You feel like you’re dying.When I give lectures on dying and life after death, people often ask if the timing of our death is written in stone. The answer is: sometimes. As I mentioned in chapter 1, our astrological charts include what are called exit points. These are important times when our soul can choose to be done with this lifetime. I would guess that many of you reading this have experienced the signs of being at an exit point:
You feel like you’re dying.
You have death dreams.
You feel an inner nudge to get your affairs in order.
You sleep more than usual.
You feel a desire to get rid of material belongings.
During exit points, the soul is taking an inventory of what it has accomplished so far and is trying to decide, with the help of the Elders on the other side, if it should continue on until the next exit point or if it wants to be done now. This is kind of like graduating from high school and choosing whether or not to go on to college. Do we want to be done with our learning or go on for more and continue our life?
The process usually lasts anywhere from three days to several months, and it can be a very intense time. A wide range of emotions and memories that need healing come to the surface. Exit points are pivotal because if our soul chooses to be done, circumstances need to be set up by the universe for death to occur.
When I was twenty-nine years old, I had a complete hysterectomy. When I woke up from surgery, my dear friend and astrologer Ginny Miller was sitting at the end of my bed and was relieved that I woke up. She ran out to tell the nurses that I was awake, and several nurses quickly came into my room to check on me. One nurse told me that I’d had them all pretty concerned, and I asked her why. She said that today was Saturday and this was the first time I had woken up since my surgery on Tuesday. I asked her why I hadn’t woken up before this, and she said they weren’t sure and maybe I was given too much anesthesia. When the nurse left the room Ginny told me that I was at a major exit point in my chart and she had been quite worried that I was going to die. My soul obviously had decided to continue to live, but that must have been quite an interesting session on the other side with the Elders for me to have been gone that long! I had no memory of anything that happened during the five days I was gone. Since that time I’ve been aware of three other exit points in my chart, and obviously my soul continues to choose life.
Not everyone has several exit points. Some people have just one, and in that case the time of their death is “written in stone.” If an exit point is more about taking an inventory, the soul usually chooses to stay. When one of my closest friends discovered she had breast cancer, I checked in on her soul and saw that she was at an exit point and needed a lot of coaxing to stay here. Her soul was tired and was feeling as if my friend wasn’t doing all that she had hoped to accomplish. She felt stuck in her work and couldn’t see any other options. But the universe was being very wise in shaking her up to help her see that she did want to continue to live. She had few problems with the chemotherapy and recovered very well. Her work has expanded in ways she didn’t think were possible, and she’s grateful for all she learned through the cancer experience. Exit points can definitely be thought of as wake-up calls for the soul.
I mentioned that these exit points can be found in our astrology charts, but not all astrologers understand them or how to find them. It isn’t a simple matter of one planet conjoining another (or whatever planets do!). If you are interested in knowing about your exit points, seek out an astrologer with this area of expertise.
Having said that, I caution you not to get attached to finding out when you’re going to die. When clients ask me when they are going to die, seldom am I able to get that information. On the rare occasions when I do, their soul always asks me not to share it with them because they may sink into a depression and not accomplish the things the soul is hoping they will finish up before they die. The conscious mind thinks it can handle knowing when it’s going to die, but truth is, it can’t.
The Fence or the Slide
Death is a fascinating subject that tends to confuse us all. I’ve met clients who were given last rites, only to rally and live for many more years. And I’ve heard many stories of people who went to the doctor because of an annoying pain and were dead within days of diagnosis. So often, we think we know what’s going on and then realize we really don’t.
In my work as a clairvoyant, I get my information in the form of pictures and visions. I’ve come to understand two different visions that I get when I’m working with someone who has been diagnosed with a serious illness. If I get a picture of the person sitting on a fence, I know they are in an exit point trying to decide if they want to stay or go. If I get a picture of them on a slide, I know they are in the dying process, and their whereabouts on the slide tell me how much time they have left. It they are sitting at the top of the slide, I know they still have more time to enjoy their life and get their affairs in order. If they are at the bottom, it is a matter of days before they’ll die.
My dear friend Lee died from lung cancer. When he first called to tell me the diagnosis, I checked on his soul and saw that he was sitting at the top of the slide. This was not what I was hoping to see, but at least he still had time before he would die. Each time he called, I could see his soul slowly inching his way down the slide. I desperately wanted to tell him to stop the chemo and radiation that were making him very sick and use what little energy he had left to enjoy his family, but he was determined to live for as long as possible. He knew what I did for a living and never once asked me if I thought he was going to survive, so I kept my visions and opinions to myself.
When the doctors told Lee the treatments were not working and asked him if he wanted to go through another round of chemo, his sister stepped in and told him, “No more.” She too was a psychic healer and knew that he was not going to survive the cancer. He accepted what she said and died within a couple of months.
A client emailed me about her seventy-year-old cousin who was in hospice care. He was no longer taking food or water and was in the final stages of death, according to the hospice staff. They were advising her to “pull the plug” because his quality of life was not very good, and she wanted to know if I could communicate with his soul to find out what he wanted her to do.
From the way she talked, I thought I’d see him at the bottom of the slide, but instead I saw him sitting on a fence, smiling. He told me he was quite content where he was and didn’t want anyone doing anything to his body. He was pleased that his cousin cared enough to check on his wishes instead of just pulling the plug. At her request, I asked him several times if he wanted to stay, and he just smiled. He was sizing up the whole situation, trying to determine how strong his body was and if he could live longer. His soul sat on the fence for over a year while his body gained strength. Eventually, he left hospice and moved into a nursing facility, where he lived for several months. He couldn’t speak and was quite limited in what he could do, but he didn’t care. He loved that he was still alive.
Several months later the woman called me for another check-in with her cousin’s soul because his personality had changed. I was excited to see him and find out how he was, but I was surprised to discover that his soul was no longer all smiles. He had a serious look on his face and was three-quarters down the slide. His soul was getting tired of being in a limited body and told me he was finally ready to surrender his body and go home to heaven. I asked him if anything was preventing him from going now, and he said that he was waiting to finish up some important karmic business with someone and then he’d go. My client told me that a week later, an old friend of his who he hadn’t seen in months stopped by for a chat, and shortly after his friend left, he passed away.
Denny, a very dear friend of mine, was a happy-go-lucky Irishman who had a million-dollar smile; everyone loved him. He hadn’t been feeling very well for a while, and his skin was turning an odd shade of orange. One day while walking around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, he collapsed, and a ten-year-old boy on his bike called 911. Denny was rushed to the hospital, where he ended up in intensive care in a coma. They discovered he had diabetes and liver failure from hepatitis C.
About a week later, Denny came out of the coma, and they sent him home with a rigid regime of medications and little hope of finding a donor for a liver transplant. I started channeling healings to him daily to keep his liver from getting worse, while they searched for a donor. The first day I gave him a healing, I was nervous about checking in with his soul. He was so sick that I was sure I was going to see him somewhere on the slide — but instead, his soul was sitting on a fence.
I asked the soul if he had a plan, and he said he wanted to see how much he was going to have to go through before making a decision. Every day when I channeled the healing, I talked to his soul, and emotionally he was quite detached from the experience. It was as if he was thinking of his body like a car: if it was repairable, he’d keep driving it; if it wasn’t, he would get rid of it.
About four weeks later, Denny’s twenty-five-year-old nephew turned out to be a perfect donor match, and he gave Denny a portion of his liver. I channeled healings to Denny for another couple of weeks while his body was accepting the liver. Interestingly, his soul continued to sit on the fence — he still wasn’t ready to commit to his body.
One morning in meditation, I was told that Denny didn’t need any more healings, and I checked in on his soul to see if he had made a decision. He was no longer on the fence and had decided to get back involved in his life. He was a documentary filmmaker, and over the next two years he worked on a documentary about the importance of organ transplants. Shortly after the film was finished, he began feeling ill again. He went in for routine tests and found out he had cancer throughout his entire body. The doctors suggested chemo and radiation therapy, and he called me and asked if I would check in on his soul to help him decide if he should do it.
I asked his soul if he would talk to me and tell me what was going on, and I was very surprised to see him sitting almost at the bottom of the slide. Denny was the kind of guy who wanted you to be completely truthful with him, so I told him that it looked as if he had a very short time left and that he should forgo the treatments and just enjoy his family and the time he had left.
Because the body is designed to fight for life, I wasn’t surprised to hear him say that he was going to do the chemo, but it sure made me sad. I wanted a better ending for my sweet friend.
He tried chemo once and said, “No more.” He died two weeks later and is deeply missed by many.
I’d also like to tell you a fence story about my mom, Mae Bodine. She had emphysema for over fifty years and had many health challenges as a result. One Saturday morning she called my sister, Nikki, and asked her to come over. She said she wasn’t feeling quite right. My sister lives six blocks away, so she ran over to see what was up and right away noticed that Mom’s lips were blue and she was having a difficult time breathing. They called 911, and as the ambulance was rushing Mom to the hospital, she died. Fortunately, they were able to bring her back to life, and the hospital put her in a medically induced coma while her body got stronger. The nursing staff was honest with us about her chances of survival being very slim.
Unfortunately, I was scheduled to give a talk at a conference in Denver, so I had to leave town for a couple of days. My sister and brothers assured me they would be with her the whole time and call immediately if there was a change. Two days later, I was on the plane flying home, feeling very relieved that I was going to be able to see Mom soon, when suddenly her soul appeared right in front of me. She told me she had been sitting on a fence all week, watching her body struggle to survive. She said she was tired and wondered if it was time for her to be done with this life.
Mom’s soul described in detail her upcoming week. She said she would come out of the coma on Sunday. Monday the doctors would do what they considered a routine procedure on her, which would nick one of her lungs and cause an emergency surgery. She would come out of it okay but would be weak for two days. Then on Thursday they would have to take her down for another unexpected surgery. She said she would not survive that one and would be gone by Friday. Her soul was as calm as could be as she laid out these events for me. She expressed no emotion about her death, just stated the facts and then disappeared.
Sunday to Thursday went exactly as she had said it would, and each day I could see her soul sitting on a fence, waiting. Even on the morning of the second surgery, when they discovered a problem with her gall bladder and had to take her into surgery immediately, her soul just sat on the fence. When I tried talking to her soul, she faced the other way as if to say she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it.
During that second surgery, I was an emotional basket case, knowing that she’d said she would not make it through. I hadn’t said anything to my sister or brothers and was hoping for a different outcome than the one she’d described. Fortunately, there was.
The doctor came out and told us the surgery had gone just fine and that she would be up in her room in a couple of hours. The first three days after that surgery, I had no desire to go up and visit her. It felt like her soul was far, far away, and I wanted to wait until I could feel her presence again.
Monday morning my phone rang, and it was Mom. She said she’d had some really bizarre dreams about being on the other side and decided it wasn’t time for her to die, so she came back. I didn’t know a soul could change its mind like that, but I was very glad hers had!
About five years later, in May 2012, I started having dreams in which I was on the other side with my mom. Night after night we would meet up with old friends of hers, as well as make the acquaintance of many new friends. At first I thought they were just dreams, but they started feeling more real. Even my waking hours were getting a bit strange. I felt like half of me was on the other side and the other half of me was here trying to live in my body. While this was going on, I was having a heck of a time functioning in my day-to-day life. I was forgetting everything. Conversations I had with people one day were completely erased from my memory the next day. I was sleeping a lot more, getting my usual nine hours at night but then taking two-to-three-hour naps in the afternoon. This went on for two to three weeks.
Then one Tuesday morning in June, I called Mom to see how she was feeling, and her breathing sounded as if she had pneumonia. I asked her to please call the nurse downstairs (she lived at an assisted-living place). I felt really panicky about how bad she sounded, so I called both of my brothers and my sister and alerted them to what was going on. Mom called back to say that the nurse, too, thought it sounded like she had pneumonia and had called an ambulance right away. One of my brothers called to say he would meet her at the hospital, so I was able to go to a scheduled chiropractic appointment. On my way there, I suddenly started hearing over and over in my head, “Echo, this is it. Echo, this is it.” I called my psychic brother, Michael, and he said he was hearing the same thing in his head.
Michael picked me up when I got home, and we headed to the hospital right away. When we got there we were very surprised to see Mom sitting up in bed, breathing fine, and looking fairly okay and surprised that we were all there. When my brothers went out to talk to the doctors, Mom asked me if I thought she was going to die. I told her what I had kept hearing in my head. She said that that was her sending me very strong thoughts because she was sure she was dying and she wanted me to know. She said right after she sent me those strong thoughts, a voice asked her if she wanted to stay or go, and she said she wanted to stay. Almost immediately, she’d started feeling better.
They kept her overnight but sent her home the next day because she was doing fairly well. The other thing she told me when we were alone was that she was sorry she had been pulling on me so strongly for the past month. She told me she knew it wasn’t fair of her to ask me to go to the other side with her all the time but she was afraid to go alone. I told her I had been having very real dreams of us going over there, and she said yes, she knew that — she was having them too. I was very surprised that she was conscious of these “dreams,” or out-of-body experiences, and it made me wonder if many of us go to the other side with our loved ones as they are preparing to leave us but aren’t aware of it. There is still a lot about death that is a mystery to me.
A few months after this experience with Mom, I had a dream that she had died; I even saw her dead body in her bed. The next scene in the dream was of someone telling me they had moved my mother, and when I looked back at her bed, her body was gone. The rest of the dream was of my life without Mom. It was eerily real, emotional, and final.
When I woke up, I was sure Mom had died. I’d think about calling her, and a voice would tell me to let her be. I could see her soul out of her body; she was out almost all day. I didn’t call her that day, which was unusual for me.
The next day I got a nudge to call her. She sounded good and strong, and when I asked how she was doing, she said, “God called, and we had another talk about whether I was ready to come home. I said, ‘Not quite.’ ”
She told me that she’d then remained out of her body all day. At various times, she’d found herself sitting on a swing with me, her best friend, or someone else in the family who was still alive, so that let Mom know that she was still alive too.
Over the next few months, my sister started getting odd little nudges about Mom. One day she had the feeling that she should make Mom some rutabagas — not something she’d normally do. When she brought them to Mom, Mom told her that just the day before she’d told God she wasn’t ready to go until she tasted rutabagas one more time!
One of the misconceptions people have about psychics is that we can see when someone is going to die. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, “Please don’t tell me when I’m going to die.” As these experiences with my mom show, death is not easy to predict. There may be psychics out there who can pinpoint a person’s exact time of death, but I’d say the majority of us can’t. That’s between our Maker and our soul.