When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [56]
The interesting thing about this visit was that about six or seven months later, I was signing books after one of my talks when a woman I thought I recognized as one of the daughters approached. She gave me her name to put in the book I was signing. “Do you remember me?” she asked. “My mother was the lady who didn’t want to be buried with her locket.”
I told her I hoped things had worked out for her. They had, she replied. She and her sister were very happy they’d followed their mother’s last wish. They had found their half sister and given her the locket. The three women had talked, and the two younger daughters had told her all about their mother. Their half sister had been extremely grateful, because she had been experiencing health issues and had no way to determine her genetic history. The two sisters, encouraged by this positive response, had also told their father, who was completely understanding about an event that had happened before he had come into the picture.
She thanked me again for passing on her mother’s last words. “If not for you, we never would have met our sister,” she said. “Mother would be so happy.”
Did It Hurt? Were You Scared?
I’ve never heard a ghost say that it hurt to die. They’ve told me how much pain they were in when they were ill or became injured, but as far as actual death or dying goes—I can’t recall anyone mentioning that it hurt. Others have admitted that they were scared, but more often than not I hear inspiring stories of the comfort that those in the white Light bring to the dead and dying who can see them.
One of my most moving experiences was attending the funeral for a soldier who had died in Iraq. Over the summer, we had lost over twenty young men and women from the Cleveland and Columbus area to the battles in Iraq, and each of the military funerals had been very rough. It had been difficult for me to find words to console the families who’d asked me to be there. The ghosts of the soldiers would tell me that they had died doing what they wanted to do. They were proud that they’d gone down fighting, and they were sorry if they had let anyone down. When I passed this on to the families, they were proud, of course, but not necessarily comforted.
But at one of these funerals, a young soldier, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, told me something extraordinary. He was from a family of military men—from his great-grandfather to his grandfather to his father, right down the line. When I got up to his casket, he told me how sorry he was to be leaving his wife and his baby son. I replied that he would be able to keep a watch over them from the Light—he’d be able to get into their dreams and perhaps offer them comfort.
I asked him to look into the Light and to tell me what he could see. He stared for the longest time before whispering, “It’s amazing.”
I have heard spirits say this before, but I have never heard what he told me next.
“I see my grandfather,” he said. “And he’s not saying anything, but he’s there and he’s wearing his uniform. And behind him there are rows and rows of other people, all in uniform. And I don’t think I know any of them, but they are all standing and saluting me.”
I got the chills.
“I saw all the flags and the people on the route when they took my body from the airport to the funeral home,” he added. “But now I’ll be a hero when I go into the Light.”
Later, when I told his mother about our conversation, a smile crossed her grief-stricken face. “Leave it to my father to come up with something to make everyone feel better,” she said.
And I learned from that grieving mother, as I learn from every funeral I visit, that it is better to look for the good in everything. Otherwise, alive or dead, you will end up miserable.
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MURDERS AND SUICIDES
When Spirits Stay After Unnatural Deaths
I MEET MANY earthbound spirits who died from