Everything can change
at any moment,
suddenly and forever.
paul auster
How My Mother Taught Me the Truth About Life After Her Death
It was two days after Christmas in 1999 and a friend’s twenty-first birthday. The plan for celebration included a two-and-a-half-hour drive down to Atlantic City, NJ, so we could try our luck at the slot machines and see a comedy show. I was twenty-two years old, and this holiday season was a special one for me. After struggling with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, I had recently started making progress toward healing, both mentally and physically. I got my period back after being diagnosed with amenorrhea, a side effect of starving myself from a healthy 115 pounds to a skeletal 90 in a futile attempt to gain control over my life. My mother called it an early Christmas present. Even the anxiety and depression—the real reason I had turned to food as a means for control in the first place— had begun to lift.
I remember saying to my mother, “I can actually say I’m starting to feel happy again,” and on Christmas morning I gave her a huge hug and said, “I love you.” Despite the sometimes overpowering yet always unconditional love my mother showed me on a daily basis, we didn’t always say the words “I love you” out loud, yet something drove me to do so that morning.
Getting ready to head out the door to see my therapist before heading to Atlantic City, I said goodbye to my mom, who was home from work that week for the holiday break. We were both in a great mood, laughing as we tried on our new clothes from Christmas, and she modeled all the new shoes I had bought her. She always loved fashion and matching her outfits, shoes, and jewelry—a trait she passed on to me.
After therapy I stopped back at the house to grab a few things before heading out again, but she had already left to visit a friend. I was getting over a cold at the time and found a note from her next to a bottle of cough medicine, reminding me to take some before I left. This was so typical for her. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night with medicine if I had a fever so it wouldn’t spike up while I slept. I took the cough medicine, grabbed my purse, and left for a day of fun with my friend.
That night the comedy show ran late. Knowing my mother would worry, I stopped at a pay phone to call and let her know I would be home soon. But instead of my mom’s voice, a man answered the phone. I immediately hung up and called back, assuming I had dialed the wrong number. That’s when I heard my cousin say, “Tammy, it’s Joey. Don’t hang up.”
And in that split second, my life changed forever.
“Your mom was in a car accident,” he said.
“But is she okay?” I asked.
All he could say was “we don’t know.” I kept asking over and over, desperate for reassurance, but he couldn’t give it to me. He honestly didn’t know. Nobody did. I hung up with tears running down my face and said to my friend, “Something happened to my mother. I have to get home.”
That two-and-a-half-hour drive home seemed like days, and all I could do was stare out the window, tears streaming down my face, as I begged God to save her. He couldn’t take my mother. Not my mother. How would I survive without her? I grasped onto my Catholic roots and began to pray the rosary to the Blessed Mother. For some reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling this was worse than what my cousin had explained. Something in me knew there was more to this story.
I clung to my prayers in the hope they would make a difference, and by the time we arrived at my house it was almost 1 a.m. I remember walking up to the front door, not even noticing the street was lined with the cars of our friends and family. As I walked through the door and into our living room, I was immediately greeted by a crowd. It looked like a party. People sat in the living room and dining room, and I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. But this was no party.
My eyes darted around the room, and everyone whose gaze I met—aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends—had a blank expression. This wasn’t good.
“Somebody better tell me what the f*** is going on,” I said as my aunt Neva, my cousin Joey, and my dad ushered me up the stairs and into my parents’ bedroom. Shutting the door behind us, they sat me on the bed. It was even worse than I had imagined. My mother had had a brain aneurysm. She was lying unconscious in a New York City hospital bed, and the doctors didn’t know if she was ever going to wake up.
She had initially lost consciousness at her friend’s house. When she woke back up and found out her friend had called 911, she immediately grabbed her purse and ran out of the house. She was always afraid of doctors and must have been frightened that an ambulance was on its way. Behind the wheel of the car, she blacked out again and drove her car over someone’s lawn and straight into a telephone pole.
According to the police report, when the ambulance found her, she was unconscious and laying across the front seat. They took her to a local hospital in New Jersey where she regained consciousness one last time—long enough to give them her insurance and doctor information and my father’s work telephone number. She told them, “I don’t know what happened—I just got dizzy,” then closed her eyes for the last time. Once the doctors realized what was actually going on, they transferred her to the neurological unit of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. While my family initially went to the hospital in NY before heading home to wait for me to get back from Atlantic City so I didn’t walk into an empty house, they were told they could not see her yet and the doctors wouldn’t have any more information until the morning.
I remember sitting in my parents’ living room with my dad, aunt, uncle, and cousin, surrounded by all the Christmas decorations we had joyfully and lovingly put up, trying to rest a bit before heading back to the hospital around 5 a.m. I thought about the wonderful Christmas we had celebrated only a couple of days before. I thought about that morning and the last time I had seen her before this happened. Would that be the last time I saw her alive? I gripped onto a pair of rosary beads my mother loved, which were a gift from one of her coworkers who had visited Jerusalem, as if they might have some magical powers that would fix everything. I prayed for her. I prayed for me. I prayed this was all a bad dream.
The next morning, we all drove to New York City and spent the entire day in the hospital waiting room, fielding periodic updates from doctors who provided little hope. I refused to go into the hospital room and see her because emotionally I just couldn’t handle it, and if this was the end, I didn’t want to remember her that way. Doctors explained that the bleeding was so massive, they were trying to get it under control enough to operate on her, but by 8 p.m. that evening, they pronounced her clinically brain dead. As a family, we made the decision to take her off life support. My father, uncle and cousin went into the room to be by her side as they shut the machines off, and I went into the bathroom to cry. I stood in a stall as heavy, heaving sobs came up from my chest to the point where I was choking. It felt like something inside of me was squeezing my heart, and it was hard to breathe.
Then, suddenly, it stopped.
As if someone had dumped a bucket of peace over my head, I felt a sense of calm rush over me. It flooded my entire body, and the thought “you are going to be okay—it’s all going to be okay” came into my mind. The tears stopped. The sobs ended. I felt as if my mother was in that bathroom with me. It was the strangest yet most comforting thing that had ever happened to me. I knew at that moment she was no longer in her body and had crossed over. That was her first communication with me from the other side. It’s now been nearly twenty years as I write this, and her communication has never stopped.
We buried her on New Year’s Eve. While everyone around the world celebrated a new century—and worried about Y2K, which would supposedly create havoc on computers and take down the world—I sat on the couch in my aunt’s family room feeling as though my world had already ended. I remember staring down at the brown carpet as the ball dropped on television. I was surrounded by friends and family, but all I could think about was how I was only twenty-two years old—which meant I likely had years and years of life left to live without her. I just didn’t see how I could do it. Thankfully, she showed me she wasn’t really gone.
My Foundation of Faith
Faith was important in my family, especially to my mother. She grew up with my grandmother Rose, who was very devoted to the Blessed Mother Mary. She passed that faith onto my mother, who passed it on to my sister and I. From pre-K through eighth grade I attended Catholic school, where we got demerits that added up to detention for things like rolling our knee socks down to our ankles when it was 90 degrees with no air conditioning. In eighth grade I completed a Bible study project that was a huge binder of essays and commentary. Growing up, my mother and I went to mass every Saturday night at 7 p.m.
But I was a child who questioned everything, including my religion. I’m still the same way today. I’ll drive a doctor, veterinarian, family member, or friend crazy with questions on just about everything. Just ask my husband—he loves that about me. (No, he doesn’t!) I don’t mean any harm by it. I’ve always sought answers, and until I fully understand something, I just keep questioning. Growing up, I remember asking my mom things like, “How do you know Catholics are right in what they believe and other religions are wrong?” or “What if everyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus isn’t actually damned to hell for all eternity?” I never really got any answers—not any that satisfied me, anyway. She never had a good answer for questions about Santa or how reindeer could fly either. As I got older, I started leaning away from my faith little by little until those Saturday night masses became a ritual of my mother leaving the house alone, yelling how she was going to pray for all of us who were not attending mass as she walked out the door.
I’m grateful for the faith I grew up with and took very seriously as a child. Although I’ve evolved beyond the teachings and beliefs I learned as a child, I know the deep faith and spiritual views I hold today are built off of the foundations set early on. I still honor many of the wonderful aspects of the Catholic faith today, including prayers and my family’s devotion to the Blessed Mother. In fact, I have statues of her in my meditation room next to archangel Michael and Buddha, and I call on her often for help. I’m also grateful for the beliefs instilled in me as a child that our soul goes to heaven, and that those who have passed on watch over us. I no longer view heaven as “up there” but rather as a place that exists all around us, and I believe that our loved ones can be seated right next to us here on earth if they choose to be.
Growing up, my mother also believed that our loved ones who died could send us signs, and I particularly remember her talking about dream visitations and the use of songs on the radio. She told me once that the song “Holes in the Floor of Heaven” by Steve Wariner came on while she was driving, and she just knew it was a sign from her mother. I was only five years old when my grandmother passed away, so I grew up with the belief that she was watching over me, and I think this, along with my mother’s belief in signs, set me up to be more open to receiving signs after she died. They were all part of the universe’s plan for my path and purpose in this lifetime, I’m sure.
My mother was also open to and intrigued by afterlife communication through a medium. A friend of my sister Gina brought the book Lessons From the Light: Extraordinary Messages of Comfort and Hope from the Other Side by George Anderson to our house and showed it to my mom only a few months before she died. The friend explained how Anderson could communicate with deceased loved ones, and at the time, both of my grandparents on my mom’s side had passed. I remember sitting in the living room of my parents’ home and my mother saying how she would love to hear from her parents, but this was probably more for people who didn’t get a chance to say goodbye or who suffered an unexpected tragedy.
It was a strange foreshadowing of events, as she died nearly six months later with no goodbye or closure. Looking back, this was just another setup by the universe to introduce us to George Anderson, who would play a major role in our lives and connect us with our mother after her death.
A Whole New World
Shortly after my mother died, it seemed like George Anderson showed up every which way my sister and I turned. Cable networks were airing specials on him and his ability to communicate with those who had passed, and a prime-time television network even aired a show where he gave readings to strangers who were floored by his undeniable accuracy. In one special, they even hooked him up to a machine to study his brainwaves while he did a reading. Then he showed up in New Jersey for a live event. Then my sister heard him on a radio interview. She kept calling me, saying, “See! Here he is again. Mommy knew about him before she died. I think she is trying to get our attention. We need to make an appointment.” We had already started receiving signs from my mother, including dream visitations and songs on the radio, just like her mother used to send to her. The songs “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack and “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan were two that made us think of her and would always come on when we were thinking about her, talking about her, or struggling with something. We believed George Anderson showing up over and over again was also a sign.
At the time, I thought George was the only person on earth who had the ability to communicate with those who have passed. This was before the days where mediums had television shows and connecting with those who had passed was more commonplace. I watched the specials with him, read his book, and couldn’t deny we were hearing an awful lot about this man since my mother died. But I was still skeptical. We looked him up online and found out that he was holding sessions in Long Island, NY, which wasn’t far from where we lived. My sister finally convinced me to make an appointment, and I think part of me caved because if she went without me and actually connected with my mother, I would be totally pissed I wasn’t there.
So here is how a skeptical Virgo like me handled it. It was 2000, so online payments didn’t exist yet. To book an appointment you had to print out a form and mail it. I took this opportunity to make sure George would not have any information so he could look up details about my mother or anyone in my family for that matter, and did what any hesitant person would do: I lied. I sent in the form using a friend’s name and address and another friend’s work telephone number. Eventually we got a letter saying we had an appointment set for October, which was ten months after her death. My brother-in-law drove us to Long Island.
When we arrived at the hotel, an assistant took us to a conference room and we sat down on a small sofa across from George, who had a quiet warmth about him. We popped in a cassette tape to record the session, then sat in anticipation for him to begin.
“Please only say yes, no, or I understand,” he instructed us. “Don’t give me too much information because I want to get the information from the spirits on the other side.”
We agreed, and within the next three minutes my life changed yet again. George explained that a female presence had entered the room (my mother), followed by a male and another female, which turned out to be my grandparents.
“The lady that came in first comes to you as mom,” he said, pointing to my sister. “But wait, she comes to you as mom as well,” he said, looking at me. “She embraces you both with love.” Then he looked off into the distance and said, “Oh, they are,” and looked back at us, saying, “She said you are her daughters, and this is my problem because I’m saying to her ‘they are not related’ and she said to me, ‘I think I know my daughters.’”
Now, if you knew my strong-willed Italian mother, you would know this sounded exactly like her. I’m guessing my sister’s blond hair and my brunette threw him off because he said we didn’t look like we were related. At this point we both started crying and continued to do so for the entirety of the session. His accuracy floored me as he shared messages from my mother addressing things I’ve never said out loud to anyone but thought only in my head. In fact, he not only relayed the strong bond my mother and grandmother had with the Blessed Mother, but at the end of the session, he asked us to wait because he had something to give us. He walked to the back of the room and pulled a few things out of a bag, saying, “Now I know why I bought these the other day. I knew it must have had to do with a reading coming up.”
He handed my sister a framed picture of the Blessed Mother, saying, “Your mother said you need more religious symbols in your house and to hang this somewhere.” We laughed because it was true, and she had said that before she died. Then he handed us both prayer cards with the Blessed Mother entitled “The Immaculate Heart of Mary” with the Novena prayer my mother used to say printed on it. We were stunned and beyond grateful to this man. We still are today.
This reading opened the door to a whole new world for me—a world where there was proof that only the physical body dies. A world where there was proof the soul and spirit live on. I still wanted my mother back in her body and here with me—I think we all long for that when a loved one leaves this physical world—and I cried on and off for three days because I felt like I had lost her all over again now that the reading was over. But this was really a new beginning, and not an ending at all. A shift had taken place inside of me, and I knew my life would never be the same. I also knew I wanted to share what I discovered and continued to learn on my new spiritual journey. Eight years later, I created Elevated Existence Magazine to start doing it.
Landing Deepak Chopra
Whenever I’m interviewed or tell my story about starting Elevated Existence Magazine and debuting it with best-selling author and spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra on the cover, the first question people ask is, “How in the world did you get Deepak Chopra on the cover for your first issue? That is incredible!” They’re right. It was incredible, and it was also the universe who set it up for me, one synchronistic step at a time. In fact, getting Deepak Chopra on the cover of the first magazine is when I first began to notice synchronicity in my own life because I realized how everything lined up perfectly for me. It’s also when I realized there really are no accidents in this universe. There are only events or circumstances we may not have found meaning for yet, and that includes the positive and the seemingly negative circumstances in our lives. Everything is leading us in the direction toward our highest good—even when it doesn’t seem like it.
I’m going to share how I got Deepak Chopra on the cover of the first-ever edition of Elevated Existence Magazine so you can see how one seemingly random event after another connected to lead me to it. It all started with Wayne Dyer, whom I discovered through his PBS special called The Power of Intention. I had begun listening to his weekly radio shows on Hay House Radio, and during one episode he mentioned Deepak Chopra and the fact that the Chopra Center had a location in New York City. At the time, I worked as an editor for a magazine in the city, so I looked it up online. I noticed the New York location had a retreat called Perfect Health coming up, and they would be teaching meditation. Although I had dabbled in the practice, I had not had any formal meditation training yet. I was excited about the retreat but hesitant to attend it by myself. I had been on many business trips alone, but this felt different to me, and I wasn’t sure I should spend the money.
A few days later, I got an email from someone—not the Chopra Center—offering $400 off any Chopra Center course. I immediately felt chills run up my spine. I called a friend, saying, “I don’t know why, but I feel like someone wants me to attend this.” I signed up and attended the four-day retreat, where I received Ayurvedic spa treatments and learned Primordial Sound Meditation, which provided me with my own personal mantra based on the time and date I was born, and practiced yoga. By the end of the retreat, I felt renewed and knew I wanted to be able to attend more events like this and immerse myself in the spiritual world where I was finding so much comfort and hope. I also knew I wanted to work for myself so I could have more time off than the standard two weeks each year to pursue this new passion. In fact, the idea of working for myself came to me during one of the group meditations during the event.
Initially I thought I could become a full-time freelance writer so I could make my own schedule, or even pursue a career working for a spiritual magazine, but in 2007 there were not many spiritual magazines being published. The ones I found were in California, Arizona, or Colorado, and I didn’t want to relocate. By January 2008, a year after attending the Chopra Center retreat, I became increasingly unhappy in my current job and longed to marry my writing and magazine experience with my spiritual journey. I was explaining this (okay, complaining) to a coworker, who nonchalantly said, “Why don’t you just start your own magazine and put it online? Everything is online nowadays.”
“Start a magazine?” I asked. “Are you crazy? Who am I to start a magazine? Who would read it? I don’t think I can do that.”
She reminded me I had been in the magazine industry for ten years at the time and offered to do the graphic design. I initially laughed it off and went back to my desk. But again, something shifted in me, and I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I started thinking about names, looking into technology, and thinking of column ideas for my magazine. The more I allowed myself to dream about it, the more I wanted to do it. The idea started becoming less and less crazy and more and more exciting. By March 2008 I had created Elevated Existence LLC and trademarked the name.
I knew I had to get someone amazing for the first cover to be taken seriously by people who discovered the magazine, and after a little research, I discovered coincidentally (not, of course) the Chopra Center had a Renewal Weekend scheduled in New York City in April 2008. Deepak Chopra would be speaking at the event, and I hatched a plan to attend and cover the event for the magazine, quoting the speakers and summarizing their teachings, including Deepak Chopra. I just needed a picture of him for the cover.
At the event, I spoke with a few of the coordinators, explaining how I was starting an online magazine and that my coverage of the event would be the very first cover story. I asked who I could contact for a high-resolution digital photo of Deepak to use on the cover, and although I’m pretty sure they thought I was crazy, they gave me the name and email of someone I could reach out to at the Chopra Center in California. Several emails went unanswered, but I refused to give up. I knew there had to be a way to get this photo, and then it hit me: I could contact the spa director at the Chopra Center in New York, whom I had met during the retreat the year prior. I was sure she would remember me.
On my lunch hour, I hopped on a subway train in Greenwich Village with my newly printed Elevated Existence letterhead in hand and went to the Chopra Center in Midtown Manhattan. I was told the spa director was in a meeting, so I asked if I could leave a note. I quickly wrote on the letterhead explaining who I was, what I was doing, and what I needed. I left it with the woman at the front desk and headed to the Starbucks next door for a caramel macchiato before taking the subway back to work. Just as I was adding a hint of cinnamon to the top of the foam, my cell phone rang. It was the spa director.
I reiterated what I was trying to accomplish, saying, “I know I’m not the New York Times or Time Magazine, but I have a legitimate company, I attended the event, and I already wrote the article. I just need a photo for the cover.” The spa director promised to make a phone call to the headquarters in California for me, and by the time I sat back down at my desk that afternoon, I had several photo options in my email inbox.
Can you see all the dots that connect in that story? Discovering Wayne Dyer led me to Deepak Chopra and the New York City Chopra Center. Getting the coupon in my email led me to take action and attend the Perfect Health retreat. That course and learning a formal practice of meditation helped me decide I wanted to work for myself and pursue a career connected to spirituality and self-improvement. When nothing was panning out, my coworker brought up the idea of starting the magazine. Deepak Chopra was speaking in New York only one month after I started my company and was looking for my first issue’s cover subject. My attending the event the year before at the Chopra Center, which started me on this path to beginning my own magazine, gave me the connection I needed to get a photo of Deepak Chopra for the cover. This was over the span of more than a year, but it all lines up perfectly. I had no clue when I attended that retreat in 2007 that I would be starting my own magazine the following year, let alone getting Deepak Chopra for the first cover. But the universe did. It was all set up perfectly for me. And I promise, there are many connections in your life where things play out in a similar manner. In fact, I’ll be showing you how to connect the dots in this book.
I started Elevated Existence Magazine with a desire to share what I was learning to create more peace, joy, and meaning in my life. Since I began the magazine, I’ve met so many wonderful and inspirational spiritual teachers and celebrities, including the late Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer as well as Marianne Williamson, Brian Weiss, Gregg Braden, Melissa Etheridge, Alanis Morrissette, Olivia Newton-John, Fran Dresher, and Shirley MacLaine.
I discovered so many unique ways to apply what I was learning to my own life—including creating new tools that worked for me—and I eventually realized in addition to sharing the teachings of others, I needed to start sharing my own unique views, too. The feedback has been overwhelming, especially on the topic of signs and synchronicity. Now, here I am teaching you through this book, so the universe obviously had more plans for me than I originally thought when I launched that first issue with Deepak Chopra.
But that’s how it works for all of us. We may not know exactly where we will end up next, but signs and synchronicity can help us navigate the uncertainty with less fear and more faith. What has helped me tremendously is knowing how guided I am and that no matter what, everything is leading me to my ultimate good. By the end of this book, you will realize this about your own life, too.