Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson

Author:Laura Lynne Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

I am quite confident that the most important part of a human being is not his physical body but his nonphysical essence, which some people call soul…The nonphysical part cannot die and cannot decay because it’s not physical.

—RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

20

GROUNDHOGS

I MET Julie, my editor, not long after she acquired my first book. I came to her office in Midtown Manhattan prepared to read for her, but she quickly told me that she didn’t want the reading that day. “I’m already a believer,” she told me, “so you don’t have to read me to convince me.” But my literary agent was there, too, and she insisted that Julie should have a reading with me. Julie reluctantly agreed—but I could tell there was a reason why she initially resisted, though I didn’t press her.

We settled in and got started. Somewhere around the middle of the reading, Julie’s father came through. I told her he was there with a dog.

“He is showing me a peach,” I told her. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say about this peach, but that’s what he’s showing me. I don’t know—maybe Georgia? Like a Georgia peach?”

Julie got visibly emotional.

“Georgie Girl,” she said. “That’s my childhood dog.”

Julie’s father told me he had information about a different dog. He even gave me the dog’s name—Alfie.

“Your father wants you to know you made the right decision about Alfie,” I relayed. Then I hesitated for a moment and clasped my hands together. “You know what I’m going to say…but your dad wants you to know that you did the right thing. You bought him a good chunk of time, but when it’s his time, your father and Georgie Girl will be there waiting for him.”

At this point, Julie was a weeping mess. Julie’s dog, a fifteen-year-old Tibetan terrier named Alfie, had had risky surgery just a few days earlier. That’s why she was initially resisting the reading with me that day. She was raw—and worried about opening the emotional floodgates. And of course she was worried about what she might learn about Alfie’s health in the reading.

Her dad’s message proved true. The surgery had turned back the clock for Alfie, who recovered quickly and regained his youth and vigor. In fact, he lived a good life for two more years, but then his health began to decline.

So Julie took him to the downtown vet who’d known him since he was a puppy. “I wanted to know if Alfie was in pain and if I was being selfish in keeping him alive,” she later told me. She sat in the waiting room with a heavy heart, with Alfie lying at her feet. While there, her eye was drawn to the lost dog flyers posted on a bulletin board on the wall across from her. She got out of her seat and went directly to one poster, for a missing Shiba Inu. “I had the thought, I wonder where this dog was last seen, and traced my finger across to that information.

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