I know, because I was in the middle of it. And I watched it all unfold in the most magical way.
* * *
—
A few years ago, Susan and her three sons flew from California to New Orleans to visit her husband, Marc. Marc was a production designer who was working on a film that was shooting in the city. The family had planned a lovely long weekend together.
While Marc took the boys on a boat trip, Susan went into town and stopped by a voodoo museum. On a whim, she allowed a man who worked in the shop to read her tarot cards. “He had just come back from Haiti, and seemed very kind, so we sat down and he laid out all my cards,” Susan says. “Every single card was about death or dying. It was very scary and intense.”
Susan could even see that the tarot reader was surprised.
He asked her, “Is your husband okay?”
She told him Marc was fine.
“I feel like he has a headache,” the reader said. He looked at the cards again and added, “What I can tell you is that you are going to go through the biggest transformation in your life. But in the end, you are going to be okay.”
Susan was spooked. But she shrugged it off and, the next day, the whole family flew back to Los Angeles. A few days after that, Marc returned to New Orleans to finish the movie.
Marc was healthy and vibrant, and had no major health issues, but on the very morning he returned to New Orleans, on the way to the movie set, he suffered a brain hemorrhage.
Six days later, surrounded by his family, Marc crossed.
* * *
—
Susan was devastated. Her sense of loss was unbearable. “I had incredible friends and incredible support, but those months were such a dark, terrible time,” she says. “Actually, it wasn’t months; it was more like two years.”
It was during this period that Susan’s friend Jill—the connector we met in chapter 18—called to arrange a phone reading for Susan.
At the very start of the reading, Susan’s husband came through. He knew his crossing had left her in a really dark and lonely place and how hard her life had been. But he had a plan to change all that.
“He is saying there is another relationship waiting for you,” I told Susan. “He says you aren’t necessarily ready for it now, but he wants you to know that you are not meant to be alone. You are meant to live vibrantly, and he wants to help you live that way. He is going to organize it from the Other Side.”
Susan was startled, and understandably so. She’d just lost her husband; the last thing on her mind was another relationship. And yet here was her husband telling her he was going to set her up on a date.
Marc’s message was very straightforward. He was going to help Susan find the happiness she deserved, but it wasn’t going to happen right away. In fact, he said, it was going to take four and a half years from the time of his crossing. Susan accepted what Marc was saying, but I could see she didn’t really believe it. The mere thought of entering into a new relationship must have seemed to her like a betrayal of the love they shared.
I understood why she would feel that way, but I also know that’s not how the universe works. And that’s not how our loved ones on the Other Side look at it. They want us to be happy.
When we cross, we take the love we felt on earth with us. And once we’re on the Other Side, that love only intensifies. But even as it grows and grows, it never becomes possessive. We don’t take love away from one person by giving it to another person. On the Other Side, there is an abundance of love, and so love is not a zero-sum game. So for Marc, seeing his wife, Susan, share love with someone else would not be a betrayal, or even a suggestion that her love for him, or his for her, was being diminished in any way.
On the contrary—by living a life filled with love and vibrancy, Susan would be honoring the love she shared with Marc. She would be giving him the greatest gift he could ever ask for—seeing her on her highest life path.
I have read for many people who were terrified that any new relationship would hurt a loved one who had crossed. And every time, the wife or husband on the Other Side came through forcefully to explain how this is simply not true. In fact, they not only approved of a new relationship that would lead to true happiness and fulfillment, they very often played a big part in making that relationship happen!
Still, my reading with Susan was the first time someone on the Other Side explained to me in advance how they were going to play matchmaker. So I was curious to see how it would play out.
A few weeks later, I was in Los Angeles, and I met Susan and Jill for breakfast. Susan didn’t ask me any more questions about our reading, but I felt someone pushing through for her. It wasn’t her husband Marc—it was someone else. I was getting an R name.
“There is something coming through very strongly,” I told Susan. “His name…his name is Randy.”
“Randy?” Susan said, completely stumped.
“Yes, Randy. He is standing here, and he’s not leaving. He says he knows you.”
Susan thought about it for a moment. Then she said, “Randy D.?”
“Yes!” I said. “He is standing here. And he is here with Marc. They are standing together.”
“That’s really odd,” Susan said. “Randy passed away seventeen years ago. I don’t really think about him very often. He was married to my good friend Barbara. Wow—I haven’t spoken to Barbara in a while…”
“Well, he’s here and Marc is saying he is going to enlist Randy to help find a man for you.”
I could tell Susan wasn’t sure what to think. She said she still talked to Barbara, Randy’s widow, a few times a year, but she hadn’t connected with her recently. Really, there wasn’t any reason Marc would team up with Randy on the Other Side.
Moments later, Susan’s cellphone rang. She looked at the number, and her face froze. It was Barbara—just wanting to catch up.
Now Susan really didn’t know what to think.
But I did. Randy was the second piece of the puzzle.
* * *
—
Four and a half years is a long time to wait, so to keep Susan aware of his presence in her life, Marc began sending her signs. In our reading, she had already mentioned how she suspected he was sending her signs—and one sign in particular: rainbows.
“Marc’s favorite song was ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ” she says. “He loved to play it on the piano. After he died, we went to Hawaii, where Marc and I were married, to spread his ashes. I remember standing in this beautiful spot on the beach spreading his ashes, and looking up and asking Marc, ‘Why aren’t you sending me any signs? I want a sign.’ ”
Just a few minutes later, a beautiful rainbow appeared across the sky.
But Susan wasn’t impressed.
“I said, ‘Marc, this is Hawaii, there are rainbows all the time. Is that really all you got? You’re an artist! You can do better than that!”
Just a few minutes after that, Susan looked up at the rainbow again. By then it had changed. It wasn’t just a rainbow anymore.
It was a double rainbow.
“And then I said, ‘Well, okay, that is impressive, Marc.’ ”
Now that they had their sign established, Marc got really creative. Susan wanted to have a memorial service for Marc at Sony Studios, where he had done so much wonderful work. She tried to book the date for the service, but construction in the parking lot was disrupting events. So she settled for a later date.
On the morning of the service, Susan and Jill drove to Culver City. Along the way, Susan looked out the car window and saw a dazzling sight—the biggest, most vibrant double rainbow she had ever seen in her life. Susan and Jill knew immediately that Marc was guiding the way. “The rainbow was so amazing, it made the news the next day,” she says. “When I saw it, I just started crying.”
But that was only Marc’s
opening act.
When they arrived at Sony Studios and pulled into the parking lot, she saw the construction that had delayed the service. It wasn’t a new building or additional parking spaces.
It was a rainbow. A gigantic, towering rainbow.
“I was astounded,” Susan says. “They built it over the parking lot as a tribute to The Wizard of Oz, which had been filmed there in the 1930s. And as soon as it was completed, I could have the service. We couldn’t have the service until the rainbow was finished!”
The rainbow was 188 feet across, ten stories tall, built on a hundred-thousand-pound steel truss and covered with 648 brightly colored aluminum panels. It wasn’t just any rainbow; it was a glorious Hollywood rainbow that took ten cranes and 115 people to build—just like one of the many sets Marc had designed on that very lot.
And it was there, in the very same lot, just waiting for Susan to see.
* * *
—
Three and a half years after Marc crossed, Susan hired an architect for a job she was designing. They became friendly, and one day the architect told Susan about another client of his.
“I’m building a house for him in Seattle,” he said. “I really want you to meet him, I have a feeling you two would like each other.”
Susan was polite but firm.
“I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not ready, I don’t want to meet him.’ And that was that. We dropped it and moved on to something else.”
But a year later, the architect called Susan out of the blue.
“He said, ‘Hey, my friend from Seattle is here in Los Angeles, I really want you to meet him,’ ” Susan recalls. “And once again I said, ‘No thanks, I’m not interested.’ ”
“Come on,” the architect said. “Let’s just all meet for dinner and have a good time. Nothing more than that.”
So Susan joined the architect and his friend—David—for dinner.
They got along. They had a lot in common. They talked about art and architecture and their travels and their families and lots of other things. After dinner, David asked Susan if he could call her once he got back to Seattle. She said that would be okay. A few days later, he called. The day after that, he called again. “He called me a lot,” Susan says. “We had all these wonderful conversations. And then one day he was in Hawaii, and he sent me a text. The text didn’t have any words, it was just a picture.”
David sent her a photo of a beautiful double rainbow—even though he knew nothing about the significance of rainbows in her life.
“That’s when I said, ‘Whoa, okay, I better pay attention to this.’ ”
* * *
—
Not long after, David came to Los Angeles again, and he and Susan went out on a date. Then a second date, and a third. Susan visited David in Seattle, and he proudly showed her his collection of motorcycles. When Susan had to travel to San Francisco, David met her there.
“We had a great time, and then we went our separate ways, me to Los Angeles and David to Seattle,” she says. “But on the way to the airport, two more rainbows appeared in the sky. Two separate rainbows in two different places. I took pictures of them. I have photos of all the rainbows I saw during that time. I’d look out my bedroom window and I’d see a big, giant rainbow right there. Or I’d be driving, and I’d turn a corner, and I’d run right into a big rainbow. They were showing up in ways that I couldn’t possibly miss them.”
It was right around this time that I happened to be in California and met up with Susan again. To be honest, I’d forgotten most of the details of my reading for her, but when I saw her it jogged my memory. I asked her if she remembered the amount of time that Marc had told her to wait before she met the man.
She said yes—four and a half years.
“And what about Randy?” I asked. “Has there been a Randy connection?”
“No, no Randy connection,” Susan said.
The next morning, Randy’s widow, Barbara, just happened to call her again to say hello.
“And you know, one of the first questions she asked me was, ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ ” Susan says. “I said, ‘Yes, this guy, but you wouldn’t know him.’ And I told her his name.”
There was a silence on the phone. Finally, Barbara said, “I do know him.”
“How do you know him?” Susan asked.
“He was Randy’s good friend. They used to ride motorcycles together. In fact, he has one of Randy’s motorcycles.”
Susan was stunned. She had seen the motorcycle. David had shown it to her when she was in Seattle. And now she was learning that it was Randy’s motorcycle. The Randy connection! Finally Susan told Barbara about everything that had happened—the reading, having Marc say he was setting her up, learning about Randy, and finally, meeting David.
“Yep,” Barbara said, “that sounds like something Randy would be involved in.”
“It was astonishing,” Susan says now. “It was like this incredible puzzle with all these pieces that had to fall into place just right. So when I heard that David and Randy had been friends, that’s what tied everything together. I knew that Marc and Randy were working together on the Other Side.”
Susan was right. Marc enlisted Randy to help him with his mission: steering Susan toward a new relationship that would help her grow and engage in life fully again. The Other Side is capable of brilliantly orchestrating connections for us here on earth, and what happened to Susan is beautiful evidence of how involved our loved ones are willing to get in leading us to our highest paths. “I mean, no one could have known all the things they needed to know to pull this off,” Susan says. “David is very logical and not a believer in signs or anything like that, but when I called him and told him about Randy, even David agreed there was no logical explanation for it. He knew no one in the world could have made it happen.”
We humans have a tendency to stick to paradigms, or models of reality, that we know and understand. And when something challenges our existing paradigm, we look for ways to make it fit, so it will make rational sense. We look for logical explanations. But what is the logical way to explain Susan’s truth? Even if someone googled Susan and Marc and David and Randy and learned everything about them, how could they possibly use that information to make such a plan fall neatly into place? What happened to Susan isn’t google-able!
The only people who could have pulled the strings and brought Susan and David together in such a magical way are Marc and Randy, working together, on the Other Side.
A funny thing happened not long after Susan realized that she and David were meant to be dating—she stopped seeing so many rainbows.
“I’ll still see one here and there, but it’s different,” she says. “They aren’t as prominent. And I feel like that is Marc pulling back a little bit. It was like he held my hand all the way through it, and now he is giving me the space I need to move forward. And everything has been so free and easy with David. It all feels so incredibly natural. And that is Marc pulling back at just the right time.”
That is how the Other Side works. Our Teams of Light will hold our hands through the darkness like a parent walking their child to school on the first day of kindergarten. But they will also let go when they need to, so that we can freely do what we need to do to get on our highest life path.
Okay, but what if I hadn’t been there to tell Susan about Randy, or about Marc’s plan? Would she still have ended up dating David?
I believe she would have, for one reason—the signs.
Susan established her sign with Marc—rainbows—before we ever met. And Marc confirmed that sign in ways Susan simply couldn’t dispute. A giant rainbow in a parking lot? The very parking lot Susan had to drive through on the day of his service? And then, after Susan’s architect introduced her to David, David texted her a photo of a rainbow. That made Susan sit up and take notice. Even if s
he hadn’t heard about Randy from me, she likely would have eventually discovered that David was buddies with one of her friends who crossed years earlier, and surely that would have been very meaningful to her.
In other words, Marc would have found a way to put his plan into action with or without me. Sometimes the Other Side uses someone like me—a psychic medium—but most of the time, they don’t. They use whatever they can, wherever they can find it. They put rainbows in our path, and even in parking lots.
27
TINY WHISPERS
WHEN we get a sign from the Other Side, it is not a directive. Signs are not mandates to take a particular course of action. While they can act as guideposts or nudges of love and support from our Teams of Light, we each have the free will to choose our own paths, lessons, and experiences. Ultimately, our free will empowers us. We are the ones who decide what we do, not some external force. The choice will always be ours.
What the Other Side does try to do is make us realize that, deep down inside, we often already know what we need to do to find our highest path—we just need to trust it. We should not allow our fear to overpower our free-will choices. Our Teams of Light are often just trying to get us to open our minds and our hearts to an answer that is already inside us.
That’s what signs do—they affirm that we are never alone on this earth, that we are always surrounded by our own personal cheerleading squads, and that our Teams of Light are tirelessly rooting—and patiently waiting—for us to do the things we need to do to live the best, most authentic, most purpose-driven lives we possibly can.
All signs are messages of love. And every decision that will lead us to our highest path is a decision based on love, not fear. So when we acknowledge and honor the powerful signs we receive from the Other Side, we allow them to guide us on a path of love, instead of making decisions dictated by fear.
Signs Page 19