NDE
A WONDERFUL STORY TO GIVE EVERYONE HOPE
From: anonymous
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2000
Subject: mom's death
I just heard from a good friend who recently lost her father. She and her mother are having a tough time adjusting, which is natural, so I sent this to try to be of comfort. I thought you might like to see it, too....
As for my mom, maybe this story about her will help you AND your mom.
She was a child of the Depression, born in 1926. When she was 11 (1939), she was the second of 8 children. Her mom was pregnant with the 8th. They were very poor, so poor they obviously could not afford birth control! Anyway, two men told her father there was a job in a town nearby. They told him it would last a week or two. He took $20 to live on during the time he was gone and went with the two men to jump a freight train. On that train ride they murdered him for the $20 and threw his body off the moving train! They were later caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, but both got out on parole after 20+ years. Incredibly sad story.
Anyway, my mom had been granddad's "favorite," and she was utterly crushed by his loss, not to mention the devastation his loss wrought on a family with no means of support (neighbors and friends saw that they didn't starve, but their lives for the first couple of years after his death--till grandma could get to work in a wartime factory--were hideous. And, ironically, grandma's name was--honest to God--Rosie, and she did become a riveter, which became an icon for all of World War II). Anyway, mom and the rest of the kids got jobs and slogged through the War years, and then she met my dad and they got married. I was on the way by early 1946 and she went into labor in early September.
This all occured in a small south-Louisiana town called Houma, where my dad grew up. They took her to a local clinic (not a hospital), which was routine for routine births. Unfortunately, my birth was not routine. Something went wrong with her labor and I somehow got hung up in the birth canal. She was in labor for 72 hours before she died and they decided to cut me out to try to save at least me. They cut a big "X" across her swollen abdomen and brought me out of her, only to see that my head had been horribly squashed by the 72 hours and they were certain I was terminally brain damaged. My aunt Sarah (my dad's younger sister) was a registered nurse by then and she was there in the waiting room when the doctor came out and told my 24 year old father, "Your wife is dead and your son is brain damaged. We suggest you let us terminate his life." (That used to be routine at the time I was making my way into the world--if the copy was defective, do away with it.)
My aunt jumped in and said, "You can't do that!" But my dad was in a jam. Dead wife, brain-damaged son...add it up. He was just about to tell them to go ahead when a nurse came running in saying, "She's back alive! She came back to life!" And so it was. My mother is one of those blessed people who has been very, very dead and come back to life, long before it became fashionable. She saw just what everyone else does, too, the white tunnel of light going into "heaven" (for lack of a better term). She wasn't afraid, she was joyous about it, and her delight could not have been more amplified when she saw none other than her FATHER standing at the other end of the tunnel, dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, smiling big at her, arms extended, ready to welcome her. It had to be an awesome sight to behold, don't you think?
Anyway, she was incredibly glad to see him and was about to break into a run to fling herself into his waiting arms, but somehow she knew that if she did that she could never go back. So she stopped just short of touching his extended hand and hesitated. "Oh, Daddy!" she said, "It's SO wonderful to see you again!" And he said, "Poke..." (that was his nickname for her, Poke, which was short for "Slowpoke" because she was a bit chubby as a little girl--but a fox in later life) "...I've come to get you. Are you ready?" And she said, "Oh, Daddy, I'd LOVE to come with you, but now I have a son..."
(nobody knows how she could have known she had a son, but she swears that at that moment she just KNEW) "....and I'd like to stay with him and help him grow up. Can I do that?" And he stood there for several long seconds, and his big smile faded just the tiniest bit, and he slowly lowered his hand and nodded his head, saying, "Okay, Poke, if that's what you want to do. I'll come back and get you another day...."
She says then that he and the light and everything else just slowly faded to black and she was alive again on the birthing table she was on. Unconscious, of course, but alive. The next thing she knew she woke up and it was a day later and everyone was worried that SHE would have brain damage like the brain damage they were sure I had suffered. But my aunt Sarah would not let them kill me after mom came back to life because she and mom were like sisters by then (aunt Sarah is only a couple of years older) and she KNEW mom would want me no matter what shape I was in. And so it was.
Mom regained consciousness with a crystal clear memory of her "near-death" experience, and my aunt Sarah massaged and reshaped my skull for about five days until the fluid on it receded and it could take a reasonably normal shape. And the funny thing is that now that I'm bald, people consistently say I have a "well-shaped" head. If they only knew the story behind it! And the best part, of course, is that by six weeks my mom was beginning to suspect I was not so brain damaged after all, and by 10 weeks she was sure of it. And at the 12 week check-up the doctor confirmed that I was reacting normally to everything.
The point of this long, overly long story is that, if you are willing to take the word of my mother and literally thousands of others like her, there IS something on the "other side," and your father is now a part of whatever that is. Furthermore, my mother has often counseled dying people with her story to ease their passage, and several years ago she had to counsel one of her very best friends, Josephine Edwards, who was dying of breast cancer.
Mom assured her again and again that it would be fine and she would be happy on the other side. Josephine was terribly doubtful and afraid at the end (she had lived a life as hard as my mom's, if not harder), but she promised to get in touch with my mom from the other side if she possibly could.
Five years later my mom visited a psychic in Baton Rouge who specialized in contacting people on the other side. She went to see if she could make contact with her father, but it was Josephine who came to her and told her that she had been right and that things were just fine on the other side and that she was indeed quite happy there. Now, keep in mind, the psychic did not know my mother from Adam's goat. I was there and this is how it went:
Mom sat down, they said the Lord's prayer together, and then the lady went into a kind of trance for several seconds. Then she said, "There's a lady here who wants to talk to you, a lady who says she promised to visit you and tell you what it is like for her on the other side." And so the psychic proceeded to describe Josephine to a "T" and mom knew without a doubt it was her. And nobody else came to visit her, not her father or anyone else.
But hearing from Josephine was enough and she has never been to another psychic.
My mother KNOWS.
Take it for what it's worth, and forgive me for rambling on for so long....
includes other NDE stories.