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I have shared stories before on Halloween that concern "Messages from the Other Side", but since my brother died this past April and my sister-in-law in September — and I feel like I have received further such messages (and believe me, I know how hokey that sounds) — here I will be sharing more of the same.
To begin at the beginning of the year: One of the things that Dave gave me for Christmas was tickets to a nighttime ghost investigation of Black Creek Pioneer Village, and as this is apparently something we do, I considered this a really thoughtful and intriguing gift. Not only did we get to hear stories about what they assure us is one of the most haunted pioneer villages in Canada, but this tour was also considered a "scientific" experience: the guide — a young man with long black hair, a long black dufflecoat, and the measured speaking style of a high school drama student — brought us from building to building, using a ouija board in one, spirit boxes and EMF readers in another, teaching us about sigils and signs. And it was amusing if not mind blowing; and especially since the guide behaved as though he had a set script to stick to and couldn't pivot to react to what was actually happening. For example: He brought us to a loft area of what had once been a family home and sat us in a circle of chairs surrounding a circle of (battery powered) candles with a foam ball in the middle of the floor. He called on the spirit of a child who is known to haunt this space to make himself known by moving the foam ball. At that moment, a pretty loud bang knocked against the side of the house, and as we all jumped, the guide said, "Interesting...but can you move the ball?" And then two of the candles flickered and went out, and again, instead of saying something like, "Thank you for letting your presence be known," or whatever he might improvise, again he said, "Interesting. Can you now move the ball?" The candles came back to life, but since the scripted experience didn't happen, we carried on to the next building without further inquiry. The most intriguing experience was when someone was using sensory deprivation tools and was able to give fairly sensible replies to questions he couldn't hear, right up to shouting "No" when the guide said that the evening was over. The guide said, "I guess we can have a few more minutes", and there were a few more questions and responses, and when he again said that it was time to pack up, the man who could apparently only hear a spirit box through his headphones once again shouted "No!" I have no idea if any of this counts as "messages from the other side", but there were better stories to come this year.
For a year or so before Ken passed of cancer, we had been unseriously talking about what kind of a sign he could send from "the other side" so I'd know he was doing okay. I came up with a couple of ideas, but Ken always said he'd do more thinking on it, and then, like with so many things, it became too late to discuss further. When we went to Nova Scotia to spend some time with my parents in the immediate aftermath of Ken's death, Dave was shocked and delighted to find a dime on the floor of one of the bedrooms in the lakehouse — and while I 100% agree that, since the passing of Dave's parents, finding dimes has always felt like a message from them (a phenomenon Ken knew about and was intrigued by), I wanted to be comforted by this sign more than I truly was.
A short while later, I read a random post on facebook that said something like, "If you want a sign from a loved one who has passed, don't be afraid to ask for one right out loud. But don't just ask to see a balloon, ask to see a red balloon. Even better, ask for three red balloons. Be bold and specific and you will be amazed by what your loved ones can manifest from the other side." This made me smile, but it's not like it prodded me to ask for a sign of three red balloons "right out loud." And then the next day, I saw this art print in a thrift store:
It stopped me in my tracks, long enough to make me take a picture of it, but I just keep wondering, "Is this something?" Everyone in the family I show this picture to seems to think it is — and more than anything, I want to believe that something survives death and my brother is somewhere safe and happy and beyond pain — but I don't know if hoping for this actually equals belief. I just needed more.
Then one day in early July, I was walking the dogs through the schoolyard behind our house, and as I turned a corner in the pathway, a coyote crossed the path ahead of me and disappeared into the trees. I had heard of coyote sightings in the area, and nothing about the experience scared me exactly, but it did feel a bit odd to see a coyote in the park for the first time ever. Weirder still: later on that same day, I was taking Cormac to the groomer, and as I sat at a red light at a pretty busy intersection, another coyote came trotting around the corner towards me, crossed the street behind my car, and calmly jogged down the first intersecting street. It was so unusual that I actually thought to myself, "If I see a third coyote, I'll know that Ken sent them."
And as my light turned green and I started driving, I had to laugh to myself — with pure delight — because that had been the third coyote. When I first got up that morning and started scrolling through my phone, the following was one of the first images I saw:
Ken would have loved that picture. We were the Saturday morning Looney Tunes cartoons generation. And, as is common for our generation, he would have loved ribbing me about woman drivers (how does someone drive into a painting? Is it more irresponsible that someone approved the mural in the first place?) It filled me with great delight to think that Ken might have been aware of this story and from the beyond sent me two coyotes to prod me to connect it with him; to join him in a laugh that connects us through space and time right back to our childhoods. Is this enough to create belief?
Here I'll reshare another story we were told this year about a family member who passed:
We heard that Dave's Aunt Susan was in long-term care, and after a brief stay in hospital, had become unresponsive. We made our way over for a visit and could see that she was obviously near her end; a husk of herself, still and silent. We sat with Dave's cousins, Jeff and Shannon, for a few hours, telling stories and sharing laughs, and they said they could tell that their mom could hear us and was enjoying herself. The most remarkable story they told us was that on the Monday — nearly a day after Susan had become unresponsive — she suddenly blurted out, "Bev! Bev! Wait! Beverley, wait for me! Bev!" And those would be Susan's last words: a plea for her big sister, my late mother-in-law, to wait for her, as would have been her perpetual complaint when they were growing up. Being five years apart in age, Bev always said that she resented when their mom would make her bring Susan along when she was meeting up with friends. So in the present, we sat there and marvelled at the idea that Bev was probably waiting just out of reach of the bed-bound Susan, telling her that it wasn't quite time for her to tag along yet. Susan wouldn't pass for several more days, and when she did, it was when her children had briefly left the building for some air. Perhaps not a message from the other side, but it certainly seems like a conversation with someone beyond the vale.
This is also the year that my beloved sister-in-law received a devastating cancer diagnosis. When it was just Kennedy and Mal visiting their Aunt Rudy in her home one day, her husband Dan went to answer the door, and the entire time he was standing on the porch talking to someone, the TV in the basement family room kept turning itself on (loudly) and off again. This has never happened before, and when Dan came back upstairs, he asked Rudy, "Do you think that was your Dad saying hi?" And that's not entirely out of left field: Not only did her Dad watch that TV, loudly, during the years he lived in the apartment below Rudy and Dan, but I have recorded before (in this Halloween post) how we have previously concluded that Jim can certainly manipulate electronics from the beyond.
In addition to that, Dave and Rudy's cousin, Shannon, talked of finding quarters in impossible places in the days before her mother passed (which she took as a comforting sign from her Uncle Jim, who always performed the magic of pulling quarters from her and Jeff's noses as they were growing up), and in August, Dave's cousin from his father's side of the family, Michele, told us the following story: After Dan and I visited with Rudy one evening, I was so upset when I went to bed that I just couldn't sleep. I was tossing and turning, worried sick about Rudy, and I turned to Dan — dead asleep, snoring — and I cuddled against him and took his hand. And then I felt the mattress go down behind me like someone was sitting there, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was so real that I screamed and woke up Dan and said "There's someone in the room with us." And Dan turned on the light and looked and said, "No there isn't." I called both my sister and my mother the next day and they each said, "That's just your Uncle Jim saying that everything is going to be okay." And it did make me feel better. Uncle Jim's got this.
Rudy herself passed on September 13th, and as I wrote recently, Dave and I have been asking more assertively for signs from the other side in the wake of her passing. On the day I wrote about, Dave and I had attended a toy show and then walked through an antique mall, and after I saw a giant stuffed Wile E Coyote, I put it into the universe that if I saw two more that day, I would know it was a sign from Ken. And I did see two more Coyotes, and only two more. Dave was inspired by a Laurel and Hardy figurine and said that if he saw two more, he would know it was a sign from his dad. And he did see two more that day, and just the two more. It felt like something, and as I wrote at the time, we just wanted to figure out what a sign from Rudy might look like.
And then earlier this month, Mal was on a training trip for a new job and it went so well, and was such an auspicious new role to be given, that Dave said, "I can't help but feel like Rudy pulled some strings from the other side to get you this job." And Mal replied, "Oh, I know she did." And then Mal showed us two photos: One of a dime sitting on a stack of boxes in the staff room on the first day of training, and a second photo of a different dime sitting on a different stack of boxes in the staff room on the last day of training. Mal has no doubt that these were messages from Aunt Rudy and that she did indeed pull some strings to get Mal what seems like a perfect new job just as the last one disappeared. How can this not feel like proof of something?
As it turns out, that would not be my last story for this year. When Rudy died, she left Kennedy and Mal as the beneficiaries of one of her insurance policies, and nearly immediately upon receiving it, Mal put in an offer on a little house to move into. The next morning when I got to the gym, I saw there was some kind of garbage near my usual spot in the boxing rig, and when I went to pick it up, not only did I notice that this "kinetic tape" wrapper was printed with my initials "KT", but there was a shiny quarter sitting on top of it. And not only was it a shiny quarter, it was one with the image of a sledge hockey player on it:
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Perhaps these "Messages from the Other Side" stories aren't quite Halloween/spooky material because I find them more comforting than scary or eerie; and I hope that anyone reading this finds some comfort in them, too. I know how hard it is to accept as fact stories like these when they happen to someone else — I am at heart a rational, skeptical seeker of truth — but I also know it all happened.
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