Encountering Grandmother
as a Soul

Visitation from a Dying Person

© 1997 Mike Strong

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In August 1977 I was visited by my grandmother's spirit as she died in a hospital hundreds of miles away. My grandmother was in a hospital in Norfolk, Nebraska. I had moved to Kansas City a few months earlier. She had been expected to die since January but was holding on, probably out of shear stubbornness. I had come to see her as a domineering person and this holding on seemed to me to reflect her character.

In the previous month (Friday, July 1st - the start of a July 4th weekend) I had been burned by hot splashing oil, mostly on my right upper thigh but with enough splashing to impact several other areas. My thigh received the deepest burns (third degree areas). It was serious enough that the plastic surgeon did not yet know whether I would need skin grafts to cover the center of the deepest wound. Several times a day I had to clean the wounds and change the dressings.

I was changing the dressing on the deepest wound past midnight on an August Friday about 10 or 15 minutes before 1:00 a.m. I was looking down as I cleaned the wound area when suddenly I knew that I should look upward and to my right, to a corner of the ceiling. There was my grandmother. I knew immediately that she had died and was stopping by for a visit before heading to another destination.

She didn't look like grandmother, at least not in the sense of any human form. There was no ghostly apparition. What I "saw" looked as if a spherical area of air, about a half meter in diameter had somehow changed density enough to be seen. I knew instantly it was she. Notice my sense of "as if" the sphere was there.

There was just that transparent spherical area which I "saw" in the air. I am not sure that this was something a camera would have seen. Perhaps it was only the way my brain visualized the sense of that identification. Such was my perception. In that instant I knew who she was, what she was doing and why. The information was not in a narrative form but rather it was simply all there at once.

There had been no expectation that this night would be different from any night of the previous eight months. Yet when she appeared there was no surprise. I was keenly alert immediately. My only outside awareness was an internal "monitor" which kept saying to me "Remember the feeling of this moment. Check out the time later."

I remember the knowledge that she had just died, that she was there to see me and my (non-existent) wife and kids and that she had a definite place to go after she left me. (To satisfy grandmother's desires my mother had invented a wife and kids for me.)

I was not pleased with her. She had, I felt, been a major source of enormous emotional damage in my life. She was commandeering, overbearing in her demands and judgmental in loving. Grandmother wasn't a welcome presence in my life and I was relieved when she finally died.

I had a lot of unfinished business I had never been able to tell her and there was no reason for me to be polite with her. I had never been allowed to complain or to voice my own different viewpoints. From infancy on I was punished for my own expression. So, when she appeared to me I let her know my displeasure. She left in a huge huff. This was no beatific vision, this was grandmother.

Even so, that visitation gave me a direct experience of knowing that we are indeed souls and that death is not a termination but a leave taking. For me, the expression "to pass on" is no longer a euphemism to avoid saying "dead" but rather a very spare description of death.

I also note that apparently we don't suddenly gain the full knowledge of the universe at death, otherwise grandmother would already have known that I remained unmarried and without children. Note also that she was still the grandmother I remembered and she left insulted. So it seems reasonable to guess that being purely a soul still leaves us with a good deal to learn and that at least some of this learning takes place in a sequential manner. That leads to the further speculation that if we have more to learn then it is not expected of us that we must - or can - complete our process of development within a single life. This speculation already implies that our development is not bounded by mortal life.

When the visitation ended I walked into the kitchen to check the clock. It was about 12:50 or 12:55 am. Later that morning, about 7:30, my step-father phoned to tell me that grandmother had died. A few days later when I traveled to the funeral I checked on the time of death. It had been between 12:45 am and 1:00 am.

There were several items which separated this experience from an imagined experience. First is that the actual event was confirmed to me some hours after the experience.

Second, just the mathematical probability of having such an experience at the same time as the death within any fifteen minute segment over an entire period of roughly seven to eight months or so. There are 96 such segments per day (4 x 24) and about 210+ days in any seven month period (7 x 30, depending on months and leap years). So there are at least 7 x 30 x 4 x 24 = 20,160 possible time segments in which this might have occurred. There was roughly one chance in 20,160 that my experience would have coincided so exactly with grandmother's death.

In more personal terms the sense of the experience had some very particular markers. One: There was no emotional component to the production of the experience. It was a sensory report with similarities to any piece of sensation I might receive from tongue, eyes, ears, hands, or nose. Two: It was very articulate in its own way. I don't mean in words or voices but rather that information content was conveyed fully without use of words. It's information was crisp and clear. Three: Although it was totally unexpected, and certainly unprepared for, there was no element of surprise. I was very clear about what was occurring. I knew the context, without stopping for any analytical process or to receive an explanatory narration. There was no sense of even wondering whether it was real. Indeed you could almost call it "hyper reality." Yet I was in no sense struck with awe or wonderment. It seemed very matter-of-fact and totally obvious.

This "visitation" was the first experience in my life that I categorize as spiritual in the sense that I was aware in a sensate manner more than I could imagine and more than I could know through "normal" information-gathering tools. There is a direct analogy with touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell. Physical senses report information to the brain. There is no additional content given to these reports until that information is processed by the brain. It is the brain which interprets these reports and adds (or even fabricates) context.

The spiritual experience is very similar except that the context information arrives with the sense. Sensing seems more direct, perhaps because it occupies your full sense of being rather than as sight, or touch or smell or so forth. But a spiritual experience is not created and cannot, I believe, be simulated through emotion or by trying in any way to convince yourself that you are having a spiritual experience. You can't pound this into your head and you can't duplicate this by revving up emotions as in a passionate religious service. You can't will it by asking, pleading, cajoling, or praying. It comes on its own for its own reasons. You don't get it because you were good. It isn't earned, it just is.

The experience is like the difference between reading about mountains all your life without ever going there versus actually being in the mountains. You can read and imagine and memorize encyclopedic volumes of information all you want. You can jump and shout and sing camping songs all you want. You never really know the thing until you are there in person.

One more point. I felt that grandmother had a destination to go to as soon as she left me. There was no identity provided for that destination. Merely a strong sense of a very specific somewhere - neither named nor described, either in theological or other cultural terms.

What seems clear to me about death is that the one thing we take with us is ourselves. We take the person we have become, the sum total of what we have made of the life given us. It is what we are. Not a body. Not goods. Not a religion. Just the person we are. If that is what we take with us out of this life then I think it reasonable to believe that is our reason for being here.