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“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.”
Henry doesn’t talk about his candles with too many people, but whenever he lights a candle for his Mami Emma, and it flickers and dances in the windless air, Henry makes sure to mention it to me.
“It is something that is so personal to me and my belief,” he says.
“It brings me so much peace and so much closure. I feel like I understand how the Other Side works.
“Every time I get the sign, it is this beautiful message of hope and security and unity, of how we are all connected, how our families endure, and how we can always be there for each other in times of need.”