My mother had helped me with several of my writings before she (unexpectedly) passed away, one was a kind of journal about Family Ghosts, documenting different encounters of relatives and deceased ancestors back to before even she or I were ever born. Encounters that had all occurrred within walls of one house over the course of a 100 years. She and I were very close, we were kindred spirits . I knew if there were a way she could reach out and let me know that she could, from there, of course she would.
I must make a long story short here as I can, a few months had passed after her funeral. I was not as emotionally broken as I would have thought, I felt a sense of calm and peace like a hug from her all around me, everyone did. Well, nearly 8 months later, something weird was happening that I wouldn't be aware of as much til later, little reality breaks, dozing off at my office, at home, I would just nod out, and then awake back up again just as quickly, but I was fine, at least I thought I was. I had always done it from time to time always burning the candle at both ends. One day, I got a call from my sister, and she said she had just received the strangest phone call at her office . It was from an ex boyfriend of mine, from a few years before, whom I had not spoken with in that period of time as well. He had reached her through google. He told my sister that he knew it would sound crazy, but that he had dreamed about our mother the night before, and she told him to ‘Go check ‘on me’’ and that it seemed very real and she was very Serious when she said that, like she really meant it. He was worried, and felt he needed to check on me.
She said ‘I have his number if you want to call him….’ and ‘are you okay?’ she asked me with a sort of giggle , and I said, of course im fine, but yes I would call him, and so I did. The dream had been disturbing to him, because she was right in his face ,and she looked real. She told him ‘You need to check on Mandy’. My office was closed that day and he no longer had my number. When he googled my name to see if I had a facebook to contact me by, what he found was my mothers’ obituary. He was shocked and stunned that she had passed away and It made his dream more disturbing to him. He said that since waking up he kept smelling something sweet like flowers , and he couldn’t hold anything on his stomach all the day. Well, this was alarming to me, at this point, in my mind Im thinking ‘omg, I hope I am okay!!!!’ and continue assuring him that I was .….
Well, just about 6 weeks later, I opened my eyes in a hospital in ICU and saw my sister smiling at me. You’ve been here for 3 days, she said. I had been knocked out and on a breathing machine. What had happened over a slow course of time my blood oxygen level had reached an all time low of near walking dead levels but because I had no apparent breathing problems, I wasn’t aware of it. My sister then said to me in the hospital room, ‘ and so That dream that Chad had about Mom, there Really Was something to that’, I shook my head , I knew. I remember nothing of the 3 days I was knocked out, but do remember some of the dreams I had in nodded moments before my sis dragged me to a hospital,. My mother, sooo close right there with me, waking up hugging her and talking out loud to her, and in one, we were even in night air looking down over streets and houses, I could never see her, but felt her presence right there beside me.
A few years passed, and it was, this past Thanksgiving, when my sister was out shopping at a random antique shop in a nearby other county, and came across a beautiful antique mantle. She recognized it instantly, our old mantle that we thought had bee. It was My old mantel that I so loved and hated to part with from the House on 13th street that had been seized and destroyed, crushed to the ground many months before that, (the house in my Dollhouse story for those who read it ) , and yet there it was! The antique dealer gave her an emotional family discount on it when she shared that it had belonged to her sister, and she blew my mind with the Surprize of its delivery!. Its like a part of that house mysteriously followed me all that time later from 13th street, some way, somehow. ; ) If you ask me and my sister, we believe our Mother knows. I may add this about the mantle as an addendum to that story, as something quite strange and surreal and magical, maybe even ghostly, that followed, long after the story ended.