I Could Feel His Energy Around Me

I’m a scientist and I love a good statistic and a good spreadsheet and a bit of research, and who knows what I could have done with my life with a science degree and looking and researching all that stuff? I could feel his energy around me. They’re really not thinking about what the day’s about at all. Grace, being Miss Independence, had a license and she had a car. So she used to drive everybody around. Michelle recalls that after a quiet day with two of her closest friends, in the evening Grace drove a friend to a party five minutes from home. Michelle thought nothing of it. Around midnight, Grace got in her car, apparently to drive home and retrieve a jacket. As she was leaving, an extremely drunk young man forced open the passenger door and demanded a ride to the bus stop. Michelle recalls, The young man broke his jaw, but Grace was far more badly injured. Her lung had burst, and she had hit her head. The man went for help, but he didn’t tell anyone that Grace was in the car, and no neighbors came outside to check what the loud noise was. Instead, she remained trapped for an hour, her burst lung depriving her brain of oxygen.

Fool In The Rain

When we were driving in the car to the hospital that night, I was the passenger and my new husband, Erik, was driving and I started having flashbacks of her life before my eyes. And it wasn’t just memories. It was actually like I was sitting in a slide show and someone was projecting all these images of her life across the screen that was my mind. I remember feeling so angry about that because we all hear that when you’re about to die, you have flashbacks. But that flashback thing started, and I kept getting it all the time. Things that I didn’t have photos of. So it wasn’t like photos flipping through my mind. It was flashbacks of points in her life. Doctors gave Grace a 5 to 10 percent chance of recovering. They operated to relieve brain swelling. For four weeks, the family waited for signs of hope. Michelle’s father had passed away suddenly nearly four years before, but in the hospital, I started having a sensation that Dad was there.

Have You Heard?

And I felt like he was coming to pick up Grace, to take Grace with him. I remember saying to him, Will you just get lost? Because I was angry at him. It was like he was standing in a doorway just waiting. He wasn’t right next to me. He was in the room, but on the edge of the room, just standing there quietly, he wasn’t saying anything. He was very calm, and he was not being pushy. He looked perfectly fit and well, and he was dressed in his ironed trousers and his shirt with a collar. He was a very capable man, my dad. Six hundred people came to his funeral, and we’re pretty sure he had fixed something for every one of those people. I had the sense of this very capable man there to do a job, to help somebody, and it was Grace. Grace was his favorite grandchild, and he very naughtily always used to say it. And actually, the others all got upset at Grace’s funeral because they said, ‘Grace was always his grandchild.

That's The Way It Is

Trust her to go first and get to be with him first. Then Michelle shared what happened next. At the beginning of the fourth week, we were told that we were going to have to withdraw her life support. We chose a Sunday because I thought Sunday is the most peaceful day of the week. We made the room really beautiful, and we invited our family to come and two of her best friends. We sat together and turned off everything. It was freaking horrible. It took her three days to die. She finally died on Tuesday morning, at three a.m. I was in bed with her. I was saying to her, We will still be connected. I know that you will still be here, and I said some beautiful words to her about how I’m going to see you dancing in the wind. After Grace drew her last breath, Michelle felt that her essence had departed. Michelle, along with Erik, packed up the hospital room. We drove home through this sunrise, and I just remember having this feeling of being pulled with her through this sunrise. I got home, and we walked up the stairs to our apartment, and I went and lay on my bed and pulled out my iPad and I typed in Where do you go when you die? I just absolutely knew that she wasn’t gone. Particularly when Ben died, at that time, I thought that when you died, you died. I hoped that there was something, I didn’t really know. Now she began seeking information. I very quickly set myself on a path of learning more about this and intentionally healing instead of allowing myself to die inside. I think it would have lifted a whole world of sadness and pain off my shoulders if I had an understanding of where Ben was going in that dream, if I had known like I know now that there is something out there. If I recognized that the beauty and the calmness that I felt in that dream was where he was going to be and still is. Once Grace passed away, Michelle stopped having what she now identifies as visitation dreams from her father. But she did start to have them from her children. I’m not asleep, but I’m not awake either. Again, it’s like your brain is in this other energetic space. And I’ve felt her feet touching my feet. Michelle’s first encounter with Grace came weeks after Grace had died. In the dream, Michelle was walking along an unfamiliar path in a national park in Sydney, Australia.