A few days ago I shared an article on Facebook called
"Ten Signs That Deceased Loved Ones Give Us To Let Us Know They Are Around"
I received messages from a few people who lost parents recently thanking me for posting it and wanting to hear from their loved ones and wondering if I had experienced anything myself.
I have had many instances that I believe were signs from my Dad. I firmly believe he was able to communicate with us after his physical body left this world - something I would not have believed before his death. Some people are spooked by things like this, but I feel comforted that death is not final and our loved ones are still "around".
1) My first experience occurred about a month after my father died. We had sold my parents' house in Vermont and had cleaned almost all of their belongings out. I went to Vermont with my daughter Annie to attend a graduation party for my niece. Even though the house was empty, Annie and I decided to sleep one more night in the house before the upcoming closing. We slept in sleeping bags on the living room rug and watched "Pretty Woman" on my laptop. It felt good to just be there. In the morning, while Annie was in the shower I went upstairs to look around one last time. As I was walking up the stairs, I smelled my Dad. I stood on the stairs and breathed in the scent of his after-shave as if he was right next to me. After a minute, I went upstairs to his office and wandered around. On my way back down the stairs I stopped in the same spot and smelled nothing.
When Annie was out of the shower and dressed, the thought came into my head to show her the basement. In all of the years we had visited my parents, she had never been down there. It was an old house and the basement was full of bugs and spiders and cobwebs - it was where my Dad would go to putter around at night with his tools. The new owners requested we leave the basement as it was - they wanted to go through my Dad's old tools. We were just as happy not to have to clean it out. I had been down there when we were cleaning out the rest of the house to see if there was anything I wanted to keep, so I knew what was down there.
When I brought Annie down, we looked around once again. Before we went back upstairs, she noticed something on top of a box near the stairway. When my parents were first married, my Dad was a partner in a wrought-iron business. He designed and made furniture and decorations out of wrought-iron. Laying on top of a box near the stairway was one of his creations I had never seen before. It was old and rusty. It was a musical staff with notes made out of metal washers.
Annie was in high school at the time and was planning to go to music school for college. She asked me if she could have it. I firmly believe it was my father who put the thought into my head to take Annie to the basement because he left this there for her. He wanted her to have it.
Nobody in my family had ever seen this in the basement before, yet there it was right out in the open waiting for Annie!
Annie sanded it and repainted it, and it now hangs in our kitchen as a reminder of my father.
2) In the months after my father's death, my brother was driving my dad's work van to make sure everything was working ok before he sold it. As he was driving, the radio stopped working. He tried to see what was wrong with it but couldn't figure out why it stopped working. Then it started working again. He told me about this and said he thought it was Dad fooling around.
A few weeks later, my sister, Lori, in Alaska was driving her daughter to the horse barn to tend their horse when her car radio stopped working. And just as it happened with my brother, it started working again all by itself. She had heard my brother's story and wondered if it was my father.
About a week later, I was driving Annie home from her music rehearsal in West Hartford and we were talking. I was telling her what had happened with the car radio with both my brother and my sister. At that exact moment, my car radio stopped working. We looked at each other in amazement. It couldn't be possible, could it? After two or three minutes, we were close to home and I said out loud, "Ok, Dad, enough is enough! Turn the radio back on!" He must have heard me because it was back on within seconds after I said that.
3) The third major "sign' from my Dad happened after he had been gone for more than two years. I wrote a blog post about it back then:
Click
here to read it.
I haven't had any experiences lately that are as blatant as the ones I just described. There were a few times I had dreams where I awoke feeling like I had just spent time with my mom or dad, and it was so nice, but these don't happen often. One morning after a dream with my Mom in it I called my sister to tell her about it and she had had a similar dream.
I've thought a lot about death and spirits since the passing of my parents. I am a believer that death is not the end of one's spirit. I believe I will be with my parents again one day, and that makes the prospect of my own death (whenever that may be) a little less scary.
Until then, Dad (or Mom), I'm here if you want to get in touch!
