Almost every reading I do eventually arrives at the same hesitant question, usually asked in a lowered voice, as though the person is a little embarrassed to be asking it out loud.
"Do you think that was really a sign, or am I just imagining it because I want it to be true?"
It's a fair question, and an honest one. I don't think anyone should be expected to abandon their sense of reason just because they're grieving. So I want to offer the way I've come to think about it after many years of sitting with people in exactly this kind of uncertainty.
A coincidence, to me, is something that could have happened to anyone, at any time, regardless of what they were thinking about or missing. A sign, on the other hand, tends to carry a very specific kind of timing or detail that speaks directly to the relationship you had with that particular person.
Let me give you an example.
A cardinal landing in your backyard is, on its own, a fairly ordinary event. Cardinals exist in large numbers across much of the country, and they land in yards every single day without any grand meaning attached. But a cardinal landing on your windowsill on what would have been your mother's birthday, staying there far longer than seems typical for a bird, while you happen to be looking directly at the exact spot where she used to keep her bird feeder — that starts to feel like something else entirely. Not because cardinals are inherently magical, but because of the layered specificity of the moment.
I worked with a man once who told me, almost apologetically, about a strange experience involving his father's old truck radio. He had inherited the truck after his father passed, and for months the radio hadn't worked at all — not static, not silence, nothing, just completely dead. Then, on the one-year anniversary of his father's passing, he climbed into the truck to run an errand, and the radio came on by itself, playing the exact song that had played at his father's funeral.
He wanted to know if I thought that was a coincidence.
I told him what I'll tell you: I can't prove what happened in that truck, and I don't think you need me to. What I can say is that a broken radio turning on, alone, on a random day, playing a random song, would be a coincidence. A broken radio turning on, on the anniversary of his death, playing the specific song from his funeral, is a level of specificity that coincidence struggles to explain away.
The truth is, you don't need external validation to trust your own experience. If something happens that feels meaningful, layered, and specific to the relationship you shared, you're allowed to receive it as exactly that — without needing anyone, including me, to confirm it for you.
Signs rarely arrive with a stamp of certainty attached. They ask you to notice, to wonder, and eventually, to decide for yourself what you believe you were given.
If this resonates, you can learn more about working with me or book a reading at https://www.aperfectsoul.com
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