I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile…

But this particular topic is a challenging one for me. I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts on this into cohesive ideas for over a year! I’m talking about signs, synchronicities, things that could just be coincidences but feel more meaningful than that. Complicated stuff, indeed.

I’ve been dragging my feet on writing about this because it’s a bit of a triggering subject matter for me. Stephen looked for synchronicities A LOT, to an extent that I found unhealthy at times. I would remind him occasionally that you can find meaning in almost anything if you are actively seeking it out. Here’s a great (and hilarious) example from Friends:

Now that we’ve all had a good laugh and given this difficult topic an appropriate bit of levity, I must confess that I delved into the realms of searching for signs after Stephen died. As much as I had an aversion to it when he was alive, I found it comforting to seek out little moments that felt like a message from him. For the first nine months without him, I kept a list of what I interpreted as signs. I primarily did this because I needed to feel some sense of certainty that there is indeed life after death. And after nine months, I became so confident that his spirit lives on that I stopped maintaining the list. I keep it now as a relic of my healing journey.

I reread the list recently and looked at my signs objectively, and in retrospect, I suspect the majority of these were probably just a coincidence. (That’s not to say that it wasn’t a meaningful coincidence, but in all likelihood, it probably was not a direct message from a spiritual realm.) However, there are several that jump out to me as being something more.

For example, I was in Fort Wayne for work last year, and we had a team dinner on September 16, my wedding anniversary. At the dinner, I gave a cheers to Stephen, and two seconds later, the song Take it Easy came on, one of Stephen’s absolute favorite songs of all time. And then a few minutes after that, our waiter told me that I was “randomly” selected from everyone in the restaurant to receive a free dessert. Coincidence? I think not. Stephen wanted to be sure that I had a nice anniversary day without his physical presence, so he was making himself known in whatever way he could. And I 100% believe that.

I had another encounter with Stephen just a couple days ago, and that’s actually what prompted me to feel like I was finally ready to write this post. I adopted a new dog, Jasmine, a month ago. (More on her in a later post!) We were walking in the woods together, a trail Stephen would have loved, and we saw a beautiful deer a short distance off the trail. Jasmine didn’t bark, sat calmly and observed the deer. The deer was not remotely afraid of us. It actually started approaching us rather than running away, as you would expect a deer to do when they meet eyes with a German Shepherd. The three of us calmly observed each other for a couple minutes, and then Jasmine and I continued walking on. Less than a minute later, I heard rustling behind us and the deer was following us! I started to get the sense that maybe Stephen’s spirit was inside this deer, and he was wanting me to introduce him to Jasmine. So I started talking to the deer like it was Stephen! I said hello and that it was nice to see him, and I told him about Jasmine. And the deer was looking into my eyes the whole time. Some may say I’m just a crazy widow talking to wild animals… But after that conversation, the deer calmly trotted away and met up with the rest of his family, and I felt this profound sense of peace that Stephen had dropped by to say hello and give me his blessing and congratulations for finding a new dog, before returning to his heavenly activities.

So do I believe in synchronicities? Do I believe that the deceased can communicate with us through music, animals, or dreams? Yes, I do. Now, I don’t think it happens terribly often, certainly not as often as we would like. And I don’t know that we should be actively looking for signs, because it’s very easy to make something out of nothing. But I do think that if we are flowing through life in union with the Tao, we will occasionally receive little nudges from the beyond, affirming that we are being watched over and that we are on the right path.