just the same. I was no longer able to cope and John began walking the dog on his own. Shandy regularly slipped his lead and would disappear for two hours or more with John walking for miles calling his name. One day he ate another large hole in the garden fence and followed a woman home on her bicycle, all the way to the next village. He escaped three times that week and twice we phoned the police to see if anyone had handed him in because we just did not know what else to do.
When John was working away the following week I remember trying to take Shandy for a walk in the pouring rain. I had to push the girls in a double buggy, and Shandy almost pulled us all into the road. I came home wet and tired and cried all the way home. Later when I fed Shandy, my eldest daughter Charlotte walked past him and he snapped at her. I just screamed hysterically and shut him in the kitchen.
He was a beautiful dog but the mistake in taking him on was ours. When you purchase a dog from the RSPCA, you agree to return it if there is a problem, so we took him back. On the day we handed him over I cried for several hours. I felt such a failure and I felt so ashamed. When they rang us a few days later to say that he had been taken home by a family who lived on a farm and wanted him as a working dog I cried some more. He was so intelligent he would love it. It was a difficult time and the guilt I felt was unbelievable.
Anthony had died, and so had my grandmother. We had been burgled and I had given up my dog and all this happened in a very short time. It was no wonder that I slipped into a deep depression but had no idea what was happening to me. I didn’t know anyone who’d suffered from depression and so I had no one to discuss it with. I was good at keeping up appearances and although the house was in a serious mess, inside and out I was good at hiding the worst of it when people came around.
I used to have an ironing cupboard and all the clean washing would get thrown in there. I was too ill to do more than look after the children each day and breathed a sigh of relief as I dropped the eldest off at playgroup twice a week. I usually managed to hide my tears. One day I remember one of the mothers walking up to me outside the playgroup to see if I was okay. I’d been crying for several hours and my make up couldn’t hide it any longer. She walked back home with me for coffee and it was the first time I was able to talk about how I was feeling.
I realized that something serious was wrong and finally made a trip to the doctor. The doctor placed me on antidepressant tablets. The tablets made me feel like I was living in a fog, but they did help a little. The psychic experiences had gone (probably as a result of the antidepressants) but I still felt unable to do anything other than the bare minimum of work in the home. Everything we ate came straight out of the freezer. I didn’t cook – I just warmed things up. I felt numb and only half on the planet.
I remember feeling as if I had a ball and chain around my ankle. I couldn’t manage even the simplest of tasks. I spent hours sitting on the sofa watching television and when John came home at night he would often enquire politely about my day. I would make something up because I couldn’t remember doing anything at all. What did I do? I day-dreamed my life away…
Later, I began working as a temp and did occasional work as a personal assistant or receptionist in many of the large companies in our local brewing town. I was able to cope with the short-term jobs and it was great to get out of the house again. As soon as a job became a little longer, though, I started to get into difficulties. I just couldn’t manage, even though I was offered permanent positions constantly. I knew that I would not be able to keep it together for more than a few days a week.
At one time I had a trainee nanny from the local college to help me for a few days each week, and my youngest daughter went to a nursery one day a week and a childminder another. I finally had some time to myself but it was getting too complicated and when my mother offered to have the children whilst I worked I immediately said yes. The car I had bought with the insurance money from the burglary gave me a great deal of freedom and with a little money in my pocket I was able to take my mum out shopping on the days I was not working. We helped each other and I felt a lot better.
In time, I found that the antidepressant tablets were holding me back, and I knew I had to stop taking them. The doctor had warned me not to stop taking the tablets in one go but I did it anyway. I literally took the tablets one day and stopped the next. The fog cleared almost immediately and I was fine for a while. I’d missed the psychic experiences even though I feared them and whilst I was taking the tablets I seemed unable to feel the unseen spiritual help and guidance which was my birthright. Guardian angels were with me – but I’d been unable to ‘feel’ anything when I had been depressed. I lost them, and they lost me.
I still spent a lot of time in front of the television. One day I was watching the daytime television show This Morning, which was focusing on angels. It reminded me of the experience I’d had as a child where I’d felt I’d been saved by angels and I began to investigate the whole angel phenomenon in depth. My life suddenly had new meaning. I wanted to find out more about angels.
By this time we had a computer and it gave me the perfect opportunity to learn how to use it. Amazing things were beginning to appear on the internet and at last I was able to do the research that I’d longed to do in the years before. Now I could type any paranormal word into a search engine and the internet would open up the whole world to psychic investigation. It was very exciting.
The week after I’d watched the angel programme my youngest daughter had an upset stomach. I quickly ran out of sheets and towels so I made her up a bed on the bathroom floor and laid her down to sleep on some towels. She called me steadily throughout the day, which was exhausting. After she called me for the twentieth time that day I called out to the universe for ‘someone’ to come and help me with her as I was now so tired, and again found myself unable to cope.
Much to my confusion, as I walked into the bathroom, the sound of a celestial choir filled the room. I searched the house looking for the source of that sound, and even stuck my head outside the window but I realized that angels (or some other helpful spirits) were showing me they were around and watching over us. Angels were with me, and at last I was able to feel them around me again.
More and more spontaneous paranormal experiences were occurring. Less than a year later I had another ‘out-of-body experience’ like I’d had as a young child on holiday. I was suffering from a sore throat and was taking antibiotics. One night, and after my husband had gone to bed I decided to get myself a hot chocolate before retiring. As I opened the fridge I spotted the remains of an open bottle of wine in the bottom of the door. I’d opened it a couple of days before. ‘Why not?’ I thought to myself. This was exactly what I needed to cheer myself up so I decided to pour myself a glass, which I drank quickly before switching off the lights to go to bed. I thought no more about it.
Whether it was the mixture of the wine with the antibiotics, or just tiredness, I was never too sure but as I started to walk upstairs I found myself becoming ‘taller and taller’. By the time I reached the top step I was well aware that something was not right. Our house was an older property and our bedroom was part of a new extension. To get the ceiling height in the bedroom, there was a step down into it, so the floor in our bedroom was slightly lower than the other upstairs rooms. As I stood on this top step of the bedroom this particular night, it felt as if the step had been raised somehow.
‘What have you done to the step?’ I asked John who was drifting off to sleep.
My spiritual body had slipped out of the top of my head somehow, and I was now ‘looking down’ upon myself in the mirrored wardrobe door. My logical brain was still trying to explain what had happened and I was aggressively questioning my husband, and trying to work out if he’d had someone raise the entire bedroom floor just to trick me! As if! I was standing level with the mirrored wardrobe door yet at the same time I was almost up on the ceiling. How could this be happening?
I took off my jacket and opened the
