My mom called Heaven her home. “Have you ever felt like you don’t really belong, that this Earth really isn’t your home?” she had asked me just months before she died. “No, not really,” I replied. I didn’t know exactly what she meant. My mother was a bit eccentric when it came to spirituality. I didn’t know what to believe at times.
Some of what she told me was so bizarre. She knew she was going to be called home soon, she said. About three months prior to discovering the cancer in her liver she had a dream and although she couldn’t remember the details she said she heard someone say “cancer” to her. I began to worry. When my mother had a dream, it usually meant something-either good, bad or indifferent, it could be tied to something about to happen. Looks as if she was a bit of a psychic herself.
Another odd event took place a few days before she passed. She was still quite lucid at this time and asked that the chaplain from hospice come visit her. During his visit, she asked him if he knew what the top three industries in the world were. Now, this question is an odd one, coming from a woman who knows she is dying, don’t you think?
But he said she smiled and slyly asked him this trivia question. He thought a moment and answered, first computers, then oil and the third, well, he would have to think on that one. What made this question even stranger, he later told my sister, was the fact that he and his wife were discussing that very subject – what the three top industries in the U.S. were – just that morning before he arrived to see my mother. Was she reading his mind for some unexplained reason? Or did her spirit visit him in his home? My mother had made comments to my sister that she was given the “numbers,” like a combination that would enable her to get back and forth from here to “there.” That “there” stood a beautiful church on the corner and everything was brilliantly colored and peaceful. She said her mother and father were there along with others who had passed on. The very last words my mother spoke were words of validation that she is a being of spirit-no doubt about it.
Mom had been slipping in and out of consciousness for about 24 hours, barely speaking. She had a seizure, woke for a second and said, “How come this is taking so long?” and then went completely unconscious, the nurse came to examine her hours later and sadly told us that she no longer had a blood pressure and it was just a matter of hours, maybe minutes before she would pass. After the nurse left, my sister whispered to me, “I saw a spirit light by that nurse.”
The room was dark and quiet. Out of nowhere, voice strong as ever, my mom piped up, “Oh, that was just me.”
With eyes almost popping out of my head, my jaw dropped and a chill ran down my spine. My mother spoke clearly just as if nothing was wrong, after being basically unconscious for about two days, as well as not having any detectible blood pressure.
“That was you, mom?” my sister said hesitantly. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing.
“Well, not really me,” she replied clear as a bell.
I was in total disbelief. She didn’t open her eyes or sit up but she spoke as if she had never even been sick.
“That was your spirit?” my sister asked.
“Yes,” my mom said. Those were her last words. My mother, however, lived another 26 hours. It is unbelievable. We think she may have wanted to see her youngest sister, because she finally passed just hours after her sister visited and sadly, it was her sister’s birthday.
See Part 3 in this four-part series in our Feb. 26 edition.
Contact Paula at paulaparisot@gmail.com.
