When my wife’s sister (now in her 50’s) was around 7, and the family lived in Chicago area, this happened:
The family is around the kitchen table talking, and she is in bed. This is around 9 or 10 p.m. She comes out of her room and wants to see grandpa because she didn’t get to say goodbye. They explain that he lives in California and he’s not there. She insists that he was just in her room saying goodbye but she didn’t get to say goodbye because she was so sleepy. She is so insistant that they call his number so she can talk to him.
At the other end of the line a friend (or grandma) answers and says they were about to call because grandpa had just passed away.
Make of it what you will. My wife will never forget that night.
After my father passed he appeared to my mom, sister, me in a dream. We all had the same dream when I brought it up.
Recently my mom was ill and had an angel appear before her. Said it was very comforting.
I had been trying to master a cell-phone video game for 1 year. The day my mother passed (at home), several of us siblings were sitting around her living room after the undertaker had come to take her away.
I’m convinced my mother is a saint (given her church-going, sweet nature, and fact I never saw or heard of her commit a sin - EVER) and we had a very easy and joking relationship. I said aloud to the group, as I turned on my cell phone to kill some time. “Well now, maybe Mom can help me reach the final level of XXX game.”
Boom - two minutes later, I had sped through all the levels, and the app was dinging as I had finally gone all the way to the end. Everyone in the room was shocked and laughed loudly.
Make of it what you will.
Yeah, I have the same attitude with respect to our family story. That my grandfather, in his hospital bed seconds before he passed, suddenly sat up staring joyfully up at the ceiling and exclamed “JACK”! Falling back to his pillow he died. Jack was his adult son who’d predeceased him by a few years. His whole family witnessed this.
My mother in-law passed in 2007. That night I dreamed she was sitting on the chair in my bedroom telling me goodbye. She also told me she was wrong about me and apologized for it. My wife called me the next morning to tell me she had passed away. To this day I firmly believe she was there to make amends.
I believe this happens.
I have stories that has happened to family before another family member passed away but I won’t bore everyone.
A beloved relative, a young man in his 20s, lay dying tragically of cancer. His young wife sat death watch. She fell asleep. She dreamed that he rose from the bed, touched her, said: "I'll see you," and left the room. When she awoke he had died.
I have had visitations from several people: my mother-in-law, my great-grandmother (whom I never knew), a high school friend, my first cousin by marriage, and another dear friend. They were not dreams. They were visitations. Some were life changing.
When I was 3-years-old, my mother sat death watch. My father was dying. Her situation was hopeless. She had no money, no job, no prospects, no hope, and two small children and no one else in the world. She sat up praying, crying, and racking her brain trying to think of something that she could do. She could think of nothing. In the darkest of the night, she said to herself: "I give up. I don't know what I'm going to do." Just then, she looked out the window (a 3d floor window) into the night. "Someone was out there," she later told me; "I don't know if it was Jesus or and angel or what, but someone was out there. Suddenly I knew everything would be okay. I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was better." He got well. She got a job. They saved money, paid for the house and the car. All was well. Many years later, I thanked the physician who had operated on him. The doctor said: "He's the sickest man I ever knew to get well."
One thing I’ve always wondered about these relatives and such who “come back to visit”: Were any of them known atheists or hostile to God or God’s will for some reason, or were they religious people, or is there no pattern at all? Wish I knew the answer to this as it might validate or call into question some beliefs about the afterlife.
I experienced something similar. One night, one of my siblings woke up and sat straight up, waking me up with something “wrong.” It turned out that our father was in the middle of having a heart attack (that ended up being the cause of death a few days later, even after going through with surgery that uses a balloon/stent [which was still experimental at that time]).
We kids all got to say our goodbyes and get advice at his deathbed. I will always remember us all standing outside his hospital room, as my mom, sobbing and shaking-and with us all gathered around her- signed a no code order that he said he’d wanted.
At the time, it turned out that a Cardinal had built a nest for three baby birds she hatched and took care of until they flew away. The last one took a bit of “pushing” from the momma bird. We all watched the hatchlings, partly as a way to not think about what we were going through. I just realized that we didn’t take pictures of them.
A while later, as I was pulling into the driveway, I swear I saw him in his usual fishing shirt and hat, on the riding mower, smiling and waving to me, like he’d done a thousand times before. I stopped the car cold for that brief moment.
Happened to my Mom when her dad died - Her sister had moved to California some years before (we were in NY) and the sister called Mom about 4 in the morning NY time to say she had the weirdest dream where she woke up and saw her father standing at the end of the bed giving her a sad look (she had been kind of a wild black sheep of the family) and felt something was wrong. Mom called Grandma and woke her up and it was then that Grandma discovered Grandpa dead in his bed - massive heart attack...