A PERSONAL STORY
In early May 1989, my 71-year old mother was admitted to hospital in Toronto for chemotherapy treatment after a diagnosis of acute leukemia. At my father’s urging, I stayed in the city where I was living (Denver) upon hearing the news because he felt that seeing the injuries I had sustained in a bicycle collision the previous month would cause my mother unnecessary added emotional stress. My arm was in a sling to help heal a three-point separation of my left clavicle, a rib was cracked, and I had a large contusion on my right forehead. I didn’t look the way I had before.
At this time, I was reading an ostensibly channeled book Personal Power Through Awareness by Sonaya Roman. One evening while at home, I was practicing some of the exercises contained in this book that entailed intentionally projecting my “awareness”, in the waking state, out to other persons I knew; the aim was to discern what they were feeling or thinking at that time. One of those people was my mother. Coming back to me immediately was the feeling of anger towards my father, for reasons I dimly sensed as being about his behavior towards her before entering the hospital. This was no real surprise because I knew my mother had long been unhappy with my father over issues spanning many years. As their only child, I was emotionally much closer to her than I was towards my father.
I then shifted my focus to other people, with varying results. At 11:00 PM, as I decided to call it a night from my efforts, I suddenly heard my mother’s voice inside my head, “Bill, I’m getting ready to leave, and I just wanted to let you know.” As I had no notion that she might be close to death at that point, I freaked out, telling her in my mind that she was going to be OK, as she was in the best hospital for cancer treatment in Toronto. I then heard the exact same words repeated in my mind, “Bill, I’m getting ready to leave, and I just wanted to let you know.” Still unnerved but knowing it was too late to call her or my father back east, I called it a night and went to bed.
At 7:00 AM the next morning, just emerging from sleep, I heard my phone ring but decided to remain in bed and let the answering machine take the call. After my voice message sounded, I heard my father’s voice, cool and relaxed, intone, “Bill, when you get up, give me call; nothing urgent, just give me a call.” Intuitively, I knew what lay in store, but I stayed in bed for several minutes more to awaken more fully. I then called my father. “Bill, I have some sad news: Your mother passed away this morning.” After asking how her demise could have happened so soon after her hospital admittance and him saying he didn’t know, I asked what time she had passed. He replied, “6:00 AM.” I was astonished! This clock time was exactly five hours after her apparent telepathic announcement to me of her impending departure from earthly life (allowing for the 2-hour time-zone difference). Why this elapse of time? I can only speculate that it took her body that period to shut down after her decision, whether intentional or soul-sourced, to pass away.
The very next day, I flew to Toronto to see my father and attend the funeral he had arranged for later in the week. That same day, before our relatives arrived at our home from out of town in the late afternoon, I went outside for a contemplative walk in a large green school grounds just across the street from where we lived, an area that happened to adjoin a cemetery. As I finished my walk and prepared to cross back across the street, I had an impulse to sit down on a nearby park bench. As soon as I did, I felt my mother’s presence and asked in my mind how she was and what she was doing. She replied that she was “fine” and was “visiting with friends”, which I presumed to mean people also deceased. I asked her why she had left when she did, and she said that she had had enough of her life and did not want to be chronically ill. She then said, “Now you will have the chance to really get to know your father. You will have a good long life, and you will meet a woman with whom you can have a child, a son.” That was all, and she spoke no further. I then went home.
I did get to know my father better over the next several years, learning more about his difficult early life as a child and young man, his trials in making his way in the world, and some of his attitudes and behaviors that had contributed to my mother’s unhappiness and despair. Two years later, in 1991, I did in fact meet a pretty woman, two years my senior who, at age 37, had never been married and wanted to have a child. We dated for nine months, but, while I liked her and she was quite sweet on me, I lacked passion for and excitement with her. Thus impelled to end our relationship, I did not marry her. To this day, I have never married and have no children.
At the time of my mother’s decease, I was employed as a state telecommunications regulatory attorney for AT&T in Denver. Two months after her transition, in July 1991, I was preparing to try an administrative case-on-appeal on my company’s behalf before Wyoming’s Public Service Commission in Cheyenne. While just a dry regulatory and business dispute between my long-distance telephone company and a local common carrier in Wyoming, the case had been marked with an unusual amount of acrimony, almost certainly owing to the local carrier’s owners’ theft of revenues and illegal acts over several years, and its chronic duplicitousness towards AT&T in the course of the litigation. I had tried the underlying case earlier, in which AT&T had prevailed on a split 2-1 decision of the three commissioners, but the six-page order that the commission had issued in our favor was wholly inadequate to fully redress all of my company’s grievances. And so AT&T appealed the commission’s decision, as did the other party, they having totally lost on the merits of the case.
In the afternoon on the day before the hearing on both appeals, I decided to take a stress break from preparing my case and wandered down and out onto a green, open-air terrace adjoining my office building. I sat down on a low parapet and tried to release my rising angst in anticipation of the next day’s event in the hearing room in Cheyenne. Suddenly I heard my mother’s clear voice inside my head: “Bill, you have nothing to worry about. The commission will do all the work for you.” Stunned, I asked for a repeat, and the same words came to me again! Buoyed at this clarity, in sound and meaning, but uncertain as to whether to trust what had just happened, I tarried for a while longer, letting the possible significance sink in, mundanely and spiritually. If this communication was really real, it truly was a transcendental event for sure!
I then returned to my office and worked to complete my case preparation into the evening.
Early the next morning, I drove to Cheyenne from Denver with my witnesses and entered the Commission hearing room just minutes before the hearing on our case was to begin. Gaveling open the hearing, the Commission’s chairman directed the other party to go first in making its case against the Commission’s original decision and order in AT&T’s favor. Over the next couple of hours, I watched in amazement as each of the three commissioners hammered the other party’s lawyers and witnesses with direct, precise, and challenging questions that betrayed clear hostility to them and their legal positions. It was thus very evident to me that we were likely to receive another positive commission order in some form. At that point, though, just what form it would take remained to be seen.
After the other party finished its presentation, I put on AT&T’s witnesses, each of whom drew only sympathetic, clarifying questions. There was no palpable animus towards any of them or the evidence they presented. While I was, now, guardedly confident that we would prevail on our appeal for the most part, I was not prepared for what came next. At the conclusion of our case presentation, the commissioners recessed in order to confer on what they had heard in the parties’ testimony and argument. In short order, the chairman reconvened the hearing and then announced to everyone present, “We have decided to find for AT&T on all matters addressed in the appeals before us. Mr. Pippin, we would like you to prepare a draft order on all points and submit it to us for review.” And with that, the hearing was concluded. What a total success!
Within a few weeks’ time, I drafted and submitted a 36-page proposed order to the Commission for its review, spelling out in comprehensive, exacting detail everything that AT&T wanted from its local-telephone-company opponent: Payment of all monies owed to AT&T and installation of new plans, procedures, and processes to ensure that the company’s prior errant behavior would never recur. In a month’s time, the Commission issued its official order determining the case on appeal. Astoundingly, they had made a mere six word changes in my long and complicated draft order, and then published it as their own! Very gratified, my employer accorded me great kudos for a long and difficult case well won.
Many years later, in 2007, my father and I had become embroiled in an acrimonious lawsuit with his second wife over family finances. One summer day, I picked my father up, then wheelchair-bound, from his nursing home for a trip by car to visit our two lawyers’ separate offices in the city. Wheeling my father to my car, I placed a manila folder containing important papers I was carrying onto the vehicle’s rooftop so as to free my use of both hands to first lift and bundle my father and then his folded-up wheelchair into the car’s interior. Focused and preoccupied, I then unthinkingly drove off to our appointments without first removing the folder from the car’s roof.
I did not recall my act of omission until we had left the first lawyer’s office and were off to see the second one. By now quite distraught inside, I was scarcely able to maintain my cool as we made the drive over, retracing our route as exactly as possible on the off chance I might be able, somehow, to espy the lost papers. But no luck. Once in the second lawyer’s office waiting area, I sat down, closed my eyes, and quietly yet intensely asked for divine help in recovering my lost folder of papers. Instantly, I heard my mother’s voice in my mind, “They will be at the nursing home when you return.” Nonplussed, but momentarily relieved a bit, my father and I completed our visit with the second lawyer and then barreled back to his nursing-home residence. I did not know what to expect when we arrived.
Once there, I inquired at the reception office if they might have a folder of papers that belonged to my father, lost outside in the parking lot a little while ago. Not skipping a beat, the lady said that, about half an hour after we departed, a stranger had entered the facility and tendered them to her. He told her he had been waiting at a bus stop on a busy main street about a half-mile away when he saw a car pass by, and suddenly a sheaf of papers had blown off of its rooftop onto the street pavement, scattering in the turbulence created by the car’s speed of travel.
Instinctively, and between oncoming cars, he dashed into the street and retrieved each and every one of the papers that had been launched. Assembling them back into the folder, he noticed the address of the nursing home at the top of one or more of the pages and thought the people there might know to whom they belonged. And so he decided to walk them to my father’s residence, a half-mile away, to drop them off. Miraculously he was right, and in so doing, he saved the day for my father and me – but particularly for me, given my severe angst. My “inner critic”, already by then in high dudgeon about the court case for numerous reasons, now happily had one fewer ground for beating me up emotionally.
Later, I made telephone contact with our Good Samaritan friend, bought him dinner, and then gifted him with some money. He told me he was at the bus stop that day waiting for a bus ride home from work, and just responded to the sudden scattering of papers from my car’s rooftop on impulse, motivated to do “the right thing.” Beyond that, he could not say anything more. I like to think that he was, in some mysterious mystical way, psychically nudged by my mother’s spirit to act as he had. A veritable angel, of sorts. But who knows?
Long before her decease, my mother had disclosed to me that she had a modicum of clairvoyant ability, a power she was manifestly discomfited by as such was not held in any positive regard by the convention-bound society in which she grew up in the mid-20th century. I actually believe it scared her because the first incidence of it she related to me happened during the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. At that time, unbeknownst to her, her fiancé, an infantry sergeant in the Canadian Army, was embarked on a landing craft heading to Juno Beach in Normandy, France. Asleep, she awoke with a start to “see” him, five time zones and several thousand miles away, killed by a Nazi artillery shell fired from an emplacement on shore. He died instantly. By the time, five days later, the official telegram attesting to his death arrived at the summer cottage of his parents, where she was staying, she had already been painfully grieving his loss. Having had this experience of such a traumatic vision, she was not at all inclined to cultivate her “ability.”
Nonetheless, 20 years on, when I was a young child, my mother was asked out of the blue one day by our cleaning lady, a middle-aged European immigrant, if she would “read” this lady’s teacup, a long-standing technique of “scrying” or foretelling the future. My mother was very reluctant to comply with the request, quite perturbed that her cleaning lady would even suggest such a task, as my mother had never intimated to her any interest in such skills, let alone ability. The woman insisted, however, and my mother finally relented.
After the woman drained her cup of tea, my mother peered into it at the tea grains remaining at the bottom. She offered shortly, “I see that you and your husband are looking to buy a house, but I think you should wait a couple of days before you do it.” The woman then confided to her that she and her spouse were indeed looking to buy and had actually planned to close on a house the very next day. My mother nonchalantly replied to her, “You should wait a couple of days.”
The next week, the cleaning lady reported to my mother that she and her husband had chosen to delay the closing by several days. On the following day, she related, the house they had planned to buy had a fire and burned to the ground. Their delay in closing had therefore apparently saved them from making an inauspicious purchase.
I wonder, did my mother’s demonstrated clairvoyant ability while in physical form enable her in some unknown way to communicate with me from beyond the veil, after her transition there? Or are such after-death telepathic abilities more universal, not tethered in some causative way to any earthly possession of psychical talents? Unfortunately, there is no known scientifically testable way to tell well. So far, there is only anecdotal evidence, albeit a large body of it, attesting to the capacity of “dead” persons to pass intelligible information from “the other side” to those still in corporeal form here on Earth.
What may be determinative of the likelihood of such a phenomenon occurring is the quality of the love bond that existed (exists?) between the percipient and the putative sender. My mother certainly loved me in the best maternal way, and I loved her in return as her son and only child. As such, I know she wanted the best for me in life and was so sorry to have left me when I was still relatively young, at 33 years of age. All of her communications to me seemed designed to allay feelings of fear, angst, or uncertainty I was experiencing, and they certainly did serve that purpose well. She had tried, since I was a child, to help me the same way while she was alive.
For me, the survival of personal consciousness beyond bodily death is now a fundamental fact of life writ large, informing my worldview of the earth as an experiential school for exploration and discovery by all of us as sentient beings. As it was clearly her voice that I heard in my head on the above-described occasions, my mother’s transmissions, however brief, seem to confirm that each individual’s unique awareness is tangible, eternal, and ever perceivable — and may likely be the most central core of all of us.