(YYSLSC) The Visit

The Visit

The cooling evening licked the beads of perspiration from my forehead as I lay in the big hammock recuperating from what I can only describe as a play date with my four large dogs. They never cease to entertain me as we run and play together like children. I didn’t have “two-legged” kids of my own, so now, in my mature years, these beasts are the only children I have ever known… and I love them as if they had come from within me. With my husband, Bryan, traveling often for business, they not only protect me, but bring me great joy. Jaia came to me, with a whimper, and licked my face, a sure sign of love and devotion from this largest and most loyal of my canine family, before he lay down beside me for a late snooze. My protector. My special guy.

I must have actually fallen asleep because the next thing I realized, I heard a whirring sound that was waking me out of my light slumber. I opened my eyes to virtual darkness as I strained to see what was making that strange noise. As I gained my bearings and looked around, I saw that the dogs were all gone. I sat up and turned behind me to see that the sound was coming from a vehicle that had driven up the lane. It was a long light-colored Limousine with just enough headlight to maneuver the dark country lane.

What the…? Where were the dogs? Why weren’t they barking like mad at these intruders? I looked around for something to use as a weapon. If there’s one thing Bryan had taught me, it was to be prepared. So much for lessons learned. He would be disheartened to find out that I had fallen completely asleep outside without so much as a pocketknife on me to protect myself. In the dim light of the vehicle, my eye caught a stick Jaia had been chewing on and as I moved to get out of the hammock, I grabbed it from the ground and laid it alongside my leg.

As I stood up, the passenger side door opened soundlessly. And out stepped someone I was absolutely certain I would never see again.

Being 51 years old, I have seen a fair share of life. I have felt deep emotions that ran from despair to bliss, pain to pleasure. As a child, I fully experienced the wonder of Santa Clause, the thrill of acquiring our first television, the agony of physical abuse and the love of all creatures furry. As a teen, I married my first love and a year later, my heart was completely destroyed by his unfaithfulness and the following divorce. Years later I was blessed by the thrill of finding myself pregnant, only to experience the anguish of losing that only child that would ever take up residence in my body. Through my life I have gone from one emotional extreme to the other, and these experiences have made me a strong, levelheaded, open-minded person.

At 30 years old, I stood by my mother’s bedside as she left this world for the next. I held my hand against her neck, feeling the last pulse of her life and I bade her farewell with love and acceptance, knowing I’d never again see her precious face or hear her sweet voice, except in the annals of my memory…

And now here she stood, in front of me, in fact, walking toward me in this weird, lifelike dream state I was certain I must be in. This was real, though… I poked my leg with the stick to bring me out of this fugue as I stared, with a mixture of fright and awe, into the eyes of my mother. Just as she was a year before bone marrow cancer had whittled her body away and taken her from us all.

“Wha… Mom”? I thought someone must have been tricking me. “What is this? Who are you”?

With a sweet quiet laughter, she said, “It’s me, honey… It’s your mom.”

My hand covered my mouth instinctively, to keep from bursting out, and tears immediately streamed down my face. “But how…? How can you be here”?

“Sarah, it’s really me. I know it’s hard to believe, and I’ll explain it all to you, but to let you know that this is really me, your mother in the flesh, I want you to remember when you were about three or four years old and I was holding you in the rocking chair on the porch of our old farm. I was telling you how much I loved you and I said I wouldn’t trade you for anything. You looked up at the full moon and asked if I would trade you for the moon and I assured you that there was nothing – in heaven or earth – that I would trade for you. Do you remember that”?

At that point, as the memory brightened in my mind, I dropped the stick and ran toward my mother, our arms encircling each other in an embrace I had KNOWN I’d never again feel. I cried uncontrollably until my throat was raw while she held me and consoled me exactly as she’d done when I was a child. Once I came to my senses, I moved away enough to see her and asked, simply, “How”?

“Let’s go in and sit down.”

-continued-

[edit on 18-1-2009 by Benevolent Heretic]

As we walked inside, the dogs approached tenderly and sniffed at her hands, their ears laid back and tails wagging. This was very odd, as I usually had to control them or contain them to keep them from jumping rudely on visitors. I invited her to sit and I made some of her favorite tea – Raspberry Zinger - the one I always drank when I wanted to remember her, for the aroma enhanced my memories. I sat down across from her, placing the cups and teapot on the coffee table in between, and she smiled with sparkling eyes and told me the following…

“Sarah, what I’m about to tell you is going to be very hard for you to understand and perhaps hard to believe. But I want you to trust me. It’s hard to explain, so I’ll use words I think you’ll best understand. I have come to visit you and I will be going back soon. But I have some important information to share with you.

“All those years ago, when I … ‘died’, even though I was sure that I would go to heaven, as I taught you your whole life, something very different happened to me. I left my old, spoiled, physical body behind, but I found myself in a new body. A spiritual body that had no mass. I was confused for some time and I came to you several times. Do you remember”?

“Yes, Mom”! I cried. “I knew it was you – calling out for me that morning at Cindy’s house and hugging me in my sewing room. That really was you…”

“Yes, that was me. And I made contact with others, too. Your sister and father. I was in a state of limbo, sort of like dreaming, and it was a little confusing, so I was reaching out to anyone who would listen”, she chuckled. “After some time in this dreamlike, transitional state, I sort of woke up. Of course, I was awake the whole time, but I moved into a state of brighter consciousness, one that was less like a dream and more like the awareness I had in my life here.

“When I opened my eyes, I was in a bed inside a building and as I looked out the nearby circular window, I saw a foreign landscape that is very hard to describe. There were very few hard edges on anything, with the shape of one object melding into the shape of the next. There were “beings” made of what looked like multi-colored clouds; amorphous forms of various sizes moving about, sort of hovering along, moving into and out of one another. I looked down at my “body” and found that I, too, was formed into one of these unstructured entities. I wanted to get up and immediately, I was. I wanted to go out and explore my new surroundings and apparently without moving, I was outside the building, which was the only hard-edged structure in sight. I later learned that it was one of several Intermediary Stations, used to house crossovers, like me.

“Honey, I was chosen to leave this earth and join a group of beings in another plane of existence. The ‘people’ I have spent the last 20 years of your life with have been gathered from all over the cosmos and from many different realms of reality. We are working on a unification project, the purpose of which is to reveal the truths of the Universe to all beings living in it. I know that’s a pretty big statement, but I want you to try to take it in. All those silly people who have claimed that ‘we are all one’, were very literally correct. And that is one piece of information that I’m bringing to you tonight.

“The other thing I am here to tell you is that your husband is being chosen to come with us. Time is very different there, everything is different there, as you will come to understand, but at this moment, Bryan is being prepared to join us. I was given the opportunity to either advance to the next level in my training or to visit my old home and see someone of my choice. So I am here right now to let you know that even though you won’t see him again in this plane, he will be with us, with me, and working on our unification project.

My mouth opened in protest… But she silenced me with a finger.

“I want you to know that I am with you, I love you and we will both always be with you.”

As I tried to absorb this horrible piece of information, Jaia approached me and nudged my hand with his head and began licking my fingers. As I awoke, lying in the hammock in the cooling evening, I muttered, “Bryan…”? I sat straight up, knowing it wasn’t a dream. It happened. My mother’s face was fresh in my mind again. I could still hear her voice. Shaking my head, I tried to snap out of it. I told myself it wasn’t real.

Coming to the realization that my overactive imagination had made up a crazy dream so I could “see” my mother, who I miss with a heartache I can’t describe, I got up, called the other dogs from their napping and lumbered into the house. I noticed the message light blinking on the machine as I flicked on the living room light. There on the coffee table were 2 cups and the teapot of Raspberry Zinger tea.

Very deep and heart felt story. Very well written.

Thank you.

Would love to read more.

May the angels guide you till you stand at the door of your dreams.