A MESSAGE FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Written
By
John
Midwood
If there is one thing in this
life that I am thankful for, it is the relationship that I enjoyed with my
father when I was growing up. More than
just father and son, we were best friends.
When my father died at the age of 55, one day short of his 56th
birthday on December 16, 1976, I took the loss very hard.
At the time, I was living in Columbia , South
Carolina Fayetteville ,
North Carolina
Hundreds of people showed up for the
viewing, and the subsequent funeral. My
father was a great man with many friends and admirers in the community, and as
a family we were all very comforted by the show of support so many people
showed us in our time of grief. Of all
of us, I probably handled things the best, for I felt that I had to be strong
for my mom as I could not imagine her without her husband.
For a long time the sight of my
father laid in state haunted me, if for no other reason in death he looked so
thin and pale. So many people commented
on “how peaceful he looked”, or how, “he looked like he was sleeping”, but to
me it was like he was a body empty of life.
If nothing else I could take comfort in knowing that he was not there,
that my dad’s spirit was free, and his lifeless body was nothing more than an
empty shell.
Perhaps because he did not look in
death as he had in life, I did not readily accept the fact that he was
gone. Indeed, weeks, and maybe even
months went by when every evening around 5:30 pm I would hear a car pull up in
the driveway. Then I would hear footsteps
coming up the concrete sidewalk, followed by the sound of first the storm door
and then the entry door opening, then closing.
Of course I did not consider these sounds to be the sounds of a
haunting, but merely the memories I had of my father vividly coming to life.
To the best of my recollection, it
was in the early days following my father’s death that I had a very disturbing,
yet comforting dream about him. In this
dream, my father and I were at a dining table, in the dining area of a kitchen
in a house that I had never been in before.
There were other people at the table with us, none of whom were familiar
to me.
What happened next was like a scene
from an HBO television show, “The Gary Shandling Show”, where the star, Gary
Shandling, would come out of character to address the audience. It was in this fashion that my dad turned to
me, and his eyes meeting mine he said in his familiar voice, “I’m dead, but
I’ve come back to visit you”.
Dad or no dad, familiar friend or
not, I woke in a cold sweat, gasping for breath and shaking with fear from what
had been for me at least, a very frightening experience.
In and of itself, this episode in my
life may have proved to be just a very unusual dream, however, years later
something happened that made this much more than that. I was in the home of my niece, looking
through a box of pictures she had. Among
the photos was one very special print of my niece in her father’s kitchen, in a
house I had never been in before, but I quickly recognized it as the kitchen
where my father had spoken to me.
There were other indications that my
father was still with me in spirit, and three years to the day after he died, I
dreamed about the wife from whom at the time I was separated. I had heard rumours that she was cheating on
me, and in the dream we were reconciled, and she told me she was pregnant
again. On March 24th, a woman
called from an insurance company to congratulate me on the birth of the new son
of whom I had no idea existed.
From that very first dream I had of
my father, my fears of dying were mysteriously put to rest. There have been other dreams as well, just
the two of us being best friends as we always were. One sign of his continued existence that was
more than a dream was his old wrist watch that suddenly and inexplicably began
working again on, “All Souls Day” one year, despite the fact that it had not
worked for a very long time.
Since my father’s death, not a day
has gone by when I have not thought about him.
That I believe was his way of teaching me that life does go on, and that
as long as those we love remain in our hearts and minds, they are truly
immortal.
