This knowledge is already in our hearts. If we think about it long enough, we can know which of our decisions are love-based and which are fear-based. And when we’re really torn between the two—when we cannot distinguish between the love-based path and the fear-based path—that’s when the Other Side tries to send us signs. Signs are the directional arrows that point toward the highest path.
But sometimes, these signs are not external. Sometimes, signs aren’t even physical things. Or a spoken word, or a piece of music, or the wind.
Sometimes signs are just a tiny whisper in our hearts.
* * *
—
Sarah and David Rathke met in a bar. He was a bartender, and she was ordering a drink. “What’s funny is that the first time I ever saw him, he looked familiar to me,” Sarah recalls. “I wasn’t sure why, he just did.”
They flirted and dated, and six months later David proposed. “It was freezing outside, and I told Sarah I wanted to show her a boat in the harbor, because I wanted to propose by the water,” David says. “And when we got to the dock, all of a sudden Sarah turned to me and asked, ‘How much do you love me?’ I couldn’t believe it. There I was with a ring in my pocket about to get down on one knee. It was the perfect setup.”
They got married, and in the next few years had two children, both boys. Life with Luke and Daniel was an endlessly wonderful blessing, but also expensive and chaotic. “We live in Northern California, which is very expensive,” says David, a chief revenue officer (Sarah is a classical musician). “We’re not trust-fund kids. We drive a minivan. We started talking about having a third child, because Sarah really, really wanted a daughter. But it wasn’t an easy decision. To be honest, I wasn’t jumping up and down about the idea of having another child.”
“And I wasn’t going to pressure him if he really didn’t want to do it,” Sarah adds. “It’s not something you can force someone to do.”
They were both torn. They didn’t want to say yes, but they didn’t want to say no, either. And time was also a factor: Sarah was thirty-nine.
Finally they decided to just do it. But even then, they weren’t convinced they were making the right decision. So even after they made it, they didn’t rush to get pregnant. Fear was holding them back.
It was right around then that I met Sarah and David at a wedding. I was in a really great and festive mood, and I had a couple of drinks, and when I have a couple of drinks, a weird thing happens. I seem to have trouble keeping the door to the Other Side “shut,” so to speak; I get especially receptive to it. So when I found myself in a group with Sarah and David, I had no way of stopping David’s father from coming through.
“Your father died suddenly, didn’t he?” I asked David.
He looked startled and replied, “Yes, he did.”
“And his first name started with an R?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, your father is here, and he wants me to share some things.”
Oddly enough, David’s father, Richard, showed me shoes, pajamas, and teeth. He had me tell his son that even though David was wearing a fancy pair of dress shoes, he ought to invest in a decent pair of sneakers.
David smiled. He was wearing Gucci loafers and he did indeed need new sneakers.
Then his father told him that while he was at it, he ought to get rid of his ripped pajamas and buy a new pair of sweatpants.
“His PJs have this giant rip down the side, and he’d worn them for ten years, and he wouldn’t let me throw them away,” Sarah explains.
Then Richard told his son to see a dentist right away. “He says you have an issue with a tooth in the back right side of your mouth, and if you don’t get it fixed soon it will turn into a big health problem,” I said.
But David didn’t have any teeth issues.
Still, he booked a cleaning for the next week, just to be safe. And when the dentist examined him, he quickly asked David a question.
“Are you free this afternoon?”
“Why?”
“You have a tooth in the back that is severely vertically cracked, and I want to send you to an oral surgeon right now for a root canal. If you don’t do it soon, the tooth could become infected, and it could affect your heart.”
My brief reading with David turned out to be hugely significant for him. Not just because he got his tooth fixed in time, but because of how it affected his relationship with his father, who had a heart attack and crossed when David was just twenty-one.
“After my father died, I spent the next twenty-three years building a box around him,” David says. “I didn’t think about him or talk about him all that much, and I expected that box to be in place forever. It was just too tough otherwise. So I built the box.”
But when his father came through with signs and affirmations, “the box burned down,” says David. “It just went away. That’s when I knew my father was still with me.”
During our brief reading at the wedding, David asked me to pose a question to his father. Or rather, he joked about it.
“Let me guess,” David said at the time. “My father thinks we should have a third child.”
“He sees a third presence in your life,” I told David and Sarah, “and there is a lot of positivity around it. He says to tell you that it will be a girl—and he is telling me that you want a girl. He also says that if you wait until you can afford it to have another baby, it will be too late. But if you have this child, you will never be able to imagine your life without her in it.”
Then David’s father squeezed out one last message for his son. “Tell him to get on a treadmill and lose some weight.”
To David, that sounded just like his father.
I remember that after all these wonderful messages for David came through, he had a question he wanted me—and not his father—to answer.
“When my dad passes me advice from the Other Side,” he asked, “is it like he’s still here on the planet? Or is it like he is omnipotent? Because when he was here, he got a lot of stuff wrong.”
“On the Other Side, your father can see everything in totality,” I explained. “So he sees all these things and he wants to pass along some of these things to you, if they are important for your well-being. But it is not absolute. There is the concept of free will. You have choices that you need to make.”
In other words, nothing David’s father had relayed to him was an imperative. Nothing was an order. David’s father didn’t take him to the dentist—David had to drive himself there, he had to decide to go. The signs and messages and affirmations from the Other Side were meant to steer him in that direction.
“For me,” says Sarah, “hearing his father come through with all those messages is what did it. David’s father was just so positive about another baby. We both completely embraced the idea, and within a month I got pregnant.”
When David and Sarah’s third child—precious little Emily—came along, everything changed. “She is just so happy and smart and beautiful and playful, and David is absolutely smitten with her,” Sarah says. “She brought a new and different energy to the whole family. She sort of softened up the boys, and they adore her now. It was true—we really can’t imagine our life without Emily in it.”
Months after they named their daughter Emily, David and Sarah learned something about his great-grandparents from another relative. “I hadn’t known anything about them, but then we found out that my great-grandmother’s name was Emila, and my great-grandfather’s name was Emil,” David says. “It’s like Emily was always our destiny. This was always meant to happen.”
That is how the universe works—souls have deep connections and unique contracts that span centuries, exist back and forth in time, and bind us in ways we can’t really understand. The brilliant cords of love that ran through generations and generations of David’s family, and Sarah’s family, brou
ght the two of them together (remember how Sarah felt like she already knew David even though they’d never met?) and eventually brought Emily to them. These connections are ancient and everlasting, and they already exist in our hearts, even if we’re not always aware of them.
After all, David and Sarah made the decision to have a third child before they met me, and before David’s father, Richard, came through. All Richard did was affirm what they already knew in their hearts.
Sometimes, the sign is the whisper in our heart, the deep and undeniable pull, the inherent knowing that the answer is already there.
“All of these connections that run in and out of our lives, with people here and with people on the Other Side: They are very real, and they lead to real emotions and real changes in our lives,” says Sarah. “If we are open to this, it will truly enrich our lives. Because life is so much more than we can see in this dimension.”
* * *
—
Marina Romero grew up in a big family, with five children and many more cousins, and some part of her might have imagined that she, too, would have a big family someday. “I was born in Spain, and Spanish families are usually very large,” she says. But when she got older, she created a successful career for herself as a teacher and a therapist, and that career consumed most of her time. “The lifestyle I chose was not made for children,” she says. “I worked six days a week, every week of the year, and I was very passionate about my work. And so eventually I decided that I would not have children.”
Of course, as so often happens in life, things changed. Marina fell in love and got married, and for the first time in her life, she says, “I was with someone whom I felt, Okay, yes, I could have children with him. That was a deep feeling in my heart.”
At the time, Marina was fifty years old.
Despite her age, Marina and her husband, Samuel, decided to try to build a family. They went to a fertility clinic, and doctors told her she was more than healthy enough to bear a child. At the age of fifty-two, Marina got pregnant and learned she was going to have twin boys.
After forty weeks, however, “my babies died right before they were born,” Marina says with sadness. “It was a stillbirth. The doctors said it wasn’t because of my age, but they didn’t know why it happened. So after that, we were grieving for a very long time. I began to think it was the universe’s way of telling me I was not meant to be a mother, and I let it go. We tried to accept that we wouldn’t have a child.”
A few months later, Marina and Samuel took part in something called a vision quest. They went into the woods and spent several days there, apart from each other and with no food and just enough water to get by. “I think that when I went into the woods by myself, I was finally able to feel the grief of losing my twins,” Marina says. “And once I did, I had another very strong feeling. It was the feeling that I wanted to try one more time.”
Samuel supported his wife in her decision, and at the age of fifty-three Marina got pregnant again. This time, her doctor learned after twelve weeks that the pregnancy wasn’t viable. “That was extremely difficult,” Marina says. “We were going back and forth between viable and not viable, between yes, we will have this child and no, we won’t. It was very painful.”
But even then, Marina and Samuel decided to try again.
They had started the process with several frozen embryos at the fertility clinic. Now they were down to four. “I tried again with two embryos, but I just never got pregnant,” Marina recalls. “I don’t know why, it just didn’t happen. That is when I told myself, Now it is really over.”
Marina was fifty-four, and she felt lost in her life. She tried to devote herself to her career, but some days she couldn’t work at all. “I was missing my boys who died,” she says. “I had no clarity. I was lost, really lost. I didn’t know what to do with my life anymore.”
As it happens, Marina and I have a mutual friend, Ken Ring, a renowned psychologist and the pioneering researcher in the field of near-death studies. Ken referred Marina to me. In my reading with her, Marina’s father, Rafael, came through quite quickly and showed me two distinct souls.
“Your father is showing me two children,” I said to Marina. She seemed surprised that the topic of children came up so quickly.
“Yes, I did have two children,” she told me. “They died at birth.”
“Your father needs you to know it was not your fault in any way,” I said. “Their souls’ mission was to feel your unconditional love for those nine months of your pregnancy. That was their whole mission and lesson, just to feel unconditional love. They are safe and happy on the Other Side now, and they are with your father. And now…”
I paused, because Marina’s father was showing me another set of two distinct souls.
“…your father wants you to think about trying again.”
“I was shocked,” Marina says. “I was completely closed down to the whole process of trying to get pregnant again, but my father was insistent. He said that there were two little souls waiting to come to me, waiting to come into this life, if I wanted to have them. He said that they would be okay with whatever I decided to do, but that they were wondering if I wanted to do it. Because they wanted to be here.”
I could tell Marina was confused. She shared what she was thinking: Maybe all her struggles were a sign from the universe that she wasn’t destined to be a mother—that she needed to abandon her dream. Her father repeated the same message, letting her know that the twins were happy, and that there were two additional souls wanting to arrive.
“He says it will happen,” I told Marina. “That is what he is showing me—it will happen if you open up to it.”
So Marina went home and told her husband about the reading, and about her father’s clear message to her.
“Now it was his turn to be shocked,” Marina says.
The truth was, Marina was petrified. She was scared of trying again, fearful that she would lose another child or even two more children. She truly believed the door to her being a mother had closed. But it hadn’t. Despite her age, and despite everything she had gone through, the Other Side made it very clear that the door was still open.
Marina and Samuel talked it over at length, and agreed to see a doctor. If the doctor said Marina was still healthy enough to carry a child, then they would go home and think about it some more. Sure enough, the doctor gave them the green light. Then the universe sent a really big sign: The fertility clinic let Marina know they wouldn’t be able to store her remaining two embryos past the next three months. “It was like everything was pointing in this direction,” Marina says. “I was both very excited and very afraid.”
Her fear, however, was not enough to slam the door closed.
On her fifty-fifth birthday, Marina tried one more time to get pregnant. “That night was showered by these beautiful signs from the Other Side confirming the words of my father,” she remembers. “We danced and we celebrated not only my birthday, but the arrival of new souls.”
This time, Marina got pregnant. And she learned that she was having twins.
Her doctor told Marina everything looked just fine, but as she got closer to the forty-week mark, Marina could not help but dwell on the twin sons she had lost. And when she thought about them, she felt frightened and depressed. “I just could not be sure that these babies inside me would make it,” she says. Then, early one morning, her water broke. The twins weren’t due for another month, but still, Marina went into labor. Samuel helped her into the car to drive her to the hospital, but before they left Marina looked up at the sky. She noticed that the moon and Jupiter were together, shining brightly and adding to the beauty of the moment. “I felt it was a loving wink from the Other Side,” Marina says.
The twins arrived just after Marina entered the delivery room. Two beautiful, precious boys. They were small—one weighed four pounds, the other five—but t
hey were healthy. A nurse cleaned them and bundled them up and handed them to Marina.
When she finally had her twins in her arms, “It was like I went into this other place, this other dimension,” she says. “Like I wasn’t even on this earth. It was the most pure and powerful feeling of joy I ever felt. And then our relatives came over and everyone was looking at the babies, and I still couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe that these boys were actually here.”
Miraculously, the boys were born almost exactly three years from the day the other twins crossed.
The boys are named Oceanos and Arthur, and more than two years later they are doing wonderfully. “They are healthy and beautiful and tender and also wild,” Marina says. “I am exhausted all the time, but I am so happy. I didn’t think it would ever happen, but then it happened. I am a mother now.”
The affirmations and messages she received from her father played a part in helping Marina reach a decision. But the truth is, Marina’s connection to her father on the Other Side was not especially clear or strong before our reading.
“Even now when I try to communicate with my father, I can’t always feel him directly,” Marina says. “But the difference is, now I know that he is there. When the boys are really hard and I am very tired, I will tease my father and say, ‘You’re in trouble now, Dad.’ I do it because I believe that if we communicate with our loved ones on the Other Side, our lives will be better for it.”
Had Marina never had a reading with me, and had her father not come through so forcefully, would she have decided to try one more time on her own? She simply can’t say. Maybe the notice from the fertility clinic would have pushed her to make the decision. Or maybe, somehow, her father would have found some other way to come through with his message of hope and trust and love.
“With the harshness of the stillbirth, and the difficulty of all the other times I tried to get pregnant, I couldn’t always hear the deep, soft, tender voice in my heart,” Marina says. “It was blocked, and I felt so lost, and I didn’t know what to do with my life anymore. But then the boys came along, and not only did I recover my connection to that soft, tiny voice in my heart, but I also realized that this voice can be a channel for our loved ones on the Other Side to connect with us. It is how they can whisper their loving guidance to us.”
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