that with all of my heart, but it’s still wonderful to hear it from you.”
I was moved by Cathy’s heartfelt letter.
“I know you don’t need me to know that your husband is around,” I wrote her, “because you already feel him and he sends you signs and m
essages all the time. He wants you to be happy and to be open to all that is being brought to you in your next chapter in life—but he is saying that he will send you the sign of an eagle so that you know you have his blessing on the sale of the property.”
What I didn’t realize was that Frank had already sent the sign of the eagle.
* * *
—
I later learned from Cathy that the day before she’d reached a decision about selling the property, she decided to clean out one of the closets in her home. There were boxes and boxes of papers in it that hadn’t been touched in years. Cathy reached deep into the closet and pulled out the first of many folders packed with documents.
“On the cover of this folder was a picture of a beautiful eagle,” she says. “I had no idea this folder even existed.”
Then it hit her: The property Frank bought for his family was on Eagle Lake.
“I thought it must be a sign,” Cathy says. “That folder was hidden there for years and years, totally forgotten, and I pulled it out just when I needed Frank to send me a sign about the property. When I saw it, I felt it was him telling me, ‘Okay, it’s time to let it go.’ ”
On the day of the sale, Cathy was driving to the dentist with Jeanette. “All of a sudden Jeanette said, ‘Mom, look at this!’ ” Cathy recalls. “There was an eagle flying right by our car window, almost close enough to reach out and touch.”
After that, Cathy began seeing eagles everywhere.
“They’d fly over my head or be sitting on a branch where I could see them,” she says. “And every time I saw one, it confirmed for me that, yes, Eagle Lake was our special place, and yes, we all felt close to Frank there. But the truth is, we don’t need that place. Because Frank is everywhere.”
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