Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (17 page)

In the last week or so before Julie died, her mother noticed that she’d often look up toward the corner of the room and break into this huge glowing smile. She’d wave her hand as if she were greeting her very best friend whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. She just looked so excited, so thrilled. Her mother would try to ask her what was going on, but Julie was too absorbed by whatever she was seeing and didn’t notice her mom signing. When Julie would “come back,” it was as if she’d been in another place.

Her mother would ask, “What did you see?”

Julie’s response was always: “Didn’t you see? Jesus was here! Didn’t you see him?”

This happened at least three or four times. When Julie wasn’t seeing the vision of Jesus, she’d sign things to her mother, such as: “Did you know that Jesus comes to take children to heaven? He comes and makes everyone better.”

Her mother didn’t think that anyone would believe this, so the next time her daughter was experiencing the vision and had that beautiful, glowing smile on her face, she took a picture of her. And that was the photo she showed me that day at my workshop. It truly was remarkable: this emaciated, tiny girl sitting in her wheelchair and looking up toward the corner. I’ve seen happy children. I’ve see kids who see their grandparents and light up and wave, but there was something different about Julie’s expression. She had an otherworldly look, like an angel seeing heaven. It was just amazing.

That encounter provided me with a lot of comfort and peace about my own husband. I hope that in his final moments, the last face he saw wasn’t the driver in the car about to hit him. I hope the last face he saw on Earth was Jesus’s. In that brief flash, Jason wasn’t just a man dying in a car accident who had a young wife and child at home; he was a man who was being taken home to heaven.

I’ve heard many similar accounts from colleagues. Almost without exception, everyone starts his or her story with something like: “I’ve never told anybody this, and if I did, they’d put me in the nuthouse—but this is what I experienced. . . .”

These are genuine, profound moments. Whenever I feel sad, I envision the picture of that smiling, glowing little girl and envision my husband with that same heavenly grin.

B
LINDED BY THE
L
IGHT

by Sue

I completed a year of internship as a social worker and then started a job at a hospice. I wanted to work with the dying for as long as I could remember—my motivation being the death of my mother in a car accident when I was two years old.

I’d spent my life wondering about this woman I never knew. When I was a teenager and my friends were constantly fighting with their mothers, I kept my mouth shut because I knew that I’d give anything to be able to have an argument with my own mom. Whenever I told my pals how much I missed her, they’d always say, “You’re lucky to only have one parent getting mad and punishing you!” I knew that my loss was more than the average teenager could ever comprehend, though. When I reached adulthood, my curiosity about my mother didn’t diminish in the least. I’d ask every relative and every one of her friends what she was like, trying to piece together the life of this person who’d died before I ever got the chance to know her.

One day I decided to investigate a bit further and read my mom’s autopsy report—the final document about her life.

“Blunt trauma” and “internal bleeding” were listed as “cause of death,” but none of that offered me anything meaningful.

When I told the clerk there that I wanted the “whys” and “hows” of my mother’s death, she told me that many people were interested in such things. It was normal, she added, and it seemed to make a person feel better to learn the facts of what happened to a loved one. In this case, all I knew was that my mother had lost control of her car and apparently had been blinded by another car’s high beams.

Considering my history, it was hardly surprising that I ended up working in hospice care. I somehow felt at home working with dying people and their families. One patient named Jarrod really stands out in my mind.

Jarrod was close to death, and I was spending some time with his family when I felt a sudden urge to go to his room.

Standing in front of the window, I gently whispered his name.

“You’re blocking my light,” Jarrod responded.

I quickly moved over when I realized that he wasn’t facing the window at all. In fact, Jarrod was staring at the wall. “Can you see better now?” I asked, curious. “Do you see the light?”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, looking upward and off to the right.

I looked at the spot where Jarrod was focused to see if a mirror or shiny object was creating a reflection, but there was nothing there—just the empty corner of the room.

“Tell me about the light,” I urged him.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful, so blinding, I can barely see.”

“What else?”

“So beautiful,” he repeated, as I moved closer to him.

“Blinding,” he whispered.

Those were Jarrod’s last words. He died minutes later, appearing comfortable and at peace.

I was stunned and upset, though. I’d heard from nurses how their patients had seen visions, angels, and bright lights before they died, but I was still unnerved. As I continued with my hospice work, however, I soon became aware that these events were part and parcel of the very fabric of end-of-life care.

One day, many years after Jarrod had died, I was with my father. For some reason, I felt compelled to ask him to tell me again what he remembered about my mother’s accident.

“She was driving home from a friend’s house and must have lost control of the car during the rain,” he replied. “We lived in the mountains, and a storm could make those curvy roads very dangerous.”

“So it was the headlights from the car in the opposite direction that blinded her?”

“Well, the truth is we don’t know if there
was
another car.” My father paused and sighed. “I talked with the first paramedic who was on the scene, and he said that your mom kept talking about a blinding light. He assumed that it must have been a car’s headlights.”

I thought back to Jarrod and remembered the look of peace on his face when he saw the light, and I recalled that he’d repeated the word
blinding.
For the first time, I finally felt like I was getting an answer to my lifelong search. Perhaps my mother hadn’t seen a car’s lights at all—instead, she’d gazed upon that same beautiful, shining light that Jarrod had seen as he died.

A S
URPRISING
V
ISIT

by Sofia

My father and I are both social workers. I work in a hospital system, and he was the CEO of an outpatient-counseling program. I’m so proud of my dad, who’d been honored at the White House for his contributions to mental-health care. In addition, my mother was an accomplished professor who had a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Can you imagine growing up with a mother who had a Ph.D. in math? It was intense, but I have to say that she was a great teacher and made my homework fun. I would have loved to have taken after her, but I didn’t inherit the math gene. Instead, I saw my father as more of a role model, and since I was always pretty comfortable around people, I thought social work would be a good fit for me.

Life was good until my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. She began chemotherapy, and lost her hair and experienced terrible nausea. Many months passed and she showed no promising results at all. We were heartbroken as we watched her go through so much suffering, but we didn’t turn to the church. Although we were a family of Christians, we were hardly religious and rarely attended service. We just tried to be good people, and sometimes we prayed together.

Eventually, Mom’s drastic decline made us aware that the chemotherapy was not working. The doctors were stumped, saying they’d done all they could. That was when Mom decided to seek hospice care at our home.

A few weeks later, my father and I noticed that my mother was acting severely agitated. When the hospice nurse came for her daily visit, Dad asked her, “Why does my wife seem so upset lately?”

“This is common,” the nurse explained. “We call it ‘terminal agitation,’ and it sometimes happens at the end of life.”

“I’ve heard about that,” I offered, nodding to my dad and trying to be the daughter rather than the social worker.

For the next few days, Mom constantly drifted in and out of consciousness. Yet she didn’t appear to be at peace, showing signs of continuing agitation. She also rarely spoke, just saying a few words here and there. One afternoon when Dad and I were both at her bedside, Mom came out of a total silence, opened her eyes, and said quite clearly, “Oh, I just saw Jesus.”

All of us (including my mom) were genuinely surprised by her vision. I mean, we always thought of ourselves as “Christian-lite,” hardly pious enough to get a home visit from Jesus! But that seemed to be exactly what my mother was seeing.

At the time, Dad and I didn’t really stop to think about what we believed. We just focused on Mom and how shocked she was. It was obvious that she didn’t know how to process her vision, because it was so outside of her reality. My father comforted her immediately, saying, “Well, if you saw Jesus, then I guess he must have seen you, too.”

I thought that was a smart thing for Dad to say. Rather than trying to reorient Mom to our reality, he just acknowledged hers and didn’t try to take it away. His only concern was keeping his wife as comfortable as possible during this time.

A few days later when Mom died, she was much more at peace. I believe that these types of visions can absolutely be real because I don’t know for sure that they’re
not
real. I think there’s something much greater than myself, and if I’m open to it, maybe it will bring me peace, too.

Dad and I came away from this experience with a deeper sense of faith. When I realized that Mom was being comforted by Jesus and was on her way to heaven, I felt that she was well taken care of, and I didn’t have to worry about her anymore.

As I explore an area as broad as deathbed visions, it’s comforting
to know that this phenomenon doesn’t exist separately from
spirituality. Visions of angels, God, and other spiritual figures
reassure me that we don’t travel this path alone. The next subject
matter I’ll explore will add even more richness to the concept of
this life as a journey.