Signs from Beyond Death

Today’s post is going to be difficult.

But I hope it will also be beautiful.

And, more than anything, I hope it brings a little bit of hope to those who have lost someone. 🕯️

Yesterday morning, I lost Cannelle.

In French, cannelle means cinnamon.

And yes, she was exactly the color of cinnamon.

A tiny, soft, warm piece of life, with that sweet little coat, like a breathing dessert. 🤎

My little Canelita.

One of my three guinea pigs, or cavies, living at home alongside my three cats.

She died in my arms.

And it was unexpected.

It was not a goodbye I was prepared for. It seemed like something small, something that could pass, something that could be fixed.

And then, suddenly, it could not be fixed anymore.

That is the cruel part.

When your mind is still looking for solutions, but the body you are holding in your arms is already leaving. 💔

I cried a lot.

A lot.

But this post is not only about Canelita’s death.

It is about something else.

About the hope that death is not the end.

About the possibility that death may be something we, as human beings, simply do not have the capacity to fully understand.

About signs.

About grief.

About those moments when something inside you, even while shattered, begins to whisper:

“Maybe it is not completely over.”

Those who know me a little already know that death has been very close to me since I was very young.

And yes, having many animals, I know that from time to time I will lose one of them.

Animals live shorter lives than we do.

That is one of the most unfair laws of life.

They give you that pure love, without contracts, without explanations, without negotiations, and then they leave before you do.

As if life were saying:

“Here. Love. But just so you know, it will hurt.” 🐾

But one thing is losing an animal.

And another thing is losing your fiancé at 30, in a stupid car accident.

After Sergio died, my life took such a tragic turn that I fell into a huge depression.

I screamed.

I hit my head against the walls.

I begged him for a sign.

Just one.

One tiny sign.

Anything.

I clung to any possibility that maybe everything had not ended there.

But the signs did not come.

And not only did they not come, it felt as if the Universe itself was against me.

As if I were cursed.

Shortly after Sergio’s death, his dog died too.

He was old, he was sick, and somehow you could say:

“Well, he was old, he was Sergio’s dog, maybe he followed him.”

But Sergio had another dog.

A young dog, very energetic, who often destroyed the whole garden and was sometimes tied up.

Very shortly after Sergio died, that dog jumped over the fence while he was tied and hanged himself.

Tell me, with all of these things happening one after another, like some horrible curse, what chance did I have left to believe in God?

What chance did I have left to believe that there was something after death?

What chance did I have left to believe that life had any meaning?

When faith breaks

For most of my life, I moved between faith and agnosticism.

For those who do not know, an agnostic does not necessarily say that nothing exists.

An agnostic says that maybe something exists, but we do not know what.

But after Sergio’s death, I became almost completely atheist.

And, again, for those who do not know, an atheist is someone who does not believe there is anything after death.

Death is the end.

Full stop.

Cold.

Dry.

Like a door slammed in your face. 🚪

Sergio’s favorite movie was Gladiator.

He loved it.

So much so that a line from that movie was written on his cross:

“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

And that sentence matters.

A lot.

But I will come back to it later.

Six years later, destiny hit me again.

My cat Uhy, almost 12 years old, developed cancer.

A tumor in her jaw.

The veterinarian told me she would have to be euthanized almost immediately, because she could no longer eat because of the tumor.

I could not accept it.

I moved heaven and earth.

I took her to the best doctors at the University Veterinary Hospital in Bern, where I chose an extreme option:

a total section of her jaw.

At first, the surgery was a success.

Uhy ate only with her little tongue.

Because she was a warrior.

And she showed me how much she wanted to live.

And I wanted her to live just as much.

She lived nine more months after the surgery.

Nine months in which we fought together.

Nine months in which every day was a mixture of hope, fear, exhaustion, and that crazy kind of love that makes you say:

“Not yet. We can still do this.”

But then the tumor moved lower and basically started to suffocate her.

In the end, she died at the hospital.

Without me being able to say goodbye.

I will not go into all the details of that day now, but I can tell you that I came home completely destroyed.

To an empty house.

Without her.

She had been my child.

My little girl.

My world. 🐈‍⬛

I came home full of rage, despair, and with the last piece of hope almost ripped out of me.

I had prayed for her to live.

I had prayed for us to beat the cancer.

I had prayed to have her a little longer.

And not even on the last day of her life was I able to say goodbye.

I was full of anger.

The kind of anger that no longer has words.

Only tense flesh, a clenched jaw, and a soul screaming inside a room with no windows.

And then something happened.

I came home.

Far away from me and my husband, on a small table, there was a musical Frozen card among some of my husband’s children’s toys.

A card that played songs from the movie Frozen.

For it to play, you had to open it and press a button.

One of the songs did not even work when you pressed the button.

It simply did not work.

Well, when we came home after Uhy’s death, that card started playing by itself.

Closed.

Far away from us.

And not just any song.

Exactly the song that did not work.

And what that song said was:

“I’m going to celebrate this new life.” ✨

And as I write this, my eyes fill with tears.

Because you can imagine the emotional impact it had.

It was the first time, after so many losses, that I felt I had received a sign.

A real sign.

A sign I had not asked for, but one that hit me directly in the heart.

As if someone, something, from somewhere, were saying to me:

“Do not cry as if everything has gone out. The form has changed. Not the love.”

Of course, after the first wave of emotion, my rational brain started looking for explanations.

And I still have not fully found them.

But the easiest explanation, of course, was:

“Coincidence.”

Except that this “coincidence” was strong enough to give me an impulse.

I started searching.

I was still in a deep depression, but that musical card had lit a small candle inside the darkness. 🕯️

Not a sun.

Not a revelation with angels, harps, and special effects.

Just a tiny candle in the middle of the dark.

But sometimes a tiny candle is all you need not to collapse completely.

I started looking for testimonies.

Podcasts.

Books.

Films.

People talking about signs received from loved ones who had died.

People who had gone through similar experiences.

That is how I discovered Tyler Henry.

And Laura Lynne Jackson.

Two mediums with extraordinary stories.

When you read the testimonies of people who have worked with them, you literally get goosebumps.

And at some point, it becomes harder to simply say:

“Yes, sure, it is all coincidence.”

One thing that stayed with me was something Tyler Henry said.

In an interview, he was asked what life after death is like.

And his answer felt extraordinary to me.

He said, in essence, that we do not have the capacity to understand life after death.

We do not have a “processor” evolved enough.

We do not have the necessary hard drive.

And he used a metaphor that stayed in my mind:

it is like trying to explain arithmetic to a beetle. 🪲

It simply does not have the structure required to understand.

That is how we are with death.

We do not have the capacity to fully understand what lies beyond.

I immediately created my own comparison.

It is like trying to update Windows and your computer tells you that your laptop is too old.

It cannot support the new system.

It does not have the capacity to run it.

That is how I think we are in front of life after death.

We are trying to run a system far too large on a biological computer that is too limited. 🧠

And then we get angry because we do not understand.

Of course we do not understand.

Maybe we are not made to understand it completely.

Maybe we are only made to feel small fragments.

An echo.

A sign.

A crack in the wall through which a little light enters.

Signs

Then I read Laura Lynne Jackson’s book, Signs.

And I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone going through grief after losing a loved one, human or animal.

It is an extraordinary book.

For me, it was a huge help.

She says something very simple:

ask for signs.

Ask for specific signs.

But also pay attention to the signs that come without being asked for.

That made me remember the Frozen card.

I had not asked for that sign.

But it had been so powerful, so unlikely, that I could not ignore it.

Laura also says something else:

if you suddenly hear the name of the person you loved, or the animal you loved, in a movie, a song, a conversation, in an unexpected context, it may be a sign.

When I read that, I admit, I almost laughed.

Because I thought:

“Okay, but how on earth am I supposed to hear the name Uhy?”

Uhy is not a common name.

You do not hear it in a movie.

You do not hear it in the street.

You do not hear it on the radio.

Uhy was a name she somehow chose herself.

She walked across my computer keyboard, created a username by herself, something like Uhy came out, and I said:

“Okay, that is what you will be called.”

So how on earth was I supposed to hear the name Uhy somewhere?

And yet.

One day, I was watching a TED Talk by a Native American man.

I do not remember exactly what he was talking about.

He came on stage and said a sentence in his language, a sentence I did not understand.

Then he translated it.

But in that sentence, clearly, very clearly, I heard the word “Uhy.”

And not only did I hear her name, which was already almost impossible.

The meaning of the sentence was:

“I am here to visit you, to see you.”

What can you even say to something like that?

How does something like that leave you?

It left me breathless.

Not because I desperately wanted to believe.

But because sometimes life puts something so improbable in front of you that skepticism itself starts to look a little ridiculous.

After that, I started seeing signs everywhere.

It was almost frightening.

And I wondered:

“How can my cat give me so many signs, while I received nothing from Sergio?”

Maybe the answer is that I was not ready then.

Maybe my pain was too great.

Maybe I was too closed.

Maybe I did not know how to see the signs.

Maybe I did not know what to ask for.

Maybe I do not know.

But Uhy’s signs continued.

Another very strong sign involved a toy.

We were watching television with the family.

Some of her toys were still on the floor, including a little mouse that made a specific squeaking sound when moved.

At one point, while we were watching TV, we heard the squeak.

The toy was in front of us, near the television.

Nobody was touching it.

And yet, it squeaked.

At first, I thought the sound came from the movie.

We rewound.

And the squeak happened at exactly the same part of the sound.

We repeated it.

Same thing.

We realized that certain frequencies from the speakers were making the toy vibrate just enough to produce that squeak.

So yes, there was a physical explanation.

But the physical explanation does not explain the timing.

It does not explain why the toy was placed exactly there, in front of the TV, exactly where the vibration would reach it.

After we moved the toy, it never happened again.

It had never happened before either.

One single time.

In that moment.

And if someone wants to say it was coincidence, okay.

But for me, sometimes saying “coincidence” becomes more absurd than accepting that maybe it was a sign.

Uhy’s Greek alarm

Another sign involved a musical box from Greece.

On the fireplace, we had a box of ouzo, a Greek souvenir.

When you opened it, it played Zorba the Greek.

And here is an important detail:

Uhy was Greek.

I found her on the streets of Greece.

Well, early in the morning, around 5:30, 6, or 7, that box would start playing by itself.

Zorba the Greek.

It woke us all up.

Of course, I started looking for explanations.

And I discovered that the first rays of sun, the heat or the light hitting the box, probably triggered the mechanism.

Even though the box was closed.

But it played.

In the morning.

With the first rays of sun. 🌅

My Greek cat was setting my alarm with Zorba the Greek. 🇬🇷

Yes, sometimes it was almost annoying.

But we got used to it.

It was Uhy’s alarm.

Uhy’s Greek alarm.

And I ask again:

how skeptical can you be?

How long can you reduce everything to coincidence?

How long can you watch love knocking on the window and say:

“No, it is probably just a draft”?

My father and the yellow roses

A year later, I also lost my father.

A very hard blow.

Especially because I was raised by my father.

It was not completely unexpected, because he did not want to stop smoking even after his first stroke.

And the second stroke killed him.

My father was in Roman, in Romania.

I was in Switzerland.

I had to find a plane urgently, but exactly during those days there was no direct flight.

I had to take several flights, with layovers, to make it to the funeral.

With that pain inside me, but also with a little more hope after all the signs I had received from Uhy, I remembered Laura Lynne Jackson’s book Signs.

So, on the plane, because my mind could not focus on anything else anyway, I started listening to it again.

And right there, flying above the clouds, I heard the idea again:

ask the loved one you have lost for an exact sign.

Not just:

“Give me a sign.”

Ask for something specific.

I was sitting on the plane thinking:

“What should I ask for? What should I ask for?”

And suddenly I said:

yellow roses. 🌹

For me, yellow roses express joy.

I have always loved them.

After hours of flights, layovers, airports, and exhaustion, I arrived in Roman.

It was a grey November day.

At 5 in the afternoon, it was already almost dark.

I was with my mother and my cousin in front of the cemetery, getting ready to enter the chapel.

My heart was tiny.

I knew I was about to go in and see my father lying there, lifeless.

I cannot explain what I felt.

And I said:

“Let’s at least buy some flowers.”

There was a flower shop around the corner, right in front of the cemetery.

I turned the corner.

And I froze.

In front of the flower shop, in a bucket, there were yellow roses.

I started crying.

My mother looked at me, frightened:

“What happened? What happened?”

I did not even consciously remember the request I had made on the plane.

But when I saw them, I knew.

My father was telling me:

“Do not be afraid. I am here with you.”

And again, my eyes fill with tears as I write this.

Let me clarify something:

inside the flower shop, there were no more roses.

Not yellow roses.

Not roses of any other color.

Only those yellow roses were waiting for me outside, in a bucket.

Coincidence?

Okay.

As you wish.

The ray of sunshine on the day of the funeral

The next day was my father’s funeral.

A terribly grey day, full of fog, cold, mud, neither snow nor rain.

That kind of worn-out day when even the sky seems dressed in mourning.

After the yellow roses, I said:

“Okay, let’s see what you can do now.”

And I asked him for a ray of sunshine.

On that ugly, dark, grey day, I wanted a ray of sunshine.

The day passed.

Night came.

No ray of sunshine appeared.

I said to myself:

“Well, coincidence is coincidence. You could not give me the ray of sunshine.”

That evening, I got into bed with my mother in my father’s apartment.

I said I wanted to watch a movie that would lift my spirits a little and stop me from thinking about death.

A movie that always makes me feel better, even though people say it is not exactly a masterpiece:

Twilight.

We put on the first movie.

It was 10:30 at night.

Outside, it was completely dark.

And I was watching Twilight with my mother.

At one point, the vampire Edward Cullen takes Bella to the top of the mountain to show her who he really is.

A vampire with diamond skin.

And what does he do?

He exposes himself among the clouds, in a ray of sunshine.

He shows his skin in the light. ☀️

What can I say?

What else can I say?

My father managed to bring me the ray of sunshine too.

Not physically.

Not in the sky, as I had imagined it.

But exactly as Laura Lynne Jackson says, signs do not always come in the form we imagine.

Sometimes spirits do what they can to fulfill our request, but they do it through the channels available to them.

And on the day of his funeral, my father sent me the ray of sunshine.

Through Twilight.

Through Edward Cullen.

Laugh if you want.

I cried.

And I knew.

After that, I received more signs from my father.

Songs that appeared unexpectedly in playlists or on the radio.

Songs I knew he loved.

Songs you almost never heard, and that suddenly appeared exactly when I needed them.

And I smiled.

Not the big smile of a happy person.

That small smile, through tears, when you feel someone has touched your shoulder from a world you cannot see.

Odin, the raven, and Always

A few months later, another blow.

From the garden of my former mother-in-law, Sergio’s mother, I took in a wild little kitten.

A tiny monster.

A little black Beelzebub.

Mischievous, but very affectionate when he slept.

The rest of the time, he only did stupid things.

He was a piece of black cat we named Odin.

Odin, the Norse god.

Because he was black, because we liked the name, and because it symbolized the raven.

And for me, that cat somehow came from Sergio.

From that place in my past.

I had the feeling that Sergio would take care of him.

That he would protect him.

That nothing bad could happen to him.

And from one day to the next, Odin developed acute colitis.

In less than 12 hours, he died.

We still do not know the cause.

Not even after the autopsy.

It was a very hard loss, because it activated again that feeling that everything connected to Sergio came with a curse.

Some time earlier, I had asked my father for a sign with a raven.

But when I say a sign with a raven, I do not mean seeing a raven in a park.

You can see ravens in many places.

I wanted something symbolic.

Something that would make me say:

“Yes. This is the sign.”

After Odin’s death, I said:

“If you still have not sent me the raven, now I want a super raven. A big raven, an important raven, impossible to miss.” 🐦‍⬛

It was a double raven.

Odin’s raven and my father’s raven.

Not long after Odin died, I was sitting in my parked car, waiting for someone.

In the car, Always by Bon Jovi was playing, a song my father loved very much.

I looked ahead.

And when I really opened my eyes, I saw, on the building in front of me, a huge raven painted on the wall of a house.

A raven as big as a house.

While Always by Bon Jovi was playing.

So there was my father.

And there was Odin.

A giant raven.

An impossible-to-miss sign.

The kind of sign that no longer knocks on the door.

It enters the room, slaps you on the back of the head and says:

“Do you see me now?”

Sergio, Gladiator, and Londinium

And now I come back to Sergio.

To the sentence on his cross.

To Gladiator.

“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

For years, that sentence was there, on his cross.

And about a year ago, I went with my current husband, Philippe, to the cinema to watch Gladiator 2. 🎬

Philippe also loves Gladiator.

Of course, he knows about Sergio’s death.

He knows my story.

He knows what Sergio meant to me.

And I had told him about the sentence on Sergio’s cross.

But when I tried to translate it for him into French, it got a little lost.

Lost in translation.

Philippe did not remember that line from the movie very well.

It had not marked him the same way it had marked me.

And with all of that in my mind, the sentence, Sergio, the cross, my clumsy translation into French, we went to see Gladiator 2.

And there, something happened that deeply impacted me.

Because that sentence was not just something said at the end of the first movie.

In the second part, the sentence was everywhere.

It was repeated.

It returned.

It was placed at the center of the message.

It was even engraved on a sword.

On the sword of the first gladiator. ⚔️

As if the movie were telling me:

“You have not forgotten the sentence. And the sentence has not forgotten you either.”

I received three signs that day.

The first was the sentence.

The second, I admit, I do not remember now and it annoys me terribly, because I know that at the time it hit me too.

But the third was almost impossible.

Toward the end of the movie, at one point, someone says that they must go to Londinium.

Londinium.

For those who do not know, Londinium was the name of London in Roman times.

But for me, Londinium was not just a historical name.

Londinium was Sergio’s name.

That is how I met him.

We met in an online game, and his name in the game was Londinium.

At first, I even had him saved in my phone like that:

Londinium.

Do you understand?

I am in the cinema, with my current husband, watching the continuation of Sergio’s favorite movie, after having just told Philippe about the sentence on Sergio’s cross, a sentence that appears again and again in the movie, and then I hear:

Londinium.

The name by which I knew Sergio.

I started crying.

Truly.

I was completely stunned.

After almost ten years, Sergio was sending me signs too.

Maybe at the beginning I was not receptive.

Maybe I was too broken.

Maybe I did not know how to look.

Maybe I did not know how to ask.

Maybe the signs were there and I did not see them.

But in that cinema, there was no way not to see it.

Gladiator.

The sentence on his cross.

The sword.

Eternity.

Londinium.

Sergio.

What we do in life echoes in eternity.

And perhaps love is precisely what echoes the strongest.

My signs

These are my signs.

There were probably others.

I have probably forgotten some of them.

But these have stayed inside me like points of light.

And I believe that, thanks to them, but also thanks to my experience with ayahuasca, which deeply healed my relationship with death and grief, I no longer see death in the same way.

I am not saying it does not hurt.

It hurts.

It hurts horribly.

Yesterday, when I lost Canelita, I cried a lot.

She died in my arms and it broke me.

But today’s pain is no longer that bottomless pain, without meaning, without hope.

Now, somewhere inside me, there is a certainty I cannot prove in a laboratory, but that I feel:

death is not the end.

I asked Canelita for a sign too.

And I know that when I receive it, I will know it comes from her.

Because she was a coronet guinea pig, a breed with a swirl on top of the head, like a little crown.

So I asked her for a very clear sign:

I want to see a guinea pig with a royal crown on its head. 🐹👑

That is the sign I am waiting for from Canelita.

And maybe, when it comes, I will look at it and laugh through my tears.

Because sometimes that is how love works.

It does not take away your pain.

But it leaves a window slightly open.

I write so I do not fall

And maybe that is exactly why I am writing this post today, the day after her death.

Because for me, writing is a way of processing.

A way of putting the pain on the table, instead of letting it gnaw at my liver from the inside like a hungry animal.

And honestly, when I started putting all these signs in order, one after another, I felt something I did not expect to feel so soon after Canelita’s death.

I felt a lifting.

A kind of inner uplift.

As if, by placing all these moments side by side, something inside me remembered:

“Wait. You have been through death before. You have received signs before. You have been held before. You are not in complete darkness.”

Writing this is healing for me.

It is my way of not falling again into that black, borderless depression I fell into after Sergio.

It is my way of taking my own soul by the hand and telling it:

“Breathe. It is still not completely over.” 🤍

Until we meet again, I will do everything I can to help people who have gone through grief, or are going through it now.

Because I understand it deeply.

And because I have healed it in a way that, at one point in my life, I did not believe was possible.

Yes, time helps.

Yes, time can close wounds.

But sometimes healing remains only on the surface.

Sometimes the wound no longer bleeds, but it still hurts deep inside.

I invite you to reflect.

If you have lost someone you love, human or animal, I invite you to ask for a sign.

A clear sign.

A specific sign.

And then pay attention.

Do not force it.

Do not search obsessively.

Just remain open.

Because maybe signs do not come exactly as we ask for them.

Maybe they come through a song.

Through a flower.

Through a ray of sunshine inside a movie.

Through an impossible name heard by chance.

Through a toy.

Through a raven as big as a building.

Through a word spoken in a movie, ten years later.

Or maybe through a guinea pig with a royal crown on its head.

I no longer believe all of these are simple coincidences.

I believe love has an echo.

Exactly like the sentence on Sergio’s cross.

What we do in life echoes in eternity.

And perhaps love is what echoes the strongest.

REAL-TIME UPDATE

As I was finishing this post, I was at the very end and wanted to sign it:

“With love, Sasha and Canelita”

And I wanted to add a guinea pig emoji.

So I went on Google and typed only this:

guinea pig emoji

That was it.

Nothing about “crown.”

Nothing about “princess.”

Nothing about “queen.”

Just guinea pig emoji.

And on the first page of images, in the bottom right corner, there it was.

Exactly the sign I had asked Cannelle for.

Not just any guinea pig.

Not just any image.

A guinea pig with a crown.

Then I scrolled down to see if there were any others.

None.

No other guinea pig with a crown.

It was the only one.

And it was on the first page, placed there as if to make sure I would not miss it.

What else can I say?

I am crying.

And for me, Canelita has already answered.

P. S.: All the photos are real.

With love,

Sasha and Canelita 👑