“I knew from the second I walked in that he was dead,” she says through tears. “I called nine-one-one, and ten police cars and three ambulances came over. But I knew he was gone. My son was gone. All I could say to the police was, ‘I can’t believe this is what happened to my beautiful boy.’ ”
* * *
—
Jonathan had shot himself in the head. He was twenty-eight years old. And he had chosen to end his life on Leslie’s birthday.
“It felt like every part of my body was under attack,” Leslie says. “I was in pain, physical pain, every minute of every day. Constant, terrible pain. It was like I was being attacked from the inside out. Basically, I was destroyed.”
In a way, Leslie shut down her life. She was still there for her daughter and she still managed to teach piano lessons—in fact, the only time she didn’t feel pain was when she was teaching or playing music—but effectively, she shut down her life.
“Because of how Jonathan lived and how he ended his life, and when he chose to do it, I believed he did it to hurt me as much as he could. So I had this terrible guilt and terrible sorrow, and all I could think about was the day he was born, and how little and precious he was, and how he was gone now and I couldn’t feel him anymore, and it was just so deeply painful. I was torn to shreds.”
Leslie was haunted by another memory—two years before his crossing, Jonathan asked her to make him a fancy multi-tiered French cake for his birthday. “And I remember saying, ‘Oh no, that’s too hard,’ and I didn’t make it, and I baked a simple cake instead,” she says. “Now I felt such horrible guilt about not making the cake.”
For nearly six years after Jonathan crossed, Leslie’s pain hadn’t lessened. People told her she needed to get over it and move on with her life, but that just made no sense to her.
“I thought, No, that is not what I need, because no one gets over this,” Leslie says. “It will always be there, and I have to find a way to take it with me as I go. But you don’t just ‘get over’ it. For example, my brother was constantly trying to fix me and heal me, but that wasn’t going to happen, and so our relationship became strained, too. I felt so alone and unconnected to anyone.”
Worst of all, she felt no sense of connection to Jonathan.
“People would talk about receiving signs from loved ones who had crossed, but I never felt like I was getting any signs,” Leslie says. “I couldn’t feel or see or sense anything. It was just this emptiness.”
One year after Jonathan crossed, Leslie’s father, Tony, became seriously ill. Leslie was very close to him, too, and toward the end of his life she asked him for a favor.
“I told him that I was very worried about Jonathan, that maybe he wasn’t in a good place on the Other Side, and that he was angry with me,” Leslie says. “I knew my father was going to cross, and I said, ‘Dad, when you get to heaven, please find Jonathan, and find a way to let me know he is okay.’ ”
Soon after, her father crossed. Three days later, Leslie got a text message on her cellphone. It was a photo of her father, with the words “Everything is fine” typed beneath it. Leslie checked the number to see who had sent her the text.
It had been sent from her father’s cellphone.
“It was frightening!” she says. “I mean, this picture of my father did not even exist on my phone, so it’s not like it just popped up from my photo file. But how did it come from my father’s phone? How could my dad send me a text three days after he died?”
Leslie showed the message to other family members, who were as baffled as she was. She asked if anyone had Tony’s cellphone, but no one did. No one had any idea where it was. So Leslie went to her father’s house, and into his bedroom, to sort through his belongings. “I couldn’t find his phone,” she says. “Finally, I looked under his bed and there it was. I turned it on and it had just a tiny bit of power left. Somehow, that phone had sent me his picture and a text message.”
There was no explanation Leslie could think of. No explanation anyone she knew could think of.
Leslie accepted the possibility that the inexplicable text message from her father was some kind of sign—an indication that Jonathan was okay. But it wasn’t enough to alleviate her crippling sadness.
Five years later, Leslie and I had our reading, and her son came through so forcefully. Jonathan, I realized, wasn’t someone who would have a lot of trouble sending signs from the Other Side. He seemed very gifted at communicating. He seemed powerful.
The problem was that Leslie was still too consumed by her sorrow to see what might be right in front of her.
One of the first things Jonathan had me convey to his mother was something he neglected to do on the day he crossed.
“Your son never wished you a happy birthday, did he?” I asked Leslie.
“No, he didn’t,” she said.
“He is saying it now,” I told her.
Leslie started to cry again.
“Jonathan is showing me that he struggled with addiction, and that he killed himself,” I said. “And he is saying that he understands things now that he did not understand when he was here. He is stronger now. He is saying that he is healed. He has healed so beautifully and so fully. And he needs you to know that none of it is your fault. You were the most important person in his life, and he loves you so, so much.”
I could hear the effect Jonathan’s words were having on his mother. They were exactly the words she needed to hear the most. And in that moment, I could almost feel Leslie begin to surrender some of the burden that she’d been carrying for so long.
“He is also saying that he is sorry,” I told Leslie. “He is very sorry that he did what he did on your birthday. He wants you to know that he didn’t do it as a way to hurt you. He did it because he didn’t want you to ever forget him, and he wanted you to have a link with him so that you would always, always remember him. And your birthday was that link. It was more of a remembrance, more of a way to honor the bond between you, not to hurt you or punish you. He needs you to understand that.”
Leslie exhaled and let her tears flow. The connection to her son that she believed she’d lost, she was realizing, was not lost at all.
Jonathan wanted to affirm the enduring bond between him and his mother, and he showed me the sign they shared: a tree with a heart in it. When I relayed this to Leslie, she seemed stumped.
“No,” she said, “that’s not our sign. I don’t remember that.”
But Jonathan persisted. He showed me the sign again—a tree and a heart—and this time he showed me a place where I could find it.
Right in his mother’s front yard.
“He is saying that the sign is with you today,” I told Leslie. “He is showing me the front of your house.”
While we were still on the phone, Leslie got up and walked to her front door. I could hear her footsteps on the phone. Suddenly she stopped in her tracks.
“Oh my gosh,” she said.
As she explained it to me, there was a tree in her front yard, and beside it there was a little ceramic statue planted in the ground.
A statue of a heart.
“All of a sudden it clicked,” she says now. “After Jonathan crossed, I planted a tree in the front yard in his honor, and I put the little heart next to it because trees and hearts always made me think of Jonathan. I don’t know why, they just did. And then I guess I just completely forgot about it. Until Jonathan pointed it out to me again all those years later.”
Through me, Jonathan led his mother straight to the sacred little space she had created for him, so that he could acknowledge and affirm the sign between them—a tree and a heart. It had been there all along, and Leslie had probably walked past it a few thousand times. And yet she had forgotten it—but Jonathan didn’t.
And now he was reminding her, and thanking her, and letting her know that he wa
s still around, still in her heart, as present as the tree.
“That was such a powerful, powerful moment,” Leslie says. “I went from feeling like I had no connection to him to knowing that he was still with me. And that was the beginning of me going on with my life.”
* * *
—
Since our reading, Leslie has stayed open to the signs her son sends her, and as a result she feels a deep and enduring connection to Jonathan that has helped heal her heart. There are times when she actually feels Jonathan’s presence, as if he were right there with her.
For instance, Jonathan liked coming into his mother’s bedroom and plopping down at the foot of her bed and talking with her for fifteen minutes at the end of difficult days—and today, “I can still feel him there, at the foot of my bed, like someone is actually sitting there,” Leslie says. “I’ll feel him arrive and it lets me know he is doing okay and watching over me.”
Another place Leslie feels her son’s presence is by the front door. Before he crossed, Jonathan once disappeared for three days, and Leslie worried she would never see him again. Then one evening, she glanced up and saw him standing just inside the front door. “It was like he was saying, ‘I’ve come home,’ ” Leslie recalls. “It was a very powerful moment and we hugged for a long time. And now I sometimes feel Jonathan standing in that same spot. Sometimes it’s like I can actually see him there. And it’s like he’s always arriving, always coming back home to see me.”
When Leslie told me she sometimes “sees” Jonathan, I asked her what she meant. When I “see” people who have crossed, I see them as tiny points of light and energy on the little screen that forms in my mind. Some psychic mediums I know see people who have crossed in their human forms, as if they were standing among us. For Leslie, it was something else—something she had a hard time explaining.
“You know,” she finally said, “it’s like I see him with my third eye.”
I understood what she meant. Many cultures and religions have the concept of a third eye that allows us to perceive things beyond the powers of ordinary sight. Basically, it is a figurative representation of our ability to see and perceive things at a higher and deeper level than is common—a shift in our consciousness that opens us to new insights. The ability to see the unseen that is all around us.
This is the very same concept that I’ve been returning to throughout this book—the shift in our consciousness that happens when we open our minds and our hearts to signs and messages from the Other Side. When Leslie “feels” the presence of her son in her home, she is demonstrating clairsentience—the ability to feel things through means other than our five senses. When Leslie “feels” Jonathan sitting at the foot of her bed, she is sensing the subtle presence of his life energy and consciousness. In the same way, when Leslie says she “sees” Jonathan standing by the front door, she is demonstrating a form of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive things through means other than our sense of sight.
I have had these moments myself, and I have spoken with thousands of people who have had them, and I can attest that they are deeply meaningful. These connections happen. They are not imagined. We feel them. We see our loved ones. We sense their presence. We hear their voices. We understand that they are still with us—that they are not lost to us.
And when we have these moments, we should honor them and talk about them, not dismiss them.
Before Leslie opened herself up to these beautiful moments of connectivity, she fully believed that she had lost her son—that he was gone forever. But he wasn’t. He never will be. Because our souls endure, no matter how we cross. Our life energy lives on. We remain bound by powerful cords of light and love and energy that flow freely between us.
At the time of our reading, I told Leslie that Jonathan was a pretty powerful force on the Other Side. He helped her father send her an incredible message and confirmation through his cellphone, and he somehow pulled the strings that brought Leslie and me together. He also communicated that he was grateful to his mother for agreeing to shepherd him through the world even though she knew he wouldn’t be in it for long.
“He says his soul came to earth to learn from you,” I told Leslie. “The lesson you taught him was unconditional love.”
“His message to me was a message of love and forgiveness and healing,” Leslie says. “I was angry about what happened, and that is natural, but now I feel like I am healing, and I still love Jonathan fully and profoundly. We have a connection that will never go away, and now that I know that, I can live a love-based life, not a fear-based life. Because when we connect, all I feel for Jonathan is love.”
Today Leslie marks her birthday on May 1, more than two weeks after her actual birthday, April 14. “That day is now Jonathan’s day,” she says. “It’s a day we can celebrate all that he is and all that he has brought us.
“My message to anyone who is stuck in grief and sadness like I was is ‘Do not be afraid,’ ” Leslie says. “Because when you’re afraid, you close yourself off. And when you open your heart and your mind, what comes back from the universe is pure love and joy. And you begin to understand that your loved ones are still with you, and there is no blame, no fault, no anger, no guilt, just unconditional love. And that gives you the freedom to go on.”
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SURRENDER
THIS book is a journey toward a new way of looking at our lives. It starts with opening our minds to the possibility of signs sent to us by the Other Side. It moves on to co-creating a language that makes it easier for our Teams of Light to send us those signs. From there, it takes us to appreciating how powerful and life-altering these signs can be. And then we reach the point that can be the most challenging part of the journey—our willingness to trust the universe. The willingness to surrender.
To explain what I mean by this, I’d like to share a personal story about a difficult and frightening time for me and for my family. To be honest, I was reluctant at first to tell this story publicly, but I decided to include it here because it shows how I navigated the very journey of this book, how I came to that point of trusting the universe, and how that changed my path.
This is a story about surrender.
* * *
—
It starts on a beach on Long Island, on a beautiful summer day. I was with my three children. Ashley, my oldest, was fourteen. Nothing was amiss; my kids were all healthy and happy and having a typically carefree summer. Ashley was about to start high school, and she was excited about it but also a little nervous.
Ashley was pure sweetness. She was a beautiful, tender, compassionate soul. She was in advanced classes throughout middle school, she took ballet and lyrical dance, she excelled at art, and she made the honor roll. She was also delightful to be around—funny, kind, thoughtful, and loving. She never once lied to me or talked back to me or used bad language. I know I’m biased, but in every way Ashley was the ideal child.
That afternoon at the beach, I noticed a strange rash on Ashley’s back. It looked like a row of six thick, horizontal lines stretching across the middle of her back—almost like they had been carved with a knife. I asked her if it hurt or itched, and she said no. Even so, I took her to see the doctor.
“That’s weird,” the doctor said when she examined her. “It could be a jellyfish sting.”
I told the doctor Ashley hadn’t been in the water that day.
“Then it’s stretch marks,” the doctor concluded. “Don’t worry about them. They will fade in time.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. Ashley was slender, which made me wonder how she could end up with stretch marks. But the doctor stuck to her diagnosis, and I let it go. That is what we do—we listen to authority. She told me not to worry, so I tried not to.
Right around that time I began to notice a subtle shift in Ashley’s behavior. She started experiencing bouts of anxiety. She seemed to get
easily angry. That summer we’d gone to Disneyland, and we got stuck for about fifteen minutes in a boat on the Jungle Cruise ride, right next to a tribal scene of a man with a big pot of boiling water and a shrunken head on a stick. At the time it was kind of funny, but a week or so later, out of the blue, Ashley became crippled with anxiety about it. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, and she spent two days in bed. She was terrified by the idea of cannibals existing in the world. I reasoned with her and reassured her, and finally she seemed to let go of her terror. I chalked it up to her nervousness about starting high school.
By the time her classes began, though, Ashley was already transforming into a different person. I mean a completely different person. She was rude and cranky and disrespectful, and for the first time her grades started dropping. She began having acute insomnia and anxiety attacks that would leave her curled up on the floor in a blanket. In the mornings I couldn’t get her up for school no matter how hard I tried. Garrett and I decided to take Ashley out of school and have tutors come to our home instead. We had no choice.
Ashley made it through the ninth-grade curriculum, but when she returned to school for her sophomore year, her struggle continued. She couldn’t focus on anything and didn’t seem to care. At home she’d wrap herself in a blanket and lie on the floor for hours, with her eyes closed or staring blankly. Her anxiety was so acute she could barely function, and she’d miss days and even weeks of school. I was alternately worried to death about her and angry with her. We fought a lot, and that took a toll on the entire family. Something was clearly wrong with my daughter, but no one could tell me what it was.
One day, I had a sudden thought about a memoir I’d read many years before by the writer Amy Tan, called The Opposite of Fate. One of the final chapters told the story of her struggle with Lyme disease. Her symptoms had been more psychiatric than physical, just like my daughter’s. That Amy’s memoir popped into my head felt like a tug from the universe, and I immediately suspected that Lyme disease might be the culprit in Ashley’s case. Part of me was already convinced I’d cracked the case. For the first time in a very long time, I felt a surge of hope.
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