fizzy55
Devoted Cultist
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2014
- Messages
- 128
Apologies in advance for the long post, and this is being written by phone so the grammer and layout may be a bit lacking.
I've gone back and forth for months on if I should post about this. It's hard to tell some of it without telling all of it and some of it's just too personal, for me and for the other people concerned.
But I think there are many things that never get spoken about, even between the closest of people, because it's just too personal, the risk of ridicule or disbelief feels just too great, or it brings up emotions that are just to overwhelming so we stop mentioning it only to go on alone with our experience, unable to take it apart, examine it and discuss it with others who've experienced something similar.
I know there are others who have experienced something similar to me.
When my grandmother passed, I was a young girl and I remember hearing snippets of hushed conversation about her talking to people who wern't there in her hospital room, reaching out as if for someone prior to passing. Just the medication, of course.
When my grandfather claimed she had come back to visit him after the funeral and decorated the house for christmas in june because she had suggested it might cheer us all up, it was just the grief causing him to think he saw and heard these things, we thought.
When clocks stopped at the time of death of other family members, it was just coincidence.
And it could all be just a long stream of coincidence, along with everything that I experienced and I'm about to tell, but it affected me so profoundly, changed the way I saw things so much, that I need to tell it. I'm doing this for myself more than anything else, because I've held it in for months and I suddenly feel I can't anymore and I want to know others experiences too.
I remember the day it started. It was the day I began a thread on here telling of my experience at a sceance.
My mum called that night. She'd been to the hospital with a pain and what they'd found didn't look good.
I couldn't go in with her for her final diagnosis because of covid. They made me sit outside in the carpark while she went in alone.
Mum rang me and I listened to the doctor on speaker phone say we were looking at months. As I listened, I stared at the car parked in front of me. The last 3 letters of the licence plate spelled MUM. It took me back to when my dad passed and I left the hospital after saying goodbye and followed a car out of the carpark that spelt DAD in the same way. It had felt comforting then, as if the universe was telling me there was a plan to things. It didn't feel comforting that time.
When someone close to you is dying, the world seems to slow down and speed up simultaneously. Things that mattered so much before suddenly seem of little consequence. Things you barely registered before suddenly take on the greatest meaning. A smile, the touch of that persons hand is an emotional grenade, you want to hold on to it forever because it's slipping further away from your grasp with every moment.
You feel traumatised by what's happening, in a state of disbelief because they're here, with you and they can't be going anywhere, the doctors must be wrong. You don't know what to say to each other, you try to comfort each other but often you just gaze at each other, desperate to hold on.
You enter a different way of thinking. It's like you're underwater, or in a dream, every second an eternity and yet gone as soon as you try and grab on to it. And then it happens, they're gone and you stare at the place where they used to be in a state of mind there are no words for.
It was while I was in this state that most of this happened and I can only tell it all through my own interpretation. I just want to make sense of it. It was a series of incidents and I'll try to remember and to tell as throughly as I can, the parts I can.
My mum went into hospital and was allowed one visitor. She told me that in the night she kept feeling someone sitting down onto the bed beside her. She was in a side room by herself and there would be nobody there when she opened her eyes. She kept asking me where the music was coming from. There was no music playing. I asked her what it sounded like and she said
'Like flamenco music. Happy. Dancing.'
She came home and myself and a few of her friends cared for her during the final weeks. She fought her diagnosis to the end, believed she'd get better, even as we could all see she wasn't going to recover. It was the hardest time of my life.
She had her bed next to the window and kept asking who all the people were, gathering outside, looking in at her. There was nobody there. She said one of them had come in through the window and was stood behind her friend at the end of the bed. We asked who he was, she said she'd never seen him before. Of course, there was nobody there that any of us could see.
She insisted we answer the door to knocks nobody could hear. She said it wasn't fair to keep him waiting outside. He had been waiting to come in for a while, now. When we asked who this was, she named a family member that passed in 2014.
She wanted us to brush her hair because she had somewhere to be and wanted to be ready when it was time to go. There was going to be a party. She asked if I wanted to go with her, developed an obsession with knowing what time it was.
I was upstairs in the bathroom when I heard 3 hard knocks on the front door. I heard the door open and then close. When I went downstairs, friend asked if I'd heard somebody knocking. I said yes. They said there was nobody there when they'd opened the door. The street had been empty. We shrugged it away.
Later I was sat at mums bedside, she was asleep. Her 2 friends were sat behind me on the sofa. From under her bed came 3 loud knocks. I asked them to look under the bed, there was nothing there. One of them had heard the knocks, one of them hadn't.
My daughter went to stay with my mums friends son, so they could keep each other company while we cared for mum. They rang in the evening. The housephone kept ringing, but when they picked up there was nobody there. The phone was not one the family used, it was just to facilitate an internet connection. Mums friend said it had never rang before. She popped back, took the batteries out and put the handset in the cupboard.
We heard nothing from the kids for the rest of the night. The following morning, minutes after my daughter had left the house to go home, he rang his mum again. The phone was ringing from inside the cupboard. He didn't answer it.
The t.v searched for mums favorite songs by itself and played them while she lay drifting in and out of conciousness.
Minutes after I prayed for a sign that someone was watching over us one night my dads full name was spoken twice on the t.v by a character from mums favorite t.v show we had on as background noise for her to listen to. All in the house heard it.
Mum's night nurse came in one evening and said that as she was coming down the drive, approaching the front door she had encountered a purple ball of light, hovering in mid air. She later claimed to have seen the same thing above mums bed.
Mum started to raise her arms up, as if reaching for someone. She wouldn't be dissuaded and became quite forceful in pushing us away when we tried to hold her hand or place her arms back down. This went on for 5 or 10 minutes before she fell into an unconciousness from which she remained unchanged until she peacefully passed 2 days later. This to me, was the thing that replays in my mind. I know my grandma did the same thing. I've heard it's fairly common for people to reach out before passing. I just can't find an explanation for why they might do this.
Mum passed away in the afternoon. I walked out on to the garden, in shock, to call one of her best friends. My aunt was stood at the bottom of the garden, on her mobile. We who were there in that moment stayed metres apart, not able to find the words to say to each other, seperate in our grief. I sat down on a garden chair, tried calling, it went through to voicemail. The sun was shining fiercely down, the glare hurting my eyes as I stared at my phone screen. Someone, from somewhere in the distance, started singing Ava Maria. At 12:30 in the afternoon on a hard done by council estate, if someone sang one line of Ava Maria in the voice of an angel, they'd never done it before and they've never done it since.
My aunt didn't hear it. It is the only thing that happened that I tell here that was only witnessed by me.
Planning mums funeral, I told the celebrant what songs she wanted. I added Ava Maria, because it felt right.
I met mums friends at her house so they could help me with sorting through some things. They asked me about the songs and I told them what I'd told the celabrant. One of mums friends told me I'd got one of the songs right but the wrong artist. I was devastated. Do you think she'd mind? I asked.
Yes! Her friend said.
I didn't even know they sang that song. I said, taking my phone out of my bag to research it. But I didn't need to. In full view of us all, when I clicked the google search bar, my phone searched for said artist and brought up a recent news item about them without me typing so much as a letter. We all gazed at each other in disbelief. Almost immediatly a high pitched beeping rang out through the house. We went through to the living room to find that it was coming from mums hospital bed, which was still waiting to be picked up. We pressed every button we could find, went to unplug it only to find that it was already unplugged. We couldn't hear ourselves think, it was that loud. Finally I shouted 'Mum I know it's you, you can stop it now, we know you're here!'
It stopped. We all cried and hugged, social distancing gone through the window.
A week later, my 4 year old said my mum had been to see her. She said she had liked her nans dress. I asked her to describe the dress. It was the dress I had taken to the funeral home for my mum to wear. My daughter could not have known this and had never seen my mum wear this dress or anything of that colour. She said her nan had talked about a bracelet she wanted someone to wear. Mum had left a bracelet for my oldest daughter with some charms on it. Young daughter knew nothing of this.
Strange lights appeared on her bedroom video monitor when she was asleep, white streaks of light that whizzed around her bed, making zigzags in the air, sometimes there were 2 and one appeared to chase the other. This went on for a few weeks, then stopped.
I met a family friend at my mums house. They had treated me appallingly during all of this. I'd had enough, put my foot down. We were stood in the kitchen and they were telling me that my mum would have been on their side. I told them that my mum would have never took the side of anyone who had made me feel the way they had. My mums friend, who had been observing this from the other side of the room, said:
'Why don't you both look down, I think you'll get your answer.'
We looked down to see a large white feather literally laid across my feet.
Me and oldest daughter went to mums house for the final time. By this point, we had sorted through everything, been through every room, taken what had sentimental value, given most away. There was literally nothing left.
My oldest daughter was having a very hard time. She wanted reassurance that her nan was watching over to her. She found it hard to believe. I was still working through all that had happened and I told her that if she looked around her, I was sure nan would give her a sign. I didn't know still, if I believed it myself.
She said she felt like she needed to go upstairs, to the bedroom she used to sleep in. I followed, and there on the desk, which I had cleared the week before and left empty, was a jewelry box and inside it was a charm to match the bracelet my mum had left her, with a quote of love engraved on it that my mum used to say to her when she was small. Underneath that was another charm with my mums first initial. I had been through that bedroom countless times. I'd sorted through and looked at everything and I had left the room vitually empty. The house had lain empty since. That jewelry box, those charms, had not been there. They HAD NOT BEEN THERE.
There were other things, things I've felt and seen, but this is all I can tell right now. Mostly, I wanted to tell those instances that have been witnessed by others as well as myself. I don't know why I feel the need to tell it just that I do. I feel that these things have helped carry me through my grief, helped me cope because I feel like I have been given proof that theres something bigger than all this, that she is not gone. My own fear of death has gone away, to a large extent. I've tried to talk to a few people about this, but stopped when someone got angry, saying that if the afterlife existed then their loved one would have given them a sign, so what makes me special? I don't think I'm special. I think there must be many people who have experienced things. I also know there are many people who havent and I don't know why, I honestly don't, but I know that it doesn't mean their love was any less. I just know what I experienced and I feel like it was profound. It's changed how I am able to deal with my grief, it's changed the way that I see life and death. And it's still left me with many more questions than answers.
I've gone back and forth for months on if I should post about this. It's hard to tell some of it without telling all of it and some of it's just too personal, for me and for the other people concerned.
But I think there are many things that never get spoken about, even between the closest of people, because it's just too personal, the risk of ridicule or disbelief feels just too great, or it brings up emotions that are just to overwhelming so we stop mentioning it only to go on alone with our experience, unable to take it apart, examine it and discuss it with others who've experienced something similar.
I know there are others who have experienced something similar to me.
When my grandmother passed, I was a young girl and I remember hearing snippets of hushed conversation about her talking to people who wern't there in her hospital room, reaching out as if for someone prior to passing. Just the medication, of course.
When my grandfather claimed she had come back to visit him after the funeral and decorated the house for christmas in june because she had suggested it might cheer us all up, it was just the grief causing him to think he saw and heard these things, we thought.
When clocks stopped at the time of death of other family members, it was just coincidence.
And it could all be just a long stream of coincidence, along with everything that I experienced and I'm about to tell, but it affected me so profoundly, changed the way I saw things so much, that I need to tell it. I'm doing this for myself more than anything else, because I've held it in for months and I suddenly feel I can't anymore and I want to know others experiences too.
I remember the day it started. It was the day I began a thread on here telling of my experience at a sceance.
My mum called that night. She'd been to the hospital with a pain and what they'd found didn't look good.
I couldn't go in with her for her final diagnosis because of covid. They made me sit outside in the carpark while she went in alone.
Mum rang me and I listened to the doctor on speaker phone say we were looking at months. As I listened, I stared at the car parked in front of me. The last 3 letters of the licence plate spelled MUM. It took me back to when my dad passed and I left the hospital after saying goodbye and followed a car out of the carpark that spelt DAD in the same way. It had felt comforting then, as if the universe was telling me there was a plan to things. It didn't feel comforting that time.
When someone close to you is dying, the world seems to slow down and speed up simultaneously. Things that mattered so much before suddenly seem of little consequence. Things you barely registered before suddenly take on the greatest meaning. A smile, the touch of that persons hand is an emotional grenade, you want to hold on to it forever because it's slipping further away from your grasp with every moment.
You feel traumatised by what's happening, in a state of disbelief because they're here, with you and they can't be going anywhere, the doctors must be wrong. You don't know what to say to each other, you try to comfort each other but often you just gaze at each other, desperate to hold on.
You enter a different way of thinking. It's like you're underwater, or in a dream, every second an eternity and yet gone as soon as you try and grab on to it. And then it happens, they're gone and you stare at the place where they used to be in a state of mind there are no words for.
It was while I was in this state that most of this happened and I can only tell it all through my own interpretation. I just want to make sense of it. It was a series of incidents and I'll try to remember and to tell as throughly as I can, the parts I can.
My mum went into hospital and was allowed one visitor. She told me that in the night she kept feeling someone sitting down onto the bed beside her. She was in a side room by herself and there would be nobody there when she opened her eyes. She kept asking me where the music was coming from. There was no music playing. I asked her what it sounded like and she said
'Like flamenco music. Happy. Dancing.'
She came home and myself and a few of her friends cared for her during the final weeks. She fought her diagnosis to the end, believed she'd get better, even as we could all see she wasn't going to recover. It was the hardest time of my life.
She had her bed next to the window and kept asking who all the people were, gathering outside, looking in at her. There was nobody there. She said one of them had come in through the window and was stood behind her friend at the end of the bed. We asked who he was, she said she'd never seen him before. Of course, there was nobody there that any of us could see.
She insisted we answer the door to knocks nobody could hear. She said it wasn't fair to keep him waiting outside. He had been waiting to come in for a while, now. When we asked who this was, she named a family member that passed in 2014.
She wanted us to brush her hair because she had somewhere to be and wanted to be ready when it was time to go. There was going to be a party. She asked if I wanted to go with her, developed an obsession with knowing what time it was.
I was upstairs in the bathroom when I heard 3 hard knocks on the front door. I heard the door open and then close. When I went downstairs, friend asked if I'd heard somebody knocking. I said yes. They said there was nobody there when they'd opened the door. The street had been empty. We shrugged it away.
Later I was sat at mums bedside, she was asleep. Her 2 friends were sat behind me on the sofa. From under her bed came 3 loud knocks. I asked them to look under the bed, there was nothing there. One of them had heard the knocks, one of them hadn't.
My daughter went to stay with my mums friends son, so they could keep each other company while we cared for mum. They rang in the evening. The housephone kept ringing, but when they picked up there was nobody there. The phone was not one the family used, it was just to facilitate an internet connection. Mums friend said it had never rang before. She popped back, took the batteries out and put the handset in the cupboard.
We heard nothing from the kids for the rest of the night. The following morning, minutes after my daughter had left the house to go home, he rang his mum again. The phone was ringing from inside the cupboard. He didn't answer it.
The t.v searched for mums favorite songs by itself and played them while she lay drifting in and out of conciousness.
Minutes after I prayed for a sign that someone was watching over us one night my dads full name was spoken twice on the t.v by a character from mums favorite t.v show we had on as background noise for her to listen to. All in the house heard it.
Mum's night nurse came in one evening and said that as she was coming down the drive, approaching the front door she had encountered a purple ball of light, hovering in mid air. She later claimed to have seen the same thing above mums bed.
Mum started to raise her arms up, as if reaching for someone. She wouldn't be dissuaded and became quite forceful in pushing us away when we tried to hold her hand or place her arms back down. This went on for 5 or 10 minutes before she fell into an unconciousness from which she remained unchanged until she peacefully passed 2 days later. This to me, was the thing that replays in my mind. I know my grandma did the same thing. I've heard it's fairly common for people to reach out before passing. I just can't find an explanation for why they might do this.
Mum passed away in the afternoon. I walked out on to the garden, in shock, to call one of her best friends. My aunt was stood at the bottom of the garden, on her mobile. We who were there in that moment stayed metres apart, not able to find the words to say to each other, seperate in our grief. I sat down on a garden chair, tried calling, it went through to voicemail. The sun was shining fiercely down, the glare hurting my eyes as I stared at my phone screen. Someone, from somewhere in the distance, started singing Ava Maria. At 12:30 in the afternoon on a hard done by council estate, if someone sang one line of Ava Maria in the voice of an angel, they'd never done it before and they've never done it since.
My aunt didn't hear it. It is the only thing that happened that I tell here that was only witnessed by me.
Planning mums funeral, I told the celebrant what songs she wanted. I added Ava Maria, because it felt right.
I met mums friends at her house so they could help me with sorting through some things. They asked me about the songs and I told them what I'd told the celabrant. One of mums friends told me I'd got one of the songs right but the wrong artist. I was devastated. Do you think she'd mind? I asked.
Yes! Her friend said.
I didn't even know they sang that song. I said, taking my phone out of my bag to research it. But I didn't need to. In full view of us all, when I clicked the google search bar, my phone searched for said artist and brought up a recent news item about them without me typing so much as a letter. We all gazed at each other in disbelief. Almost immediatly a high pitched beeping rang out through the house. We went through to the living room to find that it was coming from mums hospital bed, which was still waiting to be picked up. We pressed every button we could find, went to unplug it only to find that it was already unplugged. We couldn't hear ourselves think, it was that loud. Finally I shouted 'Mum I know it's you, you can stop it now, we know you're here!'
It stopped. We all cried and hugged, social distancing gone through the window.
A week later, my 4 year old said my mum had been to see her. She said she had liked her nans dress. I asked her to describe the dress. It was the dress I had taken to the funeral home for my mum to wear. My daughter could not have known this and had never seen my mum wear this dress or anything of that colour. She said her nan had talked about a bracelet she wanted someone to wear. Mum had left a bracelet for my oldest daughter with some charms on it. Young daughter knew nothing of this.
Strange lights appeared on her bedroom video monitor when she was asleep, white streaks of light that whizzed around her bed, making zigzags in the air, sometimes there were 2 and one appeared to chase the other. This went on for a few weeks, then stopped.
I met a family friend at my mums house. They had treated me appallingly during all of this. I'd had enough, put my foot down. We were stood in the kitchen and they were telling me that my mum would have been on their side. I told them that my mum would have never took the side of anyone who had made me feel the way they had. My mums friend, who had been observing this from the other side of the room, said:
'Why don't you both look down, I think you'll get your answer.'
We looked down to see a large white feather literally laid across my feet.
Me and oldest daughter went to mums house for the final time. By this point, we had sorted through everything, been through every room, taken what had sentimental value, given most away. There was literally nothing left.
My oldest daughter was having a very hard time. She wanted reassurance that her nan was watching over to her. She found it hard to believe. I was still working through all that had happened and I told her that if she looked around her, I was sure nan would give her a sign. I didn't know still, if I believed it myself.
She said she felt like she needed to go upstairs, to the bedroom she used to sleep in. I followed, and there on the desk, which I had cleared the week before and left empty, was a jewelry box and inside it was a charm to match the bracelet my mum had left her, with a quote of love engraved on it that my mum used to say to her when she was small. Underneath that was another charm with my mums first initial. I had been through that bedroom countless times. I'd sorted through and looked at everything and I had left the room vitually empty. The house had lain empty since. That jewelry box, those charms, had not been there. They HAD NOT BEEN THERE.
There were other things, things I've felt and seen, but this is all I can tell right now. Mostly, I wanted to tell those instances that have been witnessed by others as well as myself. I don't know why I feel the need to tell it just that I do. I feel that these things have helped carry me through my grief, helped me cope because I feel like I have been given proof that theres something bigger than all this, that she is not gone. My own fear of death has gone away, to a large extent. I've tried to talk to a few people about this, but stopped when someone got angry, saying that if the afterlife existed then their loved one would have given them a sign, so what makes me special? I don't think I'm special. I think there must be many people who have experienced things. I also know there are many people who havent and I don't know why, I honestly don't, but I know that it doesn't mean their love was any less. I just know what I experienced and I feel like it was profound. It's changed how I am able to deal with my grief, it's changed the way that I see life and death. And it's still left me with many more questions than answers.