On the bird board I am a part of, someone said, it’s October, time for ghost stories! I posted my experience, though I’m not sure it is actually a ghost story. I thought I’d share it today since I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this.
I was going to say, since it would be my grandpa’s birthday today, it’s the perfect time to share, but it turns out I am off by a day. I thought today was October 4th. Turns out it is actually the 5th. Such is the life of a stay at home mom, your days run together. We’ll post this in honor of my grandpa’s birthday yesterday. He would have been 89 if he was alive. He passed away on October 14, 2005. In 9 days, he will have been gone 5 years. I miss both him and my grandma terribly. The hurt never goes away, it just hides in your heart until you start thinking about them, then it feels like it just happened.
On with my story….
My grandma died when I was 14. We were incredibly close my whole life, more so at the end because I lived with my grandparents.
This involves her, but it revolves around my grandpa.
My aunt moved my grandpa to Alabama 3 years before he passed away. It killed me because we didn’t have a lot of money to make extra trips there. I was just as close to my grandpa as I was my grandma. My aunt and my grandpa had decided though, and I supported whatever made him happy.
5 years ago this month we got a call that my grandpa was dying. He had an infection in his toe that had turned to gangrene. The gangrene was wet, and his toe had to be amputated. They weren’t sure if he’d make it through the surgery, but if he didn’t have it he wouldn’t make it at all. He had a stroke almost immediately after the surgery and a couple of days later we got the call that he was bleeding out.
We hurried and made plans to caravan to Alabama (myself, my parents, my 2 brothers, and the kids we had at that point in our lives). That night I said out loud, grandma, please let me know if he’ll still be alive when we get there. I am not kidding you. The electricity – everything in my house – turned on and off twice.
I wasn’t sure what to believe. Was it really grandma or a freak thing that the power blinked like that at the exact moment I asked? I believe in spirits and ghosts, but have never had an experience with them myself.
On the way down, I kept getting this image of my grandma in my head, just smiling at me. From the chest up. Just smiling. I was trying to sleep before it was my turn to drive, and I couldn’t. I kept feeling like I needed to tell my mom about what was in my head. So, I did. She said, she bet it was grandma’s way of telling me that grandpa was going to be there still when we arrived. After I told mom, an image flashed in my head of my grandpa, lying in a hospital bed, in a room I had never seen. My grandma was behind him, her hand on his shoulder, smiling down at him. My uncle Denny was sitting across the room in a chair. He tipped his hand to me as if to say, I see you kid. (My uncle died when I was 8 in a car accident – a drunk driver was going the wrong way on the interstate.)
My mom asked me what my grandma was wearing in my head. I said, a white polo shirt. She said with gold buttons? – thinking heaven…gold…, no, just a plain white polo shirt, with this semi-clear white buttons. She said grandma never wore that style of shirt, and I can’t remember her wearing it either.
We got to my Aunt Jackie’s in Alabama first before we went to the nursing home. My mom was telling my aunt about it, and she said, tell her what she was wearing Heather. I said, she was wearing a……the exact same shirt you have on right now. My aunt was wearing a white polo shirt, exact same buttons.
When we walked in to see my grandpa, it was the exact same room that I had seen in my head. I felt like my grandma and Uncle Denny were there with my grandpa. (I had never been to this nursing home before.) We got a couple of days with my grandpa. They had told us they didn’t think he’d last the 19 hours that it would take us to drive there, let alone longer, but he did. He couldn’t communicate. He wouldn’t eat for any of the nurses. For a few days he hadn’t eaten hardly anything (they couldn’t even tell if he understood). He ate for me. I’m going to start crying. I still say it’s because I gave him the respect he deserved as my grandpa rather than baby talk that the nurses gave him.
The last night we had with him, I went back to my aunt’s to sleep. I started dreaming and had these horrible faces in my head. They weren’t ugly. They were terrified. It was elderly people I didn’t know, just flashing at me in my head, their faces contorted in utter terror. and I felt like I had spun around in circles and then laid on the ground. I was spinning while these faces were flashing in and out. It was horrible but I couldn’t “wake” up. After what seemed like forever, it finally stopped, and I got a vision of my grandpa and grandma walking off together holding hands. I knew who they were, but I’d never seen them this way. They were probably 30.
I had about 15 minutes of just feeling peaceful until my mom knocked on the door and told me my grandpa died.
I knew he had and I felt peaceful about it.
I feel like I went through it with him. I don’t know if that spinning was the lack of oxygen, and the faces contorted were the fear he felt when he knew he was dying, but I do honestly believe that my grandma was waiting to walk with him again.
I’ve always been sensitive to things, never psychic (don’t ask me what is going to happen, because I am as clueless as you), but I get this feeling on the back of my neck when I meet someone. It’s like I know they will do harm to me or my loved ones. It’s happened 3 times, no one listened to me about my feeling, and 3 times there was horrible things that occurred because of those people. I’m not talking they were just mean people, I mean, they did horrible things that changed our lives. It’s rare that I get that feeling, but when I do, most of my family listens now.
My mom said when I was 3 – 4, I would stand outside, looking up at the roof, talking. She’d ask me who I was talking to. I’d point – can’t you see the angel mom?
Other than those and the occasional dream that comes true, I’ve never before and never since had an experience with ghosts or spirits. I honestly think my grandma knew how much I was hurting, and wanted to comfort me.
I think she was horrified when she saw the way her death affected me. I was 14, your typical rebellious teenager, with depression. I felt like my grandparents were the only people who loved me, didn’t judge me, didn’t treat me like I was a burden to them. (Not that my parents treated me that way, it’s just the way I felt.) I was suicidal for quite a few years after that. I just wanted to be with her again. I think she helped me deal with my grandpa’s death in a way that gave me peace instead of the turmoil I had when she died. I had to be nudged away from his grave when we buried him, I didn’t want to leave him, but I wasn’t in hysterics over his coffin. Don’t get me wrong, my heart was broken into a million pieces, it hurt so much, but I didn’t have that feeling that I had after my grandma died. The feeling that I couldn’t live if he wasn’t with me. I didn’t sink into a bottomless pit of despair. Something that happened that night he died gave me a feeling of peace. Maybe it was the knowledge that he wasn’t in pain anymore, or maybe it was everything my grandma gave to me that trip.
Have a wonderful day.
Popularity: 3% [?]
