Embracing the Sign

This memoir braids together stories about ordinary people who had extraordinary experiences following the death of a loved one. Each recounts a confluence of events or series of coincidences that seemed to come from “out of the blue.” What makes these stories important is the profound effect of each experience. Each person felt an overwhelming sense that death is not the end, that the deceased continue to exist in some form, apart from and beyond the death of the body. Every-day objects—a letter, a belt, a book, a song—become vehicles through which reassuring messages are communicated, becoming signs representing the shared history between the living and the dead, a history known only to them.