Dying
and Death
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comforting dreams of the deceased. Emma Heathcote-James collected
many such experiences in
After Death Communication
.
This account comes from a friend, who was bereaved in 2006, and is
particularly interesting as so many people became aware of the scent of
roses, and the later synchronicity with the poem chosen for her Memorial
Service.
It was Monday 11th December, my wife Liz had died on 20th November.
My daughters had flown out to Cyprus with me to help and to attend
the Memorial Service to be held on Friday 15th December.
It was noon on a beautiful sunny December day. I was working in
my study with the sliding doors of the sitting room open. My
daughter,
Rebecca, was writing a Eulogy for the forthcoming Memorial Service.
She spotted a white feather on the lawn – fascinated – she brought the
feather into my office and said that she had heard that a white feather
was sometime a sign of Angels. I said that I wasn’t aware of such a
claim, but took the feather anyway, and placed it in front of a picture
of Liz on my desk.
Rebecca continued writing, but after a few minutes, she asked ‘Dad
can you smell roses?’ Indeed the scent of roses was starting to fill my
study. Perplexed I went into the sitting room which was also filled with
the scent. (The house had only recently been
completed and the garden
not even begun, so there were no flowers at all there and no cut flowers
in the house.) The scent was in the sitting room – even stronger in my
study, then up the stairs and in the master bedroom. (There was no
scent in any other rooms in the house.)
I then called my mother and my other daughter Hannah to the sit-
ting room – who immediately identified the scent as roses. Of course
we soon realized that Liz was visiting us – and were all so happy and
felt very, very comforted. The scent lasted for about half an hour. After
the excitement and the scent had gone, I went to look for the white
feather – it was nowhere to be found.
The previous evening Rebecca had
asked me what my favourite
flower was and I had replied, roses. A few hours prior to this experi-
ence I had ordered bunches of lilies for the Memorial Service. Liz was
for sure telling me to change to roses – which I did.
I had asked some close friends to pay a Tribute to Liz at the Memorial
Service and I went to visit them shortly after our experience. Before
I said anything about the roses, David read me the poem he intended
to quote at the service. It was ‘The Scent of Roses’ by Thomas Moore
which had long been a favourite of his. The last line is, ‘But the scent
of the roses will hang around still.’
Religious and Spiritual Experience
166
Another friend told me four days after Liz died –
that on the night
she died Liz had appeared to her in a dream, to assure her that she was
fine and not to worry. [005441]
At the time of that dream, her friend had not yet known that Liz
had died. These events brought comfort to Liz’s widower, and to her
family and friends.
Here is another account, this one involving experiences of the widower
and bereaved son who were about 8,000 miles apart.
Singapore, March 1985.
Some weeks after my mother died in England in January 1985 I had
a very powerful dream in which she came to see me, smartly (and
uncharacteristically)
dressed in a tweed suit, and clearly ready to
embark on a journey. I have no recollection of any conversation we
held, but I have an abiding memory of being actually with her.
I was awakened from this experience by the alarming sound of our
three normally docile dogs howling and barking frenziedly outside the
bedroom window. I got out of bed, together with my wife and we went
outside to see what the fuss was, and I seemed to hear singing, and
also my mother’s voice. The house and garden outside were bathed in
the
light of a brilliant full moon, while the dogs kept up their clamour.
I calmed them down, and as there seemed to be nothing else the
matter, we went back to bed. It was 4 am.
The following evening I telephoned my father to see how he was
getting on (this had become a regular thing since our loss). He told me
that the previous night he had carried out the melancholy task of
scattering my mother’s ashes in his garden, carrying out a pact agreed
between the two of them and not divulged to anyone else, that this
should be done in the light of a full moon.
Bearing in mind the 8-hour time difference between England and
Singapore I asked him: ‘would that have been about 8 pm?’ and he said
‘Yes, why do you ask?’.
I then told him what had been happening
in our house and garden
8,000 miles away at that very moment. [005451]
Dr Penny Sartori, who has herself been involved in NDE research,
reported a strange sighting at the seventh Ecumenical Conference on
Christian Parapsychology, jointly sponsored by the Churches’ Fellowship
for Psychical and Spiritual Studies and the Alister Hardy Society and
Dying and Death
167
Religious Experience Research Centre, held at St Luke’s Campus,
University of Exeter in 2006.
At the conference, Penny
gave a talk on NDEs, after which Diana Fynn,
author of
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