Episode 7 Signs From Our Loved Ones: Coincidence, Comfort, or Connection?

Signs From Our Loved Ones: Coincidence, Comfort, or Connection?

After a significant loss, many people report experiences that leave them wondering whether their loved one is still near. In this episode, Marilyn Burns explores the common signs people describe after loss, including dreams, meaningful coincidences, familiar scents, songs, animals, and moments of unexpected peace. Through personal stories and professional insight, Marilyn offers a compassionate conversation about connection, hope, and the enduring bond of love.

Thank you for listening to Hope After Loss: Conversations on Grief.

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This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. 

If you have a question or a topic that you would like me to gently explore,
 you’re welcome to email me at [your email].

While I’m not able to provide individual counseling through email,
I would be honored to hold your question and possibly share it in a future podcast, so others may feel less alone.

Thank you for allowing me to walk beside you.  Until next time, be gentle with yourself.  Learning to walk with this pain begins one day at a time, one choice at a time to love yourself. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back. This is episode seven. I'm Marilyn. And this is signs from our loved ones, coincidence, comfort, or possible connection. One of the questions I hear most often from grieving people in my practice is this Are our loved ones still with us? The majority of us do not want to say goodbye and mean it. We want to rewind and replay and reconnect with our memories to keep it all fresh and alive. It's hard to say goodbye forever. And so this is something that plagues people. After a significant loss, many people report kind of strange experiences that leave them wondering if love somehow continues beyond physical death, if our loved ones are communicating. Well, you know, I don't know how many of us are going to get an answer to that, but it is a good time to decide, and I've talked about this in past episodes. What do you want to believe? If you see the cardinal, if you suddenly look down and find the penny or the dime or something that is connected to your loved one, how do you want to interpret that? Where do you want to go with it? It's a good time to learn how to comfort yourself during this grieving cycle, this walk that we will be walking with the rest of our life. People will say they'll hear a song at just the right moment. They're thinking about their loved one, and suddenly the song comes on. I was in a movie theater, and I was not doing well with my grief. And the main song when the movie began was Save a Life by the fray. And I was very upset by that. And it was just an immediate connection with my grief. Now, some people will smell a familiar scent. Every so often I smell cigarettes. But my clients will dream of their loved one. That is not unusual. They will see a butterfly, a cardinal, a meaningful number suddenly. These are all things that will automatically get us thinking about our loved one. But do we want to believe that maybe it is a way that they are trying to connect with us? Today we're going to explore signs after loss, not to convince anyone of anything, but to open a gentle conversation about comfort, connection, and hope. We long for signs. I mean, it's it's we want that. We want to know that they're around. Not all of us. Some of us are just fine with letting them rest in peace. And it's all about, again, where you want to go with this. But we have a deep human need for connection. And once it's there, we want to experience it. We don't want to say goodbye forever. And you know, grief doesn't end our relationship with that person. Actually, for some of us, I mean, it increases our relationship with that person because we don't stop thinking about them or talking about them or trying to connect with them in one way or another by wearing their clothes or spraying their cologne or perfume on us. And there is a big difference between moving on and moving forward. We're gonna be moving on when we wake up in the morning and we get another day to do this. But are we really moving forward with what we have now to deal with? Why people naturally seek reassurance after a loss is just common, ordinary to be expected experiences. You do want to be reassured that you don't have to live without them. That's a very, very definite end to a story, and it's a difficult ending. You know, the one thing that I know and I believe is that love creates a bond that death cannot erase. And I am a firm believer in that, and I know the majority of my clients are on board with that same belief system. Now, when we look at like common signs that people report that they've written about, I mean, there's a lot of things that are written out there on communication methods and pathways to our deceased. But it seems like dreams come up often in my sessions. People will come in and they'll they'll be crying because they had a dream the night before or the week before, and and and it felt incredibly real, very real. I remember after my father died, my brother said that my dad came to him in a dream, and he said it was so real, like he needed a haircut, but he had his same shirt on, his favorite shirt, and he had a lot of things to tell my brother to give to all of us. And mine was a very significant message. Now, a lot of people will hear songs suddenly when they're thinking about the person that that they've had to say goodbye to. They'll be thinking about them, and suddenly the connection through music comes on the radio, or they're in a store, and it'll it'll come on the PA system. And some folks really believe in numbers, and they'll say they'll get repeating numbers that mean something to them. I'm kind of a believer in the cardinals and the butterflies and the dragonflies. I know when I've been riding my bike like through the park here, you know, I will often see a cardinal, and the cardinal will follow me. And and I've decided to call it Chris. And it makes me feel very comforting and comforted when I know that I've made a decision to believe Chris is bike riding with me. I know it sounds crazy, but it feels better, so why not? A lot of of the meaning behind this podcast and the others that I've done is to realize that you have to make a decision to feel better. I mean, that's why we're here to figure it out. We will have challenges, the challenges will knock us down. Are we gonna decide to get up? Are we gonna decide to do something with that injury and not create more injury? It's up to us. We have so much power in this healing, it's incredible. And I call it free will choice. So there's lights, a lot of my folks will will just tell me that suddenly the lights will flicker. Kind of weird things go on electrically in the home, TV will go on and off, you know, stereo come on, go off. And some folks will say there's just a very, very sudden feeling of peace. Well, you know, it's not that you have to say that these are proof of anything, you really don't. But remember that it's your responsibility to take care of yourself. Why not interpret things in a way that feels better rather than worse? There's a lot of healing potential behind a choice like that. Whether these experiences are spiritual or psychological or something, we simply don't understand. Many grieving people will find them very comforting. And that's because they've made the choice to go with that. Now, I've said it before that the book that I wrote, Lost No More, A Mother's Journey through her son's addiction, was written after my son passed away. But the interesting story behind that book is that my son came to me over and over and over again in dreams, and there were very specific things that he wanted in a book. And the day that he passed, I was not in the room with him. I had to fall asleep. Something, I I mean, this this tiredness came over me. And I went into the other room and I just put my head up against the wall just to close my eyes. And immediately my Chris came to me and he asked me to write this book. He said he wasn't going to be able to be on the earth long enough to help people the way we had hoped, but the book was going to make a difference. And then, next thing I know, the nurse is telling me I better come in the room by the time I walked across the hall. He had passed. Now, a year later, these dreams were coming to me and coming to me, and I didn't want to write a book, and I felt like I could talk myself out of it just because I said it was a dream. Okay, I don't have to write a book. I was afraid to do that because I just didn't want to relive everything. But the dreams continued enough that I wasn't getting any sleep. I got a small recorder, and when I would wake up in the middle of something, I would just talk in the recorder just so I wouldn't forget, just in case my son was strongly communicating. And that's how this book got started. And when I was working with the editor, the editor felt that my Chris should be the co-author of his book because of the number of times that he communicated what he wanted in his book. And so he is the co-author on the front of the book, but the book was written a year after he passed. It's an interesting story. When I feel like he's around me, I always know because the toilet seat will be up. And that was always our joke, and it always makes me smile. I'll be thinking about him, and then I'll walk in the bathroom, toilet seat will be up. And I do live alone, so there's no one else that would move that toilet seat around. And you know, there's been a lot of real obvious signs. Like I remember shortly after Chris died, there was a lot of footsteps in his bedroom. His bedroom was caddy corner of mine in the house, and and I was hearing footsteps because the floorboard cracked a lot when he walked, and he was one of those that had to pace when he was on the phone. So it would be creek, creek, creek, creek, creek, you know. And so, anyhow, I heard footsteps. They woke me up in the middle of the night. Well, when Chris first got in his bedroom, he wanted to put those those stars up on his ceiling. So once they were activated, he would feel like he was sleeping under the stars. And I remember getting up that night and I got in the hallway, and there was light coming from under his door. And when I opened it, the whole ceiling was all lit up from the stars. And I knew, and again, it was a choice, but I I believed that that was Chris just saying hi, mom. And of course, it was in the middle of the night, another night of no sleep. Now, you know, I'm sure that some of you have stories to tell, and sometimes you think you're going crazy, you know, if you share them, and people are gonna think you really need to talk to a therapist. But know that if it's comforting and you feel good when you draw a conclusion, that's the right one for you. If you feel afraid, feel scared, you know, I don't know that that's really the right one for you. There's one more story I want to tell today, and and again, I mean, I don't know how to explain it, and oftentimes we don't, but I have Chris's fingerprint on a heart, I hang it around my neck, and about a year after Chris died or so, my cousin was coming over to clean, and when I woke up in the morning, the thumbprint was not on my chain, and I went crazy trying to find it. And my cousin walks in and I said, please don't even clean. Find this thumbprint, it's gotta be in this room. I backtracked my steps from the day before. I called where I'd been, no one found it. My cousin couldn't find it that day, and I was just heartbroken. And I decided I was taking the whole thing off my neck. I didn't want to wear it anymore. I had a St. Christopher metal hanging with it, but I took everything off and I just laid it on my dresser, and that's where it stayed for a couple of weeks. And then when I felt better, I thought, well, you know, it was there at one point, and maybe the energy is still there. And so I put my chain back on my neck, and I don't know how to explain this, but the next morning when I woke up, I moved the St. Christopher metal to the front of my body because sleeping with your jewelry is not the wisest thing to do, but you know, it lays in the back of your neck, and and there was the thumbprint. Now, how it got there, I have no idea. But I decided to draw the conclusion that perhaps it was him saying, He'll always have my back, and it comforted me. Now, if you think you've not gotten a sign and there's something wrong, why haven't I received one? Well, you know, the absence of signs does not mean that there's an absence of love. Some people experience their signs immediately, others never do. Neither experience really says anything about the depth of the relationship. So don't feel bad if you haven't gotten one. My guess is you might have, but you just didn't notice it. Whether signs come through dreams, memories, faith, nature, simply the love we continue to carry in our hearts, they remind us of something important that grief is the price we pay for love. And love has a remarkable way of finding us even after loss. I'm dedicating this podcast today to my best friend Betsy, who passed away yesterday from cancer. She fought a long, hard battle, one of the bravest women I've known. And Betsy, this is for you. And I hope to see a sign that you're okay. Until next time, be gentle with yourself and remember that healing doesn't mean forgetting, it means learning to carry love forward. Bye for now.