Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (6 page)

That evening, my family and I sat by my mom, who was still very alert, but her breathing was more audible than usual. She suddenly looked up and said, “Joseph died. Why didn’t anyone tell me this?”

I jumped in and quickly corrected her: “Mom, Daddy isn’t dead. He’s still in the nursing home.”

Startled by her statement, I suddenly realized that I’d better find a way to get Dad over here. We were afraid that my mom was beginning to lose her faculties, and we wanted her to see her husband while she could still talk to him.

“Mom,” I said, “we’ll see if the nursing home will let us pick up Dad so he can visit.” I nodded to my cousin Jackie to call the nursing home to make arrangements for one of us to get him.

“Joseph already came to say good-bye,” Mom insisted, “and he told me that I’d be with him soon.”

We all just looked at each other, acknowledging that my mother was hallucinating. I gently repeated, “Mom, Dad is in the nursing home. We’re going to bring him here.”

Once again she repeated, “No, he’s dead,” but this time, she also sat up. “Look, there he is!” She seemed to be gazing past everybody, and then she said, “Joseph, you came back for me.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she lay back on the bed.

Just then, a nurse and my cousin motioned for me to come over and talk to them at the nurses’ station. I met them just outside the door when Jackie said, “Heather, I don’t know how to tell you this. I called the nursing home, and Joseph died about 15 minutes ago. He had a heart attack.”

Mom died two days later. Even though I hadn’t seen the vision of my father, I found great comfort in the fact that he had come to my mother, and now they were together again.Since my parents are gone, I rarely tell this story, but it feels as if I went from a medical nightmare to the universe stepping in, allowing Mom and Dad to pass away peacefully with each other. I admit that it’s beyond my understanding, but I believe I had a special glimpse into a world rarely seen.

W
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by Nathan

As a new nurse in the 1980s, I learned firsthand that death doesn’t always occur in the ways we would expect. I realized that we are immortal beings having a mortal experience.

I was working in a large nursing home in New York on the 3 P.M. to 11 P.M. shift, and as is too often the case in facilities of this size, the staff always wished for more time with each patient.

Well, here it was late into the evening, and I’d already finished feeding, bathing, and helping my patients get comfortable in their beds for the night. Suddenly, I heard an eerie moan from down the hall that sounded like: “Noooo, noooo.” I immediately recognized the deep voice as my patient Frank, an affable, elderly gentleman with a little bit of confusion. I went straight to his room and found him sitting up in bed. He was rattling the bed rails, and his hands reached toward the sky as he wailed, “Noooo, noooo!”

“What is it, Frank?” I asked.

He stopped staring toward the ceiling and looked down, as if he were withdrawing from one place and coming into another. He looked me directly in the eyes and said with urgency, “I gotta go—it’s time!”

Well, being the good nurse that I am, I got him to the bathroom as fast as I could! He kind of cooperated to some extent but was very agitated. I checked the bed to see if he’d had an accident, but the sheets were clean. In the next moment, I heard the IV of the patient next to him beeping.

I didn’t want to leave Frank, but I had to check on the other patient in case it was something serious. Frank looked firmly planted on the toilet, but I strapped him in, just in case, to prevent him from falling.

As I was finishing working with the other patient’s IV, I heard that same, “Noooo, noooo! I gotta go!”

I ran back to Frank, where he was still safely sitting on the toilet. As I apologized for having briefly left him, he came out of the daze somewhat. He was looking up at the ceiling again, repeating his urgent statement about needing to go. I thought he was finished using the bathroom, so I unstrapped him from the safety harness and was getting ready to move him back to bed.

In that moment, he reached up, stared at the ceiling, and repeated, “Noooo, noooo!”

“What is it, Frank?” I knew he wasn’t hallucinating; he was clearly seeing something.

“Death has come to get me,” he finally replied. “The angel of death is here.”

I don’t know what inspired me, but I asked, “Well, is anyone else there?”

He looked at me with a puzzled expression, but then shifted his gaze back to the ceiling. He tilted his head and smiled, saying, “Oh, the angels of heaven are here, too.” As he stood up on shaky legs, I rushed in to support him, noting how light he felt as his entire body strained upward. Frank raised his arms in the air, fully extending every finger as if he were trying to touch the ceiling. Then he dropped heavily into my arms and died.

I still get a chill when I remember that moment. I witnessed a person become almost weightless and then deadweight in a single instant. In fact, Frank became so heavy that I couldn’t lift him onto his bed. Instead, I gently sat him back down on the toilet and pushed the emergency call button because I didn’t know what else to do.

While I waited, the head nurse arrived and checked his vitals. We confi rmed that he had expired right then and there, but I never told my supervisor what Frank had said nor what I believed had happened. I was afraid she’d think I was crazy! I was also embarrassed to admit that I’d misinterpreted a request to go to heaven as a request to go to the bathroom.

Now, some 30 years later, I feel privileged that I got to witness a person experiencing something beyond what most of us can normally see.

T
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by Nina

I was in my early 30s and had been married for six years. My husband and I had two kids: a three-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. As a nurse who also went to law school, I successfully moved from bedside care to hospital administration as a health-care attorney. At the same time, I was trying to balance being a wife and mother.

I thought I had it all. My husband was a Realtor, which was helpful for us since he could rearrange his daytime schedule more easily than I could in order to help with the children. I really thought our family life was on track and just like everyone else’s . . . until one day my husband told me that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. (His reasoning was that we’d gotten married too young and weren’t truly in love with each other.)

I was overwhelmed by emotions about how my life was going to change; and after the divorce, I found myself in the midst of a real juggling act. The kids were in day care, and my world was getting more demanding. The real-estate market wasn’t doing all that great, so I was making more money than my ex-husband. Now it was my sole responsibility to provide for my children, as his child-support checks only came intermittently.

As time went on, however, I got more accustomed to being a single parent. My ex-husband eventually remarried and moved out of state. From time to time, I’d think back on his comment that we’d never really been in love and realized he was right. There had been no romance between us because we were just too young.

Now that my kids were eight and nine, I wondered if I would ever find true love. I adored my family and dealt with all the challenges that came along, but I was often overwhelmed by having to do it all myself. Some of my friends made me even more concerned by remarking that my chances of finding a partner who would also be a perfect fit for my son and daughter were slim to none. I was feeling hopeless and was starting to give up on the idea that I’d find someone who’d love me
and
my kids.

Then, much to my surprise, I met a man named Bill in yoga class. From our first kiss, I knew we were meant to be, and so did he. It was like no other kiss I’d ever had. If this was love, I was sure I was feeling it deeply! Bill adored me and my children, and we eventually got married. I’d often catch myself thinking about what a wonderful man he was, and how much he loved all of us. He had also become more of a parent to my children than their own birth father.

Years later, the kids were in college, I was working, and Bill had gone on to teach yoga. He began to complain about headaches, which I paid very little attention to at first, besides suggesting he take something for it. He was reluctant to take pills but ultimately did try a few different over-the-counter remedies, all to no avail.

When Bill finally went to see a doctor, I was sure the diagnosis would be high blood pressure since it ran in his family. Maybe he was at risk for a stroke—my worst nightmare.Little did I know that there were
many
nightmares to follow when I learned that my husband’s headaches were caused by a tumor near his spine that was affecting the fluid in his central nervous system.

We went to the best doctors and hospitals that Boston had to offer. I felt so fortunate to be living in a big city that had so many resources and was a leader in medical care and research . . . but as the months and treatments went by, my optimism was replaced with sadness. The flip side of living in Boston was that if a certain kind of treatment wasn’t available, it meant that it probably wasn’t that good anyway.

Bill spent the next several years in and out of hospitals, and the kids spent every vacation with us. I knew it was hard on them and that they’d probably rather be doing fun things with their friends, but I also could feel how much they wanted to be with Bill and me.

The kids had just gotten home for holiday break on December 22 (I’ll never forget the date), and I took them to the hospital to visit Bill. When we arrived, his doctor called us all together and said, “We’ve tried everything, but the cancer has spread to his other organs. Bill doesn’t have much time left. Would you like to take him home?”

My husband looked at me, and I looked into those beautiful eyes of his, and we just knew it was time for him to come home. That was the most special Christmas ever: no gifts—only love. For all of us, the idea of gifts seemed too painful. What on earth do you give a dying person or someone who’s losing a father or husband? We had no expectations and decided to focus on the magic of the season and just being together.

A couple of days after Christmas, Bill’s condition took a turn for the worse, and the doctor said we only had a few days left. This was the worst moment of my life, realizing that my husband had become so fragile. All I could do was gently rub his shoulders and give him little pecks on his cheeks.

Suddenly I realized that our small, self-contained world had a visitor . . . not from a foreign country but from heaven. At first I didn’t know what to make of it when Bill started talking to someone in the room. I heard him say, “Mom, I can’t believe you’re here.” He told her about the kids and me, as if we were being introduced, with no regard as to whether we could hear him or not. The most amazing part was that he was focusing his eyes on a particular spot, looking upward as if that was where his mother was hovering.

On the last day of his life, he talked to his mom again. Then he looked at me and said, “Come here.” He gave me the most passionate kiss—the kind you have when you’re dating, not when you’re dying. Afterward, he told his mother, “I knew I loved her from the first kiss.” And to me, he said, “To the last kiss, I love you.” He died peacefully that night.