* * *
—
Today Cathy talks to Frank all the time. “I’ll say, ‘How you doing today?’ Or, ‘Frank, I need your help with this.’ And Frank always comes through, with either a sign or a thought or a word that pops in my head.”
Although Cathy and her family no longer have Eagle Lake, they still get together. Last summer, Cathy joined her children on Montauk Point for the weekend. “Several of us took a walk by the lighthouse, and I remember it being very peaceful with the seagulls flying around us and the fresh smell of the ocean air. I also remember trying to stabilize myself on the rocks so I didn’t fall into the ocean.”
All of a sudden, Cathy’s daughter noticed that one of the rocks near them had a name written on it. It was the only rock among thousands that had anything written on it at all.
The name written on it was Frank.
“At that moment, I thought about all the people who were walking along the shore with me—Frank’s daughter; two of his grandkids, Kingston and Caleb; his sister Nancy; and his future daughter-in-law, Kim. And I knew that seeing that rock with his name on it was Frank’s way of letting us know that he was with us there, too. There is not a single doubt in my mind about it.”
No matter the method, Cathy is always ready to receive whatever message Frank is sending.
“Every single time, it brings a big smile to my face,” she says. “Frank has a really easy time communicating with me. He always did. And he’s still the same kidder he was, still looking out for us like he always did. It’s very comforting knowing that Frank is still here. He visits me all the time, and that’s just a really wonderful thing.”
15
STREET SIGNS
MATTHEW Bittan was a bright, funny, outgoing boy with a huge personality and an uncommon curiosity about life. He would often surprise his parents with strange questions that revealed a mature thought process. One afternoon when he was eight years old, his mother was driving him to a store, and Matt grew quiet.
“You know, Mommy,” he finally said, “I’m not sure I want to die before you.”
His mom, Franciska, was startled. “Why would you say that?” she asked.
“Because I know that if I die before you do, you will die from heartbreak.”
“Oh, honey, don’t worry about that,” Franciska assured him. “You don’t need to think about that.”
Matt never brought it up again. But Franciska always wondered if, somehow, Matt could feel it in his soul that he wasn’t going to be here for very long.
* * *
—
Matt was two weeks past his twenty-fifth birthday when he overdosed on drugs and crossed. He’d been battling an addiction to painkillers for several years, but seemed to have finally freed himself from the struggle. He was optimistic about his future, more like his old self than he’d been for a while. But then he had a relapse while staying in a sober living facility in California. His unexpected crossing was a cruel and devastating shock.
“For a long time I felt so incredibly guilty about it,” Fran says. “What if I had been stronger? What if I had seen the signs? What if I had raised him differently?”
After his crossing, Fran shuttered herself in her home for five weeks. She didn’t want to face anyone, didn’t want to talk about Matt with anyone, couldn’t bear to resume her life. She was frozen in grief and despair. Finally a friend told her she needed to come to their local school to help stuff backpacks for children in need. Fran says, “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I would start bawling.”
But her friend insisted, and Fran finally gave in.
Before she left for the school, however, she did one thing: She asked Matt to send her a sign.
She asked for a hamsa—a Jewish symbol comprising a five-fingered hand with an eye or Star of David in the palm. The symbol is commonly seen as a sign of protection against negative spiritual forces. It also signifies strength and blessings. “It’s not something that you see everywhere, so I was afraid I was asking for something too specific, but I asked for it anyway,” says Fran. “When I got to the gym of the school I looked around for it, but I didn’t see it anywhere. I guess I was hoping I’d see it right away.”
Fran spent the next two hours quietly stuffing backpacks with school supplies. “I didn’t talk to anyone,” she says. “I just packed the bags like a machine.” Finally, an older woman approached her to say hello. They talked for a while, and suddenly Fran blurted out that her son had recently crossed. “It just came out—‘my son died,’ ” she says. “I even told her about how I asked Matt for a sign and hadn’t seen the sign. I’d been looking for it everywhere and I hadn’t seen it.”
That is when the woman pointed toward one of the gym’s walls, which was covered with signs put up by the students. The sign closest to Fran—basically right in front of her—had a distinctive symbol drawn on it.
A hamsa with the Star of David in the palm.
“I hadn’t seen it,” Fran says. “It was right there but I just missed it. And when I saw it, I said, ‘Wow, Matthew, that was pretty impressive.’ ”
The hamsa in the gym struck Fran as an obvious sign from Matt, and yet no matter how much she wanted to believe it, there remained a part of her that questioned whether it was real or just coincidence. Still, driving home from the school, Fran felt as if something had shifted. Like she had flipped a switch, activating the connection. Fran hoped that maybe more signs would follow.
In the car, she punched her address into her navigation app. Fran was pretty certain she knew how to get home from the school, but she used the app just to be sure. Suddenly the computerized voice on the app was telling her to make a left turn. “It was so bizarre,” she says. “Turning left would take me out of my way. I mean, really out of my way. It would put me on all these different streets I didn’t need to be on. It didn’t make any sense, but I made the left turn anyway.”
The app steered her through an unfamiliar neighborhood before finally directing her down a dead-end street. When she pulled to a stop at the end of that road, the app inexplicably shut off. “It had never done that before,” she says. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
Fran turned the car around and drove out of the dead end. Just as she was leaving it, she glanced up at a street sign and noticed the name of the unfamiliar street: MATTHEW’S WAY.
Fran stopped her car and sat there for a while. “I just thought, Oh my God, is this a sign? I mean, it has to be a sign!” she says. “Matthew’s Way!”
* * *
—
Ever since, Fran has kept a notebook of the signs Matt has sent her. “He is extremely good at sending me signs,” Fran says. “And when you get them, you want to keep getting them. But I didn’t want to be greedy, so I basically got it down to asking Matthew for one sign a week. I ask for the hamsa or for his favorite song, ‘Wonderwall.’ And you know, that song comes on in the weirdest places.”
A few months after Matt crossed, Fran attended an event where I read for some of the participants. When she came up to me, I immediately felt Matt’s presence.
“Do you have a son who recently crossed?” I asked.
“Yes, I do,” Fran said.
“Okay, well, he says he loves the fire pit, and he wants you to know he is there with you all the time.”
Fran looked shocked. She explained that she had just recently built a fire pit in her backyard, because Matt loved sitting outside with his family, playing his guitar.
“He says he also likes that you’re wearing his necklace,” I told Fran.
No necklace was visible around Fran’s neck. But when I said that, she reached inside her blouse and pulled out a chain with a beautiful Star of David at the end.
It was clear to both of us that Matt was excited about the connection that still e
xisted between him and his mother.
Sure enough, Matt has kept busy sending Fran lots of different signs. She is always finding pennies on the ground that are from 1991—the year Matt was born. For a few consecutive days she kept waking up at precisely 5:30 A.M., but she couldn’t figure out why. Then it dawned on her—Matt’s birthday was May 30, 5/30. “As soon as I figured it out, I stopped waking up at that time,” Fran says. “It was like Matt waited for me to interpret the sign before he stopped sending it to me.”
Nine months after Matt crossed, Fran and a friend took a much-needed vacation. But as soon as she got there, Fran felt racked with guilt. “Matt loved to travel—he went to Australia and Thailand and all over,” Fran says. “I know he would have wanted me to get out and see the world again, but still, I felt so guilty because he would have loved to have been there with us. So in my head, I asked him, Please, send me a sign and let me know you’re here with me.”
Just then, a large man in swim trunks plopped down in the pool chair next to Fran. “I looked over at him, and there on his biceps was a giant tattoo of the Star of David, with the words I LOVE YOU MOM underneath it,” Fran says. “The sign couldn’t have been any clearer.”
More than two years after his crossing, Fran still feels the enduring connection between them. When she wants to feel close to him, she sits by the fire pit out back, and some nights she can practically feel Matt sitting there with her, playing his guitar.
“It’s about opening your mind and your heart to the idea that the relationship isn’t over when they cross,” Fran says. “I’ve heard about parents who lost a child ten years ago and they’re still incapable of moving on, and I understand that, but I would want them to know that they need to find a way to create a new relationship with their child. That’s what I am doing now—I am learning how to be in a new relationship with Matt. No matter how much I stomp and scream, I cannot physically bring Matt back to me. But I can find a new way to connect with him, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
The signs that Matt sends Fran, she says, allow her to believe that he is okay. “And that makes it possible for me to live the life I know Matt would want for me.”
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
—RUMI
16
DANCING CANDLES
A NUMBER of years ago, I was getting my hair done at a salon I had never been to before on Long Island. The lovely man who was cutting my hair, Henry Bastos, did not know that I am a psychic medium, and I had no intention of telling him. But while I was sitting in his chair, I sensed someone pushing through for him. It wasn’t a very strong signal, and I wondered if I should say anything at all. But it wouldn’t go away. Finally I confessed that I was a psychic medium.
He wasn’t particularly impressed. He wasn’t much of a believer in those kinds of things, he told me. I explained to him how I received messages from the Other Side—and that we have to be open to receiving those messages in order for them to come through. Okay, Henry said, he would try to be open-minded about it. As soon as he expressed this, his grandfather, Hernan, was there with a message for him.
“He is showing me a pocketknife,” I said. “It’s a pocketknife in a leather pouch. He is saying that the person who has this knife believes they are responsible for his death. But they aren’t, and they need to know it wasn’t their fault.”
Henry was incredulous. How could his grandfather, who’d crossed sixty years earlier, suddenly be there with us, sending us a message for someone else?
“Okay,” he finally said, “let me call my mother in Costa Rica and ask her about a pocketknife.”
I listened as Henry dialed his mother, Elizabeth, right then and there, and spoke to her in Spanish. When the call was done, Henry seemed upset.
“When I asked her about the knife, she said, ‘How do you know about it?’ ” Henry said. She told him that Hernan had given his uncle Luis the pocketknife before he died. Luis long believed that because he wasn’t home when Hernan had crossed, his death was Luis’s fault. He carried that guilt for sixty years, until Hernan sent the message through Henry that he had crossed because of an illness, and there was nothing anyone could have done to save him.
Hernan had one more message for Henry.
“He wants me to tell you that he is doing fine, and that he is working every day to build a paradise for your grandmother, and it will be ready for her when she gets there. He wants her to know that they will be sitting on the porch together, enjoying the sunset. He’s showing me an image of him cutting up an orange for her with a little knife.”
Henry’s face turned white, and his eyes started to well with tears. “My grandparents lived in a small house facing the beach, and they always sat together on the porch and looked at the sunset,” he told me. “My grandfather would sit there with his little pocketknife and cut up slices of oranges for my grandmother. Everything was exactly how you are explaining it to me now.”
* * *
—
Henry had always lived his life in a spiritual way, but now he became a believer in the beautiful cords of light that connect us all. “I understand that there is something waiting for us on the Other Side that is above and beyond what we see over here,” he says. “Something that is even more beautiful than all of the beauty here. And that allows me to have a kind of closure about people in my life who are crossing to the Other Side.”
One of those people was Henry’s beloved grandmother Emma. “My mother worked really hard for the first fourteen years of my life, so I was raised mostly by my grandmother, whom I called Mami Emma,” Henry says. “She was my confidante. She was the one who really paid attention to me.”
When Henry was twenty, he left Costa Rica to pursue his dream of working in the fashion industry. It took him a while, but he managed to carve out a vibrant career for himself as a hairstylist. When I met him, his grandmother Emma was ninety-nine years old and in poor health.
Before Mami Emma crossed, Henry had promised that he would visit the site of the Miracle of the Lady of Fatima in Portugal and light a candle there in her honor.
“We believe that Our Lady of Fatima helps people heal internally and rehabilitate and not feel terrible pain anymore,” says Henry. “My grandmother always told me to pray to her for help in keeping me on the right path.”
After his grandmother crossed, Henry booked a flight to Portugal and traveled to Cova da Iria, where a small chapel had been built on the site of the miracle. Henry bought two small candles, then he went to the side of the chapel where people lit candles for loved ones. There were hundreds and hundreds of small candles there, and Henry found space where he could leave two more.
He lit the first one and offered a prayer for world peace, and for anyone around him who needed help and guidance.
“Then I lit the second candle,” Henry says, “and I offered the candle to Fatima just for my grandmother. I said, ‘Mami, I am here. I am fulfilling my promise to you. And I know that you are here with me right now.’ ”
There wasn’t a breath of wind in the air. All the other candles had small, unflickering flames. But when Henry began talking to his grandmother, the flame on his candle began to flicker and grow, until it went from one inch to nearly ten inches high.
“This flame, I am telling you, this flame was stretching up to the sky and dancing from side to side,” Henry says, still moved and surprised by what he witnessed. “I took a photo of it. You can see how high it is. The hundreds of other candles—nothing. But this candle, this flame, it was moving and dancing. And I began to cry, and I cried like I never cried before in my whole life.”
Henry didn’t want to leave. The flame was still jumping, and he was still crying, and his grandmother’s presence was only getting stronger and stronger. “Finally I said, ‘
Mami, it is okay. This is not goodbye, it is till we meet again.’ And when I said that, the flame slowly came down. And then it was like all the other candles. I know it makes no sense, but I have photos of it. Everyone there saw it. It really happened. It was the most unbelievable thing that ever happened to me in my life. It is something I will think about forever.”
* * *
—
When I saw Henry after he returned from Portugal, he told me all about the miraculous flame. He showed me the photos, and sure enough the flame on Mami Emma’s candle towered above all the others. I told him it wasn’t unusual for our loved one on the Other Side to use natural firelight and candles to send us signs and messages. Air and light and wind and fire are all elements that the Other Side can manipulate. Lighting a candle as a way to communicate and connect with his grandmother gave her a great opportunity to send him a message in return.
So that became their sign—a flickering candle.
“It’s not like every time I light a candle, I ask my grandmother to play tricks with it,” Henry says. “But there are times when I really do need to feel her presence, and when I do I will light a candle, and she will always let me know that she is there.”
After a dear friend of Henry’s passed away from cancer, Henry was especially saddened because she hadn’t made it to see his Christmas tree, as they had discussed. He was so full of grief that he had no motivation to put up his tree that year. Instead he sat in his living room and lit a small candle, and began to talking to his friend.
“I told her that I loved her and I missed her and I knew she was there with me, and then I looked at the candle,” he says. “I was expecting it to start moving, but it didn’t.”
Then Henry sent a message to his grandmother.
“I said, ‘Mami, I know you’re here, so please let my friend know that I am going to put up my Christmas tree just for her.’ And the candle went crazy. The flame started dancing. There were no windows open or anything like that. Everything was perfectly still. But the candle started dancing.”
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