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 56^th birthday on December 16, 1976, I took the loss very hard.

            At the time, I was living in Columbia, South Carolina, staying with a friend of my sister’s when my sister came to give me the news of our father’s death.  Back in Fayetteville, North Carolina were our mom and two brothers, and getting into my old ’64 Volkswagon Beetle, my sister and I hurried home to be with our family and friends.

            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 24^th, 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.