Signs: gifts from dead?

One day, not long after her husband died, Ann Dowdy was sitting by his grave having a one-sided conversation. She was crying and asking questions that got no replies, when all of a sudden an olive fell from the tree above her head and landed squarely on the headstone. "Maybe it's an answer," Dowdy thought at the time.

Five years later, as she prepared to move away from south Texas and remarry, she sat at the grave again, saying goodbye. And as she sat — there was no wind, she recalls — an olive fell off the tree and landed on the grave.

Were the two olives a sign, or just a coincidence? A message, or just something that happened to fall off a tree? With no way of text messaging us from beyond the grave, would the dead be forced to rely on something as inconclusive, as inconsequential, as a tiny fruit in order to communicate such a momentous piece of information ("I'm still here!")? Dowdy, now living in Salt Lake City, is certain what happened in that Texas cemetery was significant. She had sat at the grave many times, she says, but the olives only fell "when I needed a confirmation."

Butterflies, rainbows, garage doors that go up and down for no reason — these are the kinds of stories the living tell about signs they believe they have received from the dead. Often these are stories shared tentatively, if they're shared at all, kept close to the chest for fear that they will be debunked by skeptical listeners.

Even in grief support groups, says Phran Ginsberg, stories about the dead communicating with the living are sometimes discouraged. That's what happened in the Compassionate Friends group she and her husband attended after their teenage daughter Bailey died in 2002. Unable to talk during the regular meetings about the ways they felt their children had contacted them, the parents would stand around afterward and hold a "second meeting" in the parking lot.

"The consensus was that we who were the so called 'believers' were experiencing a more positive movement through our grief," Phran says. "The knowledge that our kids were still with us gave us the hope we so desperately needed just to survive each day."

So Phran and Bob began what they call Afterlife Discussion Groups in their home state of New York in 2003. There are now groups in eight states, and the Ginsbergs hope there will be at least one in every state, including Utah, within a couple of years. All that's needed, Phran says, is "10 to 20 people in drivable distance of each other, and a facilitator." In 2004, the Ginsbergs incorporated the nonprofit Forever Family Foundation to coordinate the groups and support research into survival of consciousness.