I'M BACK!

I’m back. Bet you didn’t even realize I was gone. But I was. Death and funerals took me away for awhile. They say birth and death comes in threes. So, I’m done with the death. I lost my brother-in-law and an aunt within days of each other. They were numbers two and three for me this year. My dear friend’s mother was the first. In a few months time, we’ll welcome new life. Beautiful babies – three of them. It’s that whole passing on of spirits thing I told you about. The brother-in-law has a daughter who’s expecting. The aunt has a niece on her husband’s side of the family who’ll give birth any day now. I haven’t found the third baby coming yet, but I’ve been dreaming about her. And I’ve been dreaming about her family – dreaming that they are my family.

People look at me crazy when they discover that I believe in haints and spirits. And I do. I’ve heard and seen too much in my lifetime to deny the presence of energy that sometimes walks with us through our lives. My aunt took ill unexpectedly, suffering a heart attack. She’d gone through bypass surgery and then suffered from pneumonia and other assorted complications that made her recovery impossible. The day before she died she was sleeping so peacefully that her husband and daughter said it was if she didn’t have a problem in the world. When she woke up she told them that she had truly been through something. Seems her grandmother and her mother came to see her. She said they stood by her hospital bed smiling down at her and that her grandmother held her hand briefly before the two women turned and walked out of the room. She said they never looked back as they disappeared out of sight but that when she asked if she could come with them, she heard her mother’s voice tell her that she would be back to visit her again the next day. The next day my aunt fell asleep again and died. The old women took her along that time.

My friend has been dreaming about his mother. In the first dream they were in a house and water was coming up through the floorboards as they walked side by side. I think his mother was sending him a message. She knows he’s been under a lot of stress and pressure trying to keep home and family from falling apart. Mother was letting him know that she is still there supporting him, keeping him afloat, still holding tight to his hand. In the second dream there was a pond, a body of water contained outside. Mother was playing with the children in the yard. He was inside the house looking out. The pressures aren’t swelling out of control like before. They’re contained. Mother feels more comfortable letting go. She knows that he’ll eventually be just fine. I don’t doubt my friend thinks me a bit crazy too but intuition tells me I’m right. His mother’s gone but she hasn’t left him completely. Her energy is still here, still keeping watch, still holding on, knowing that he hasn’t been ready or able to let go.

An acquaintance once wrote that she felt her late husband’s presence in her bed at night. They’d lived and loved together for some twenty-plus years. She told me that one day she found herself laughing more, and living more, her days feeling fuller and less empty. She says that with the laughter came a new friend and then one day she realized the hand she imagined was holding hers in her sleep wasn’t there anymore. She was okay with this because she believed her late husband was as well.

When my beloved grandfather died my granny use to walk the fields in the early morning, talking to herself. We worried about her mental state for days when she told us she was talking to her beloved husband, believing that he was still there, still tilling the land as he’d done when he was alive. Talk to the dead, she use to say, you’d be surprised what they have to tell you. When granny was feeling out of sorts she’d go to the fields and search for answers. One day, when her home was empty of family and friends and she was feeling lost and alone she asked Papa for the answers and they came to her that night in a dream. Granny dreamt that Papa was walking her to class, carrying her books to school. The next day Granny enrolled in classes at the local community college. With school came new friends and experiences. At the age of 78 Granny received her college diploma. By then she’d stopped walking in the fields. So I believe and now I’m waiting for the babies.