Spirit Contact

In May 2016, the husband of our friend Nancy Atkinson  was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same type of brain cancer that killed Ted Kennedy and Anne Strieber and that Senator John McCain has. He was given 12 to 15 months to live. He died in October 2017.

Not long after his death, Nancy was going through Rich’s clothing and asked her daughters, Jen and Jill, to go through the piles to take what they wanted before she donated them. The text exchange, Nancy says, went something like this:

Nancy to both daughters: Are you coming today to help with Dad’s clothes?

Jen: I guess.

Nancy: What time?

Jen: I don’t know. I’m tired. When do you want me? Noon?

Nancy: It should only take about an hour. Noon is fine.

Jen: OK

Jill: No, I said tomorrow.

Nancy started to respond to Jill when the words, He loves you typed out on the line.

Nancy: I didn’t type that! It was right in the middle of the thread and I did not type it!

Jen: What?!

Nancy: That just popped up on my thread!! I didn’t type that!!

Jen: Weird!

Nancy: OMG

Jen: He loves us!

What’s particularly interesting about this contact is that when Rich was alive, he was a big texter. “I could be upstairs, he could be downstairs, and he would text me. This happened while I was texting with my daughters, not during any other conversation,” Nancy wrote us. “It made my day.”

When I first head Nancy’s experience, my first reaction was, Well, why not use technology to communicate?

Nancy now belongs to a closed support group on Facebook whose loved ones have died from glioblastoma. I received an email from her the other day telling me that two women in her group have experienced spirit contact. I got in touch with both women and Sandy Purinton emailed me about her experiences.

“My dad, my best friend, died from cancer after a short illness.  He was a decoy carver and carved beautiful birds.  For a whole week after I got home from his memorial there were 3 live mallard ducks who never left our lawn.  Everyone saw them.  It was a delight.

“Twenty years later the same month, my mom died from a stroke after a short illness. When I got home from her memorial, there was a female mallard in the gutter of the street in front of our house.  I rolled down the window of my car and said, ‘Hi, Ma!’ I drove up the driveway, looked back and she was gone.

“Before my husband died 11 weeks ago from glioblastoma, we talked about whether he could come back as a duck or something. But so far, there have been only some little smells, turning down the water heater and a sighting at his memorial by 2 people but not me. I’m hoping for more.”

Animals, especially birds, often act as spirit messengers. Also smells, noises, music, passages in books can also indicate spirit contact. In fact, it seems that spirits use whatever they can to communicate with the loved ones they’ve left behind.

Our book, The Secrets of Spirit Communication, will be published in August and is filled with anecdotes like these. Synchronicity and the Other Side also features some extraordinary instances of spirit contact and illustrates how synchronicity is so often a component of that communication.