Friday, November 30, 2007
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About Me
- Brigid
- I'm Brigid, not my birth-name, but the one I chose for Confirmation. It's a Catholic thing. Want to learn more about how I grew up? Check out my semi-autobiographical webcomic, Mary Quite Contrary. The closest I've come to earning a living as a writer is one summer I worked as a feature columnist for a small-town newspaper. I've been telling and writing stories my whole life, though, and, hey, it's something I enjoy. Whether I manage to make a buck at it isn't that important to me.
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Where to begin? This will be rather long so I do apologize in advance. It's a deeply personal story that I don't often talk about in public for obvious reasons.
When I was 6 years old, I was visited by my uncle's ghost the night after he died. He delivered a message to me, and as I have come to see now many years later, his visitation was also in many ways a message for my mother.
It was January 1984, and I was but a mere 6 years old. The holidays had just passed, and during Thanksgiving I had seen my uncle (who also happens to be my namesake and god-father) for what would be the last time. Of course, I didn't realize that then. I was too young to appreciate what life and death meant. Further, the last time I saw him he was already a shadow of his former self having been through horrific bouts of chemotherapy.
At the time we were told that he was dying of cancer. Evidently, at some point the summer before he died, I had confronted him in that innocent way that little kids are prone to do, and asked him a bunch of uncomfortable questions about the fact that he was going to die.
"Is there going to be a day I don't remember what you looked like?" being one of my more poignant questions. Indeed this would prove largely true, as writing this today I can tell you that I have lost the memory of what his voice sounded like.
During that final Christmas of his live, he had gone out of his way to give me a present that he knew I would play with. I was a typical boy that loved playing with army men, so he bought me a "Guns of Navarrone" army men play set. I remember my mother telling me how badly my uncle wanted me to enjoy it. For some reason though, as I was struggling with death in my 6 year old brain, I somehow associated the toy he gave me with death, and became somewhat scared to play with it. For weeks it sat unopened and collected dust.
I woke up early one morning and felt compelled to play with the toy. "I've got to do this for him before he dies!" I remember telling myself. Somehow I knew he was close to the end. In all thruthfullness, I was probably aware that he was near the end as my mother had been away all night at the hospital with him and we had no doubt been "prepared" via parental conversations to expect him to die, but today the feeling was overpowering.
I opeened up the box, dumped out the contents and went to work breaking the plastic army men from their sheets. It didn't take long for me to become totally engrossed with what I was doing. His wish had been granted, I was finally playing with his final present to me. Unbeknownst to me at the time, 2 states away he was at that very moment taking his final breaths.
I remember being in the "toy room' playing when the phone rang. I didn't need to hear the confirmation. I knew he was gone. I could feel it.
My mother returned later that day and put on as strong a face as she could. Her little brother had just died and she was obviously emotional, but she was strong in front of us and did not want us traumatized in anyway. Also unbeknownst to me at the time was the horrific struggle he had been through before passing.
I'm not sure why, but I got it in my 6 year old head that I was not going to go to the funeral. I remember consciously asking myself "why would you think this, Kevin?" but nonetheless I stated as much to my mother. I made up some excuse about not wanting to see the coffin as my reason. You may get a chuckle out of this, but I remember thinking of "Count Chocula" when thinking of the coffin back then. :)
I went to bed that night and quickly fell fast asleep. The first bizarre thing I remember is that it took no effort at all to fall asleep, and there was a distinct feeling that I was being entertained subconsciously. I know this sounds crazy, but I remember being able to select stills from a film strip in my brain and almost pick which dream I wanted to send me into a deep sleep. And sleep I did, soundly in fact, much more soundly than I usually did.
At some point in my slumber, I began having a bizarre dream. I was in a park, in some sort of race against hundreds of other kids. I can still see it vividly now after all these years. We were "bear crawling" on ladders that were raised from the ground but laid out horizontally rather than vertically....almost like the top of some "monkey bars." I was losing the race and didn't think I could catch the leaders. Then, flying in like some super-hero, swooped down my uncle. Only he wasn't the chemotherapied monster I had last seen, it was him in his full glory, healthy and beaming a huge smile at me. He picked me up and flew me to the front, and I crossed the finish line while everyone erupted into a thrilling cheer. I remember being able to hear my pulse pounding in my right ear as the dream faded to black.
That's when it happened. I'll do my best to describe. I immeidately awoke and rose from my bed. I was not in control of my own mind at this point in time and do not feel I was capable of even thinking for myself. I awoke and turned to my left, and there, sitting beside my bed, radiating a blue glow around his blue-ish tinted body was my uncle.
I've told my wife this and she swears she'd freak out if she saw a dead relative, but I wasn't capable of being scared. That part of my brain seems to have been surpressed.
He talked to me for several minutes, while I seemed to be only capable of nodding that I understood. He told me that my life was going to be difficult in the early years, but that there was a bright and happy future awaiting me. He also told me not to be afraid of anything in the casket, and that he expected me to behave myself at his funeral. Nothing tremendously earth shattering, but that was the gist of what he said.
There was something else intangible about the experience as well. When I say it was impossible to be afraid, it wasn't just that my brain seemed to be under his control, but that there was also a feeling of absolute love in the room. I don't know how to describe it in words. Just know that I've felt the love of holding my son in my arms as he opened his eyes and first looked upon the world. I've felt the absolute peak of what love can offer in this our physical world. The feeling in that room made all those feelings look like child's play. It was as if you could take all the love I've ever felt or given in my entire life and could fit it on a pencil point compared to this feeling, which was so immense it would take up the entire universe. Beyond that, the most soothing aspect of "the feeling" was that it was 100% familiar. I'm convinced it was the feeling of god, whatever that may be. It is not a feeling I could have imagined nor is it a feeling that is able to be reproduced by anything in this world. It MUST be something like that the earliest believers in god talked about. You RECOGNIZE the feeling. If I were to do "word association" with it, I would say that it felt like "home." You feel as though it is a part of you that you have always known and that you long to be with again.
So, with his message complete, I laid back down, closed my eyes (still seemingly not under my own control) and went back to sleep. My next memory was waking up the next morning and in my 6 year old way of thinking, essentially saying to myself "What the hey???"
I walked downstairs to breakfast and announced to my mother that I had "seen Uncle Thommy." My mother told me that was cute but that I just had a wild imagination. "No, No!" I insisted and proceeded to repeat his message to me.
I didn't know it at the time, but in one of the last private conversations my mother had with him before he died, he had worried out loud that I would not behave well at his funeral, so suffice to say the "make sure you behave at my funeral" line was like a shred of "proof" to her that this had happened.
For years though, no one in my family ever aknwoledged what I believed had happened. We just didn't talk about it, and if I brought it up (I was struggling with the experience deeply internally for many, many years), it was rejected as an overractive imagination, a hypnagogic regression, or just a dream.
Flash forward roughly 18 years later. I'm now 24 years old and dealing with a family tragedy on my father's side this time. By now I've lived my whole life secretly believing I have been visited by my uncle's ghost (or "angel" you might say), and struggling with whether I was insane. My father's brother ended up killing himself this year over a family dispute. The family was torn assunder with grief. During a rather introspective conversation with my mother, in which she bemoaned that I was not a good practicing Catholic, I mentioned to her not to worry, as I could never travel far from the flock. I asked her to remember that I still believe I had been visisted all those years ago, even if the rest of the family thought I was crazy.
"Crazy?" my mother replied. "Oh Kevin (Thomas is my middle name), there are things we should have told you long ago."
It was now that I learned the true story. That my uncle had died of AIDS after being a closet homosexual. He hid this from the family and hid what his ailment was until the very end. Doctors at that time had a feeble understanding of the affliction, and there were still concerns that it could be spread through the air. My mother had risked all danger and stood by his side until the end, as his soul source of companionship.
It took the rest of the family some time to come to grips with the truth. It was hard to face. Finally, they started arriving at the hospital as he had neared his end. My mother tells of him being on life support, and developing allergic reactions to the tubing in his throat. It's horrible stuff that I can't even imagine with respect to the pain and discomfort.
He refused to quit fighting because he wanted his father to be proud of him, a theme they had struggled with all his life (my grandpa, god bless him, being a very "macho" type guy that had difficulty accepting his son could be gay).
Towards the end, as family arrived to say goodbye, my mother pleaded with my grandfather to end his misery and let him go. "He's only fighting to make you proud....don't make him suffer more than he has to." Of course, my grandpa was a proud man that did not want to break down in front of others, yet had no time to privately say goodbye.
My mother drove the rest of the family home that morning so they could get sleep while she let my grandpa say goodbye to his boy. It was while she was travelling back and forth that he died, and she was heartbroken that she had not been there. In fact, she told me she felt cheated. She had been the one that spent the most time with him, how was it fair that she missed his final moments and was not by his side when he passed? Yet on another level, she knew his father needed that moment for closure.
So, as I've continued to struggle with "why" this happened, I'm left now thinking that his appearance was a way of saying goodbye to my mother as much as to me. The message was as much hers as it was mine.
I have a theory on why he appeared to me, and it's loosely based on the fact that I was 6 and somewhat naive. I've always wondered why he didn't just appear to my mother, or his parents, and instead chose me? Could it be that because I was so young I was the only one open enough to receive such a message? Would the minds of my older family members have rejected what was occurring and been unable to receive the message? I can't help but think that had something to do with it. It's like my mind was naive enough not to know this was an impossibility, so it didn't rule out what was happening.
There's another even stranger element of "proof" if you will. My brother (without knowing my claim), reported that he too saw my uncle that night, after he woke up in the middle of the night and made out a feint blue glow in his room. He said he could see that Uncle Thommy was talking, but couldn't hear what he said. He reported that he was not in control of his mind either, and seems to have told himself subconsciously "it's okay, he's here for Kevin" before falling asleep. Once again my parents had kept this from me for years so as not to warp my young and impressionable mind.
So there's my story. It's been 23 years and that event is still the bedrock of my entire belief system. I feel as though I've been shown things that others are not lucky enough to see. The weird thing is that even so, I have struggled with my own faith from time to time. I find it ironic that my uncle's name, and indeed my own middle name is "Thomas" - as we all know that Thomas had to see the wounds of Jesus and put his fingers in them before believing he had risen. There's some stunning similarities in there if I do say so.
As evidence of how powerful this event has been in my life, consider that when my son was born in 2004, we didn't hesitate for a second to give him a middle name of Thomas. My wife knew, nothing else could possibly suffice. His first name also has personal meaning (Randy), but that's another story for another time.
Sorry if this is too long. There's even more I could've said that I left out, but I did promise to share this with you. I know all too well that it's not possible for readers to believe a word of this. I stopped caring about that a long time ago. To me, my situation is rather identical to that of Jodie Foster's character at the end of "Contact." She's seen things that are unimaginable, but has no proof to offer skeptics. Such is my burden, I suppose. At least I'll always know it happened, and that no amount of doubt from naysayers will ever be able to strip this memory from me.
P.S. You may not be surprised to learn that this is not the only paranormal encounter I've had. I'll look for the appropriate place to leave such stories in the future. You remember that grandpa of mine in this story (we called him "Poppy")? Suffice to say there have been some "events" since he passed as well.
Thanks for letting me share, Brigid....It does feel good to talk about this considering I keep it bottled up inside all the time.
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