Interestingly enough, my family has always had spirits visiting them, both strangers and familiar. My grandmother is the one who has visited me most often and been with me when I have needed her. She was the matriarch of the family and has visited others in my family since her passing.
My grandmother and I were always very close. She lived with us until I was eleven and even after that I spent many days with her, sometimes weeks with her during the summer. She passed away when I was seventeen. It was very hard on me and the rest of the family to lose her because she had always been there for us. I found out a year later that she would always be there for us even after she had gone.
When I was eighteen years old, I went on a mountain trip with my church youth group. We were sledding down the mountainside on truck tire inner tubes. It was in the afternoon, and the sun had started melting the snow, turning it into slippery ice. I made a huge mistake, one that almost cost me my life. I got on an inner tube with a young man (my accidents always seem to have a young man involved somewhere) and immediately after we pushed off, I knew we were in trouble.
We were going too fast. Even now, I don't have a lot of memories of the accident. I remember the trees rushing passed me. Then I remember coming to on the ground in severe pain, knowing that I had hit a tree. I checked to see if I had broken my back and damaged my spinal cord by wiggling my toes, my fingers and my ears. Yes, I wiggled my ears to see if I was paralyzed at the neck. Obviously, I wasn't thinking clearly.
The rest of the afternoon was even less clear. I was going in and out of consciousness. I knew I had a lot of internal damage. I was air lifted to the hospital emergency room because the rescue workers were sure that I wouldn't make it down the hill in an ambulance. My left lung was collapsed, I had broken three vertebrae and eight ribs. My liver was lacerated, and my stomach and intestines were perforated. I was in really bad shape. I was rushed into the operating room as quickly as possible and they patched me up as best they could.
It was after my operation that my grandmother came to visit me. I was alone in the room in ICU, and was just starting to wake up when I saw her sitting at the foot of my hospital bed, knitting. I had tubes everywhere and couldn't talk, but as I rustled in bed, she saw that I was awake and looked up from her project and smiled at me. She got up, put her hand on my arm, and leaned over to kiss my forehead. She told me everything was going to be alright and to close my eyes and rest, which is what I did. I don't know how much longer it was when my mom and aunt came into the room to check on me, but I told them that they had just missed Grandma. They just looked at each other a little worried.
A couple of days later, my grandmother came to visit me in the hospital again. My lung was still in bad shape from being collapsed and I had exercises that I had to do to try and re inflate it. I can still remember how painful it was to try to breath. My grandmother was there when I woke up. She sat there talking to me a little while telling me that she knew I could do the exercises and that she was very proud of me for working through the pain. The exercise was to blow into a tube to make three little balls go up in three different chambers. I was unable to make even one ball rise until my grandmother talked to me that day. I finally got one ball to rise to the top of the chamber. My brother came by to visit me a little while after that and I told him that I had gotten the ball to rise while grandma was visiting. He questioned me a little but didn't remind me that grandma had been gone for over a year.
It wasn't until I got out of ICU that I remembered that my grandmother had died the previous year and that the visits she made were not physical but were in the spirit. After that, I knew that she would always be there for me when I needed her.
She also visited me after my oldest son was born and he had to stay in the hospital in the PICU for four days. She's visited me in my dreams many, many times and she
has also visited my sons when they were young.
It's never easy losing someone you love, but they are never truly gone, just in another place where it's not as easy to get a hold of them. It's comforting to know that my grandmother has been there to help me through some really tough situations and she always will be.
Christine Plaisted is a single mom of two teenage boys who she has home schooled
their entire lives. You can find her at
http://www.besthomeschoolplace.com her home school blog,
http://www.paganwitch.com her Pagan & Law of Attraction blog, and
http://twitter.com/wyndsong to follow her on twitter.
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For more information, you might enjoy reading the complete book More Than Meets the Eye True Stories about Death, Dying, and Afterlife available on Amazon.com.
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