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9
GIRAFFES, EIFFEL TOWERS, AND A SONG
Alexander went to college and on to law school, but even then he knew he wanted to follow his father into the world of business. So Alexander, too, became a successful businessman, inspired by his parents at every step. When he got married in early 2013, his mother and father were there to walk him down the aisle.
A few months later, Alexander called his mother to say good night. “We made plans to see each other the next day,” he says. “I remember she didn’t sound right, but I didn’t think it was anything too serious. The next day she had a massive stroke and fell into a coma.”
His mother came out of the coma for only a few hours ten days into her hospital stay and then reverted to a minimally conscious state. Five months later, she passed away.
In the months that followed, Alexander and his wife tried to conceive, but were unsuccessful. After a few months, the couple began fertility treatments. On the day they were supposed to drive to the airport to fly to the beach to spend the weekend with Alexander’s father, they had to cancel because of the IVF schedule. “I called him and told him I was sorry we couldn’t make it, but we were going to try to bring him a grandchild,” Alexander says.
That night, the phone rang at ten-thirty. It was his father’s assistant calling to tell him that his father had been on a plane, and the plane had crashed. His father was gone.
“My wife and I would have been on that plane,” he says. “And now my father was dead.”
The news brought him to his knees. “It was devastating,” he says.
“It destroyed me. It destroyed every fiber of my being. Nothing made sense, and I cried myself to sleep every night. It was an incredible amount of pain.”
A close friend connected him to me, hoping a reading would bring him some comfort. The friend withheld all information about Alexander, and in fact only gave me the wrong initial of his first name—a test I had to pass to overcome Alexander’s skepticism, I suppose.
My reading with Alexander was extraordinary. His loved ones on the Other Side must have known that he would need a lot of affirmation to be convinced that he was connecting with his parents.
His father came through first. He told me how he had crossed to the Other Side and gave me the first names of the other people who had perished on the plane along with him. His father let me know that he had not one funeral, but two. He even gave me the name of one of the political dignitaries who spoke at the funeral.
Still, Alexander needed just a little more affirmation.
Over the next few months we spoke and texted on and off, and in one of our talks, Alexander asked for a very specific sign from his dad.
“We had a song,” Alexander says. “It was our song. Maybe five people in the world knew that we shared this song—my wife, my sister, two people who crossed, and me. Not even my best friend knew it. So I asked my father to send Laura the lyrics to that song—it would be a sign that he was with me.”
Alexander asked me to contact him again when I had received the lyrics to their song.
Weeks passed, then months, and nothing happened. No song came to me. Alexander’s father came through several times, including in readings I was doing with other sitters that I had no idea he’d known—until he showed up in their readings, that is. He always burst right through, as if he had VIP status. My spirit guides—or, I guess, my spirit “bouncers”—clearly couldn’t keep him outside the ropes. He’d also come to me at random times on random days. He was such a forceful, beautiful presence, it was like he became a part of my life. I’d tell Alexander when his father had visited me, and he loved hearing about these welcome intrusions, but still, no song.
One evening, after a rough day, Alexander and his wife went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I happened to text him while they were at dinner, because I’d gotten a message of encouragement from his dad that he wanted me to pass on to his son. Alexander read the text and smiled and then handed the phone to his wife.
She read the text and began to cry. “Did you see this?” she said.
“See what?”
When Alexander first read the text, he’d only read the opening lines—it was in fact a long text. The part he could see ended with an arrow, which opened up the rest of the text on his phone. So he only read the top portion of the text and missed the arrow. But his wife had read the whole thing. The text contained the lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin—the song Alexander and his father shared!
I’d felt Alexander’s dad around just as I was falling asleep that night, and I got the song lyrics in my head. I googled the lyrics and copied them into a text to Alexander.
Ever since, the song has become a sign for Alexander of his father’s presence. One day, Alexander had an important business meeting—he was connecting with three people he’d never met before at a coffee shop. On the way there, he was anxious. As he slid into the booth, he had the thought that he wished he could have talked to his father before the meeting.
At that very moment “Cat’s in the Cradle” came on over the coffee shop speakers. It arrived just when he needed to hear it. Alexander lowered his head as tears filled his eyes. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and cried.
“It was just such a beautiful moment of connection with my father,” he says. “It was my father letting me know that I was doing the right thing, doing a great job, and that he was there, watching over me.”
Alexander’s projection of his need for his father’s support, and his dad’s instant response—playing that exact song at that exact time—is precisely how the secret language of the universe works.
—
After his mother’s crossing, Alexander also created an unusually specific sign for her to use.
“My mother’s favorite animal was a giraffe,” Alexander says. “She loved giraffes, and we’d always joke about giraffes. And her favorite city in the world was Paris—she spoke fluent French.” So what was the sign he asked for? A giraffe and an Eiffel Tower together. Not separately, but together, at the same time.
When Alexander told me about it, I laughed. I remember thinking it was a very particular sign, but I also knew that, when we talk to our loved ones on the Other Side, they listen. And the universe has magical ways of bringing our signs to us.
Not too much later, I went to do a group reading in the house of someone I’d never met. Right before I began the reading, I asked to use the bathroom so I could freshen up. As I entered the bathroom, something on the wall caught my attention—and at that very instant I felt Alexander’s mother’s energy push into my screen. I looked at the thing that had caught my eye and then leaned in to get a closer look.
Could it be?
Yes, it was.
It was a framed pencil drawing called Metamorphosis. On the left side of the drawing, there was a giraffe. As the drawing moved from left to right, the giraffe began to change shape. On the right side of the drawing, the giraffe had been completely transformed…into the Eiffel Tower.
I took a photo of the drawing and immediately texted it to Alexander. “It was exactly what I asked for,” he says. “And since then, I’ve seen giraffes and Eiffel Towers together on greeting cards in stationery stores, in toy stores, in a gift shop. Sometimes I’ll be pulled toward it. Every time, it’s a magical feeling.”
—
Just as he had when he was a boy, Alexander spent a long time thinking about what the signs meant, and what they taught him about the afterlife.
“Look, if you live in this physical world, you are always going to have doubts and skepticism about the hereafter,” he says. “You will always wonder if we really do continue to exist after we die. I mean, I have had that very question since I was a boy of eight years old. So maybe that’s why I asked my parents for so much validation. And sure enough, they sent it to me. They sent it to me over and over and over again.
“For me,” Alexander continues, “there simply could not be any other explanation for the song lyrics and for the giraffes and Eiffel Towers except that it was my mother and father, communicating with me and letting me know they were with me.”
Not a day goes by that Alexander doesn’t miss his parents, because no matter how many signs we get, the sense of physical loss is always there. He feels the heartbreak of their absence, and it is crushing. Some days, Alexander will pull out a pair of his father’s shoes that he’s kept—they wore the same size—and slip them on and go for a long walk. “I literally walk in his shoes and think of all the questions I want to ask him, and the answers he wants to give me often just form in my head. And so that is one way I communicate with him. By taking a walk in his shoes.”
These days Alexander doesn’t see giraffes and Eiffel Towers quite as often as he used to, but he still sees them from time to time, and whenever he does, it is special.
“I’ve learned how to trust in these signs, and I’ve become a more intuitive person,” he says. “I completely understand how skeptics feel, because I used to be one. But there’s a lot about life and death that we don’t understand, and I am open to all kinds of possibilities now.”
The couple has two beautiful young children, a girl named for his mother and a boy named for his father. “I want them to know everything about their grandparents,” Alexander says. “Everything that’s happened has taught me that we need to get the very most out of the life we get to lead on earth. We have to take full advantage of the time we have here.”
His experiences, both good and bad—and all the remarkable signs he’s received—have taught him something else, too.
“They have taught me that when we put energy out into the universe, the universe responds,” he says. “And they have made me believe that my mother and father are still very much ‘alive,’ and very much with me every day.”
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream…It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me
for the first time to think about life after death.
—CARL G. JUNG