The primary effect receiving a sign from a loved one normally has on us is that it shifts our emotions from sadness and uncertainty to happiness and comfort. There may be no better example of that than what Catherine experienced.
Catherine and her husband, Jim, met in college. They married five years later and would have two beautiful boys. Sadly, six years into their marriage, they received the devastating news that Jim was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. He courageously fought it for nearly three years before passing away at the age of thirty-four.
Catherine is a person of faith, born and raised Presbyterian and a convert to Catholicism after marrying Jim. I had never met her, nor had I ever given her a reading. It was a friend who told me about her and two instances in which she had received significant signs from Jim. I tell you that to reinforce that you don’t need me or anyone else to help you receive and recognize signs around you. All you need is a sliver of faith in something greater than us and an open mind.
“After Jim had died, I was introduced later that year to his childhood friend Jason. We’d never met prior to that, but I had heard so many stories about him from Jim that I felt in some ways I knew him. They had grown up together all the way through high school and were inseparable.”
Catherine and Jason got along so well when they met that they began dating. It obviously was not initially easy for a recently widowed mother such as Catherine. She had to navigate through a lot of difficult emotions, but she received validation from Jim one day that he was supportive of her new beau.
“Jason and I had been dating for about a month when I was digging through a closet and found some random papers Jim had left behind,” she said. “They were a bunch of letters I had written to him and cards I had given him during our thirteen years together. I wasn’t surprised to find that Jim had kept them, but I was very surprised to find a card among them not from me.”
Catherine said Jim never kept greeting cards from anyone except her.
“He’d open a card from someone and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and then throw it away,” she said. “So, to see that he kept a card from someone else was very odd. When I opened it, I recognized that it was a high school graduation card — from Jason’s family.”
Catherine was overwhelmed with emotion.
“I thought it was fascinating that the only card he ever kept was from them — not just from Jason but from his whole family. It made me feel good, that Jim would be okay with my new relationship. Nothing means more to me than our two boys, and I knew Jim would approve of Jason and his family being part of our sons’ lives.”
While Catherine would continue to receive other small signs from Jim as time went on, there was one in particular she received in the fall that blew away all the others.
“The fall is always a difficult time for me because it was during that season when Jim’s health really started to go downhill,” Catherine said. “One evening, a couple of years after he’d died, I was going through all our winter coats and hats and gloves to get ready for the upcoming season. We live in Wisconsin, where the winters are brutal and the weather can go from mild one day to treacherous the next. I wanted to be prepared.”
She hadn’t expected the tide of emotions that came with the task. “I pulled out all the Green Bay Packers hats he’d collected, and I broke down crying. As a widow, you can have emotions rise to the surface oftentimes when you least expect them to. I’m sure I’d pulled these same hats out the previous year and didn’t get emotional like this, but it was really rough this time. I finished going through them, and I cried myself to sleep that night.”
The next morning, after getting her kids off to school, Catherine headed for work. Her feelings from the night before were lingering. Jim weighed heavily on her mind.
“I was driving the same route to work that I always had. It’s not a very long distance, and I never encounter that many cars. It’s a pretty quick and quiet ride.”
She came to a stop sign. There was one car in front of her. “I was sort of in a daze and just happened to look right at the license plate,” she said. “708JPG.”
Jim’s birthday was July 8. His initials were JPG.
“I was like, ‘Seriously, you have to be kidding me.’ And this was not a personalized plate. It was a standard, luck-of-the-draw plate that somebody in Wisconsin was given when they went to register their vehicle . . . and there it was right in front of me on the morning after my breakdown.”
Catherine’s mentality did a 180-degree turn. “That car was in the right place at the right time for my sake — Jim made sure of it,” she said. “I went from feelings of sadness, and thinking about what our life together could have been if he were still alive, to ‘Okay, I get it — you’re still around.’
“I haven’t felt detached from him since,” Catherine continued. “Anytime I feel sad I think of that sign. It reminds me that no matter what we are going through, no matter how we feel, he is right there for me and our boys, and he always will be.”