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good chunk of time, but when it’s his time, your father and Georgie Girl will be there waiting for him.”
At this point, Julie was a weeping mess. Julie’s dog, a fifteen- year-old Tibetan terrier named Alfie, had had risky surgery just a few days earlier. That’s why she was initially resisting the reading with me that day. She was raw—and worried about opening the emotional floodgates. And of course she was worried about what she might learn about Alfie’s health in the reading.
Her dad’s message proved true. The surgery had turned back the clock for Alfie, who recovered quickly and regained his youth and vigor. In fact, he lived a good life for two more years, but then his health began to decline.
So Julie took him to the downtown vet who’d known him since he was a puppy. “I wanted to know if Alfie was in pain and if I was being selfish in keeping him alive,” she later told me. She sat in the waiting room with a heavy heart, with Alfie lying at her feet. While there, her eye was drawn to the lost dog flyers posted on a bulletin board on the wall across from her. She got out of her seat and went directly to one poster, for a missing Shiba Inu. “I had the thought, I wonder where this dog was last seen, and traced my finger across to that information. The address was the building where my mother had grown up in Brooklyn.” Julie texted a photo of the flyer to her sister.
“Check out the address,” she wrote. Her sister responded, “Incredible
—right down to the apartment number!” Julie hadn’t even noticed that detail—#1A, the very apartment where her grandparents had lived for nearly fifty years. When Julie was a little girl and the family would visit her grandparents, Georgie Girl would bolt out of the car, run up the steps of the building, make a left, and sit outside the apartment door with her little tail wagging.
“I understood it immediately,” Julie later told me. “I was there at the vet because I knew we were reaching the end, and here was an unmistakable sign that echoed what you had told me in our reading.
When it was time for Alfie to cross, Georgie Girl, my father, and even my grandparents would be there to receive him.”
—
Now that a channel of communication had been opened between Julie and her father, he would push through occasionally when we had a meeting or a scheduled call. One day, we were on the phone, discussing the upcoming publication of my first book. At the end of the call, I asked her, “Is today some kind of special day? Your dad has been hanging around me today and he’s saying there’s going to be some sort of celebration, a party?”
Julie paused—I could tell she needed a moment. “Today is my father’s birthday,” she said. “February second, Groundhog Day.”
Julie had a special relationship with her father, who had crossed over some twelve years earlier. “I was his sidekick, his wingman,” she explains. “His business was not far from my school, so every day he would drive me to and from school. We got to spend all of this time together, morning and evening. He was solid as a rock—
hardworking, reliable, energetic, always in motion. He was as handsome as a movie star, and all his customers adored him.”
Julie was in her thirties when her father passed after a long illness. “He never complained; he had such grace. It was like his soul underwent a kind of burnishing, and he found a deep contentment with his life. It was terrible to see this man who’d been so athletic and capable become physically constricted. But what was beautiful about him before his illness became even more beautiful.”
A few months after our Groundhog Day call, Julie was at her weekend home in a rural part of Long Island. It was Father’s Day, which in the years since her father’s passing had become a day that brought up bittersweet feelings. She was doing dishes, looking out the window across the yard toward a farm that is adjacent to the property. Suddenly in her peripheral vision, she spotted a small brown creature emerge from a wooded area and pause in the middle of the yard.
“Come in here and look at this,” she called out to her husband and son in the next room. “What is that? A weird-looking cat? Is it a beaver?”
“It looks like a groundhog…maybe?” her husband said.
“Google it—what does a groundhog look like, anyway?”
Her son googled it and pulled up a photo of a groundhog sitting up on its hind legs. “Yep, that’s it.” They looked back to the groundhog in the yard, who’d obliged and struck the exact same pose as the groundhog in the photo.
“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s Father’s Day.”
—
A few months later, a friend from college was visiting Julie and her family for the weekend, and she told him the story of the Father’s Day groundhog sighting. She added that I encouraged people to ask for signs from the Other Side—her friend had lost his father years earlier, too—and not to worry about it being too specific; the Other Side can handle specific. While she talked, Julie gazed out her kitchen window, half hoping the groundhog would miraculously appear again. But, she thought, that would be too much to ask.
She went upstairs to make the beds and looked out the window.
Two cardinals, a couple, were sitting on a branch directly in her line of sight.
“I’d see them around from time to time,” she says. “I called them Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal. They reminded me of my grandparents, who were married for fifty-four years. I acknowledged them and said—out loud, because no one was around—‘I’m so happy to see you two, I’m always happy to see you, but today, you know what I would really love? I’d love to see the groundhog again.’ ”
Julie finished making the beds, walked back downstairs, and went to clean up the breakfast dishes. She stood at the sink and looked out the window. The groundhog was there, waiting for her.
She was afraid to move. She stood stock-still, watching the groundhog make its way across the yard, taking its time, until it disappeared into the bushes.
Though she was a believer, as she’d told me in our first meeting, after the second groundhog sighting Julie was reluctant to ask for her sign on demand—she was afraid the groundhog might be a no-show and she’d be disappointed. But over a year later, after coming through a difficult time, she thought, I wish I knew that my father was with me now that I’ve made it through.
Later that day, she went out for a run on a wooded country road.
On her way back, she saw a small, brown creature amble across the road about a hundred yards in front of her. “I couldn’t tell if it was a cat or a raccoon or what,” Julie says. “I started running toward it, but before I could reach it, it crossed the road and darted into the trees.”
Oh well, she thought.
But when she approached the place where the creature had crossed, she saw that it wasn’t entirely wooded—there was a small clearing just on the other side of a thicket, and there in the clearing was the groundhog, waiting for her. “I seriously gasped,” she says.
“We looked at each other for a moment or two—and then it scampered off into the woods.”
Julie ran back home at record speed, with a bright-yellow butterfly flying overhead, accompanying her. She was elated—“the world felt like a benevolent place” is how she describes it. She couldn’t wait to tell everyone what she’d seen. “I felt the groundhog was an unequivocal message from my dad that he was aware of what I’d been going through and that he was with me. I got over my fear of disappointment. I asked, and he answered, just when I needed it most.”