my stepmother's footsteps could still be heard a decade after her death.
During another “visit,” I had a vivid dream about my grandfather a year after he passed away. In the dream my grandfather and I were on a bus from the 1950s or ‘60s. Back then these buses contained pull cords so that passengers could alert the bus driver when their stop arrived.
My grandfather was sitting down, and I was standing up holding on to keep myself balanced. He looked up at me and asked, “Peno,” a nickname he had always called me. “Is this my stop?” I replied, “Yes, Grandpa,” to which he stood up and walked to the back of the bus. He then took off running into darkness.
I woke up with tears in my eyes. What I found interesting about this dream is that he had broken his hip when I was little and could never run after that.
My grandfather came to me again. Only this time, he gave me what I would later find out was a validation. He simply said, “Go to see your grandmother. She is going to be with me soon.” This was all so real, and I knew it was my grandfather speaking to me. So I did as I was told and paid my grandmother a visit. Two weeks later she had a stroke and died.
Years later my mother crossed over after a long illness, and I ordered a spray of flowers for her casket. The spray was made up of an array of multi-colored carnations. But in the midst of the carnations were two pink roses and one white rose to represent my mother's three children. The pink roses were from my sister and me while the white rose was in remembrance of my younger brother who had crossed over three years earlier.
After the funeral service, I wanted to remove the roses from the spray and keep them in remembrance of my mother, but they were gone. I asked my sister, the funeral director, and others if they had taken the roses, but no one had. The funeral director told me that they had been there when the flowers were brought to the cemetery. No one could figure out what had happened to the roses.
A few days later strange things began to happen. I kept finding single pink rose petals everywhere. I found a pink petal lying peacefully on my computer keyboard on two separate occasions and then later found another one lying right outside my backdoor. At first, I couldn't figure out where these rose petals were coming from. I was the only one who had keys to my house so no one else could have been leaving them.
The rose petals continued to show up in unusual places. About a month later my girlfriend Sandy and I went to the cemetery to visit my mother's gravesite. The ground was covered with leaves, and we were cleaning up around my mother's headstone. I happened to look down and noticed a red rose petal lying right there at my feet.
Before I bent down to pick up yet another hello from my mother, I asked Sandy who was standing a few feet away if she could see any new gravesites in the area. I wanted to make sure there was no chance that it could have blown over from another gravesite fresh with flowers. She looked at me like I was crazy wondering why I would ask such a thing. I explained what had happened and asked her to come over to look at the rose petal. We were both in awe.
Even though I had no doubt that these rose petals were from my mother, I decided to visit with a local medium. You can just imagine my excitement when I was told, “Your mother says she is leaving you rose petals.”
I haven't received any more rose petals from my mother since that day in the cemetery. Perhaps, she doesn't need to leave them anymore since I get the message. Her spirit is alive and well. And as for that last rose petal, it remains in an airtight bag…a very special reminder that we do receive “visits from heaven.”
Carolyn B. Coleridge, LCSW
California
When my maternal grandmother Frances LaMaizon Jervis passed on, she promised me she would come back to visit. Frances lived with my family and me in New England and was a second mother to me.
Grandma was a very spiritual woman with a pure devotion to God and a determined will. She had many spiritual experiences and even with limited education could memorize Bible verses. We shared a lot of similarities, especially our love for angels and cats. She was an amazing healer in her own right.
I grew up listening to many accounts of her incredible life experiences. She once told me that she was a fast runner in her homeland of South America. One day she fell while running in a race, hitting the back of another athlete's shoe. As a result, her eyes were spiked by the shoe, and she was blinded. Determined not to be blind for the rest of her life, she prayed to God to help heal her eyes when she felt a presence and miraculously regained partial sight. She believed, and it happened. Obviously, she was a spiritual inspiration to me and was one of my earliest teachers.
At the age of eighty-seven my grandmother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because this is the most aggressive and deadliest form of cancer, my family knew that it wouldn't be long before she passed. Through it all, Grandma always promised me one thing—she would come back to visit me after she died.
When I saw my grandmother in the hospital during her final days, she didn't look like herself. She was very frail and thin. The smell of the cancer eating away at her had enveloped the room. It was painful for me to see, and I am sure even more painful for her. Eventually, she was unable to speak as she lay there nearly unconscious. I told her that I loved her and that I would miss her. Suddenly, all I could hear was her struggling with her breath. My intuitive voice told me to tell her what she had meant to me. I knew her spirit would hear me. This was one of my last chances to express myself to her. I told her, “Grandma, you taught me about unconditional love.” That was something I was not aware of until that moment.
Even though she was semicomatose, my grandmother coughed coarsely and tried to speak. I interpreted this as her acknowledging what I had said. I knew she had heard me. Two days later I had a dream about her dancing with me. She was at some kind of outdoor gathering with many elderly and some younger people I didn't know. She was dancing barefoot in the center of this grassy clearing. (The grassy earth and everyone being barefoot represented to me that these souls were close to returning to the earth.) She saw me on the sidelines and ran up to me, grabbing both of my hands while pulling me onto the grassy dance floor with her.
Grandma couldn't walk in her last days so I knew the dream was a premonition of her imminent passing and the ability she would have to dance again when she crossed over. The next morning I got a call from my mother telling me that she had transitioned. Her passing left a big void in my life. She was the first close family member to die. My mother was always the disciplinarian, but my grandmother was always the playful “ma” with never-ending unconditional love. I wondered what she was doing and how she was transitioning.
Although I was saddened because she was gone, it was bittersweet. My grandmother had always wanted to return “home” as soon as she could. She had had two near-death experiences prior to her passing. One night, when she was in the hospital, her symptoms grew worse, and the staff called a Code Blue. The hospital staff was able to revive her. When she came to, she said that she went to the Other Side and that there were tons of angels around her. She stated that they showed her a scroll with her name at the top.
She had three more things to do before the golden seal was put on the end of
