This morning I woke up crying. I was literally awakened from sleep, as the sun was coming up at my usual time, already crying. And it seemed like I had been crying for a while.
I couldn’t fully remember my dreams, but bits and pieces started returning. I remember it being more like I was watching my dream happen to me. Like third person point of view. There were moments in my dream where I was watching myself grieve for all the times I didn’t speak up for myself sooner. There were strange characters too. people I couldn’t make sense of being in my dream at all. people I wouldn’t expect being there, seeing my sadness, almost pulling it out of me. Some were people from my past who are no longer in my life for whatever reason - whether it was death or distance.
I think all of this may be connected to a conversation I had yesterday with a client I see weekly. She’s deeply intuitive. She’s got a few decades on me. She says she’s lived many lives, and honestly… I believe her. She carries a kind of wisdom and insight that, in my experience, has proven to be true.
Yesterday she was holding something small between her fingers after our session. something she’d picked up off the street and began telling me a story about her dad. She used to take him grocery shopping in his old age. Because his balance had become unsteady, she had him use a shopping cart to help keep him upright. One day, she turned around and saw him bent all the way over. She panicked. At his age, bending down was difficult enough, but getting back upright was even harder. When she asked what he was doing, he told her he had seen a penny on the ground and needed to pick it up. He had grown up during the Depression. To him, a penny meant something entirely different than it does to most of us now.
Then she told me something else. She said she knows things. Ya know… things. She told me that this particular thing we’ve been working on together, something involving her dog finding a more balanced emotional state, and her learning to feel more at ease because of it, is something she practices daily when I’m not there. And she said that even though her dad passed many many years ago, she knows he’s still around. She still asks him for help. She told me she had recently asked him for a sign that she was doing the right thing. That’s when she noticed the penny. Glinting on the street.
She looked at me and asked, “Do you ever call on your dad?” I told her I’d never really thought that I could. She said, “He’s always right here next to you. He wants you to still ask him for things.” I immediately broke down. Quiet but uncontrollable tears. She cried with me. And if I’m honest, it was the first time I felt like someone besides my siblings actually saw the emptiness I still carry without my dad. And then a flood of memories came back.
Moments that felt random at the time, but maybe weren’t so random at all. The most recent happened just last week.
A new friend - someone who knows almost nothing about my dad other than that he died several years ago - handed me a smashed penny. He’d made it by placing a penny on the train tracks near where he works. The moment I saw it, I thought of my dad. I told him my dad had been a welder for train cars and used to bring me smashed pennies when I was a kid.
What makes that moment harder to ignore is the timing. It was the day after Father’s Day. My dad had already been heavy on my mind.
I don’t know what you believe about signs, or grief, or what happens after people leave this earth. Truthfully, I’m not even sure what I believe. But my client said that penny was my dad making a real effort to let me know he’s still here.
And I have to admit… Part of me wants to believe her. Because the timing felt too specific. Too personal. Too familiar. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was comfort. Maybe those two things aren’t always as separate as we think. I don’t know.
But this morning, as tears came before thoughts, I found myself wondering if grief and love ever really leave us at all.
Maybe they just change form. Maybe sometimes they glimmer on the street or come the form of a smashed penny from a new friend.
xo
-s
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