#18. Jenny’s Baby Girl

20 years ago we visited my husband’s grandmother who had serious lung cancer.

She was mostly quiet until, clear as a bell, she said, “I can’t go. I won’t be able to see Jenny’s baby girl.”

I thought it was the morphine for sure.

My name was Jenny, but I wasn’t pregnant.

We smiled and hugged her anyway, thinking she was hallucinating.

The night of her funeral, I found out I was one week pregnant.

9 months later with no ultrasound, I had a baby girl.

#19. “There’s a rainbow for you!”

Photo Credit: Pixabay/CC0

I don’t think it was my grandma’s last words, but they were her last words to me.

She was in hospice, and it was the last time she was really lucid.

She grabbed my arm and started pointing to the wall and saying she saw birds in a tree and sunshine, even though there was nothing on that wall.

She seemed really happy, but I was upset, because it was so unlike her, and I knew it meant she was dying.

She started patting my arm and saying. “Don’t worry, there’s a rainbow for you. There’s a rainbow for you.”

On the day she died, a rainbow stretched from my room at home all the way to her room at the hospital.

And every year since, on either the anniversary of her death or my birthday, there’s been a rainbow.

One year, I found a box of her writings.

She wrote about how on my seventh birthday I was so happy I’d seen a rainbow and how it was one of her favorite memories of me.

#20. Bud’s Buddies

My wife and I were blessed to have been given the opportunity to serve my father-in-law for several years as primary caregivers.

His name was Bud. Bud had been a professional engineer, very intelligent, and still mentally as sharp as a tack.

Other than severe arthritis and a diminished breathing capacity caused indirectly by that disease, at age 92 he was in remarkable shape and was living the happiest years of his life: very social and enjoying all the attention he was getting at his new assisted-living home.

In mid-March of this year, he began having more noticeable breathing problems, which his primary care physician dismissed as a cold.

The typical antibiotics were prescribed, and we decided to watch him for a couple of days to see if things got better.

On one of my many daily visits a couple of days after his PCP appointment–I think it was Tuesday–I was helping him solve a couple of problems he was having with his computer, (he loved keeping in touch with all his social media friends and family), and he mentioned that he’d been having trouble sleeping.

As I worked at his desk, he sat in his recliner and proceeded to describe in very matter-of-fact terms two experiences he had had over the last two nights as he lay in bed trying to sleep.

On the first night, he said he suddenly realized there was an older man in his apartment, walking around and dressed only in a pair of bright red, old-fashioned, long-handled underwear.

When this man started to come into his bedroom, Bud said he yelled at him to, “SCRAM! GET OUT OF HERE!”

It was too dark to see the intruder’s face, but Bud said he got a chuckle out of it, because the man’s underwear looked just like the ones his dad used to wear on their farm when he was growing up.

Apparently startled, the mystery man hurriedly exited the apartment through the only door.

When Bud arose in the morning, he found that the door, which had an inside-controlled deadbolt, was still locked from the inside.

The following night, he awoke to find his entire apartment, “filled with people,” as he described it. They were just milling about, talking among themselves, walking in and out of his bedroom and, apparently, making quite a racket.

I asked him if he recognized any of them.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I knew all all of them. Some were old friends, some were family, some were still alive, but most of them were dead. I finally had to tell them that they would have to leave. I was very tired and needed to rest.”

He was totally relaxed as he told me the stories, very matter-of-fact, as if he was describing the weather or what he had had for dinner that night. He offered no further opinion, interpretation or analysis of those “dreams.”

Bud’s condition worsened the following day. We took him to the hospital where he died Saturday at 11:30a in the ICU from pneumonia, surrounded by 16 members of his loving family.