Death and the borders of experience JENNY RANDLES
JENNY RANDLES shares a personal experience of how the end of life tests the limits of our knowledge and beliefs
56
The week before I wrote this piece my mother died in front of me following a brave fight against a ravaging illness. I had been a carer for 14 years following her major stroke in 2003, which meant that she required assistance with everything, but it was only ever a pleasure and a privilege. Whilst this change in my life arrived unexpectedly and meant that I stopped writing books, curiously, it also allowed me to experience the borders of fortean reality and questions about what it means to be human.
Events like this are hard to talk about and so most of us find coping mechanisms that push them into the background. But when we take notice of the small things that happen during any deeply trying period, our minds can be focused on questions that we otherwise choose not to contemplate – such as, what is consciousness? Is it a product purely of biology or can it function on another level? Can we know and even choose our own destiny?
All who were with mum in her final hours believe she it was her time to leave. It was extraordinary watching her move consciously away from the pain and the trauma as disease attacked her body. Despite the difficulty of communicating since the stroke and being at a low ebb with the new illness, somehow she still knew what she was doing and that it was time ‘to move on’. Everyone could see that she had purposefully chosen her own path; indeed, she looked serene and happy, and believed that she was setting out on a journey toward someone who was waiting for her.
This someone was my father – who died in 1995 – whose photo she clutched tightly for those last 36 hours after clearly deciding to be with him. Since January, when she first contracted the infection that ultimately killed her body, she had been pointing around the room saying that she could see my dad and that he was telling her it was time to go. I kept trying to assure her that there was nobody there and that she would pull through. I even resorted to photographing the empty space to prove it. But she was adamant that he was in the room, and often spent more time watching ‘him’ with interest and delight than the world around her. It was unnerving and yet, oddly, not at all scary.
Much as I tried to persuade myself that she was just seeing things, perhaps because of the antibiotics, I realised that she believed that her time was approaching – and that I was unable to accept something that she somehow instinctively knew. Each time I asked her to fight on, she looked at me pityingly, as if I could not understand her lack of concern for the physical or the strength of her desire to get to where she wanted to be.
I kept trying to asssure her that there was nobody there...
She did try – for the family, I am sure – but the longer it went on, and as the days drifted by, the clearer it was that she wanted to go. She spent her last day with my dad in spirit and quite uninterested in anything else. She knew absolutely that she was dying and at this point – when her consciousness ought to be disintegrating – she looked for all the world to have made one of the most conscious decisions of her life: to go swiftly and avoid putting us under further strain.
But there was another rather odd reason that I knew her time was short. It was around midnight on Monday 15 May and I knew that Tuesday was about to arrive and that this would be the day.
How did I know this, clearly enough to announce it to my brother? Because 46 years ago, mum had told me that all the women on her side of the family died on a Tuesday. It was a bit of family lore that went back generations, and they all just accepted it – though I had no idea how this ‘tradition’ came about.
When mum told me this, in January 1971, my grandmother had been taken ill while staying with us for Christmas in our small terraced house in Manchester. We had a bed in the living room for her, and I watched in awe as my grandmother spent what were the last days of her life talking animatedly to figures that she could see in front of her in the corner of the room but that none of the rest of us could perceive. She believed them to be her own parents, who had died before I was born. To her they were ‘out there’ waiting to greet her and ease her passage. She was in no way afraid of this, and eager to join them. Then Tuesday morning arrived and gran calmly departed, as if it were simply time to go home to the RossendaleValley as she had done after so many previous trips.
Other relatives have followed the Roberts family tradition, and I have just grown to accept it. I did once talk to a psychologist, and he was convinced that it started as a coincidence, when a couple of deaths likely happened on this day of week, and then became a self-fulfilling prophecy when someone was ill and a Tuesday approached. I can see the logic of this and how it might apply in this case. My only doubts centre on how few people in these final stages of illness are even likely to be aware of the fact that Tuesday is approaching. During my years as a carer, and especially in those final months, I often forgot what day of the week it was – because every one of them was exactly the same, with a cycle of medical, cleaning and caring regimes that were necessarily unchanging.
Growing up, I knew that my grandmother was supposedly psychic. It was she who inspired my interest in these strange areas of human experience, claiming
that she could ‘move’ kitchen utensils by staring at them. I was sure at the time that I saw them move – now, of course, I doubt those memories. It was also common for her to arrive on our doorstep in Manchester, bags packed ready to stay, saying that she ‘knew’ she had to come as either my brother or I was ‘poorly’. Despite having no phone at her home in the rural Pennines and a 20-mile (32km) bus journey being the only way to get to us, she was always right.
The bus that she caught continues to run today; it’s still called the X43, but is now branded as the ‘Witch Way’ because it passes through areas rich in lore about women who could see ‘beyond’. And, in a neat fortean coincidence, my brother – whom she’d caught the bus to visit because she ‘knew’ when he was ill as a child – is director of the company that created the branding for the ‘Witch Way’ bus.
Just before she died in 1971, Gran had announced to my mum that she did not want certain relatives at her funeral as they had fallen out with her recently. Mum smiled and said okay; but, of course, she did invite them. However, on the day, these relatives never made it to the funeral, although everyone else who’d been invited did. They said afterwards that for the first time in their lives they got lost and ended up driving in circles around Bury – a place they knew well – until eventually finding the way just after the ceremony was over. We all smiled at the thought of Gran somehow misdirecting traffic from the other side, but nobody was willing to laugh entirely at the idea.
Of course, most people will read such tales and reasonably assume that they are simply down to chance. They may be, but I have interviewed many close encounter witnesses over the years equally adamant that they ‘know’ when a UFO is nearby – as if they are somehow attuned to its presence via some hidden bond; and quite a few of these cases happen not in the traditional, physical manner but when the witness is ‘out of the body’.
I met the Day family at their home in Aveley, Essex, 40 years ago. They were intuitive and creative like Gran, and like her they’d had numerous psychic experiences of ‘knowing’ things or of objects moving around the house. Then, on 27 October 1974, driving home from a family night out, they suddenly encountered a strange bank of green mist straddling the highway and rode into the Twilight Zone.
It was like many other ‘alien contacts’ in several ways – they recalled being ‘taken’ into a hovering craft and meeting strange beings that showed them images of the Earth and their benevolent, possibly supervisory, interactions with humanity. But in other regards, it was different, because they were viewing these things from an ‘out-of-body’ perspective, not in the manner of a ‘near-death experience’ – floating over the ceiling seeing your body below – but watching from a disembodied ‘inner self’ inside the UFO, looking down at their inert bodies which were still in the car on the highway below.
All of this takes me back to January 1971, and the night before Gran’s funeral. I was staying at a friend’s house, sleeping in a bedroom where I had never slept before because our small terrace was being used by relatives staying over. It was on this night that I had my one and only, powerfully vivid, out-ofbody experience. I awoke with a start in the night and was floating over the bed surrounded by a pale glow. I could see all around me and look down on the bed below where I – or at least my body – was lying a few feet away, seemingly oblivious to the ‘other me’ floating up there looking down.
The moment was brief but the memory indelible. As I realised exactly what was happening it was as if I snapped a gigantic elastic band that ‘twanged’ me back into my body. I sat bolt upright and, of course, never got back to sleep, but took in the detail of the room as dawn broke: it was real, but identical to the unfamiliar room I ‘saw’ whilst floating in that eerie glow. Again, I am sure that most people will regard this as a dream or an hallucination and I have been told, by the psychologist I mentioned earlier, that it was most likely induced by the stress of going through that first close family funeral whilst still a teenager.
On the surface that makes perfect sense; but when you have experienced something as profoundly shocking as this, it is less easy to embrace the solace of cold logic. It feels as if something more is involved, and you inevitably wonder if there are things going on that we only glimpse every now and then, in those moments when fate shines a flashlight onto the otherwise invisible tethers that bind together the fuzzy boundaries of our reality.
Whilst my experiences are very personal and, quite rightly, should not persuade anyone reading this that they ‘mean’ anything on a wider scale, I have discovered that I am not alone in sharing these insights. I have been reading a moving online forum [1] in which nurses and doctors recount their experiences of being with patients in the final hours of their lives. One interesting aspect is how often the sort of things that I have seen happen ‘by chance’ have been witnessed routinely by these professionals. Many seem to gain solace from them, and to suspect that this is not just imagination at work but a sign of what we all might one day find ourselves confronting.
I was forced to contemplate this again when the funeral home called to say that we could view my mother. One of her oldest friends wanted to be there so we could comfort one another. And out of the blue, she told me that recently she awoke in the middle of the night feeling very ill and believed that she was dying.
“I was wide awake and never got back to sleep afterwards,” she insisted. She had prayed, thinking that, at her age, this was probably ‘it’, but found herself ‘floating’ along a corridor with several doors leading off – one of which she was drawn towards but told not to enter as she “needed to return”.
Instead she saw ahead a bright light that she felt drawn towards as it emitted a feeling of love and protection. As she drifted into it she could see a small hillside with beautiful flowers on it, and standing there was her son, smiling. He had died as a young man, many years ago, following complications from an asthma attack. She had never gotten over this awful loss, but seeing him there alive and well filled her spirit with hope and peace. She said he told her to “go back” because “it is not your time”. She argued briefly, but heeded his words, began to move swiftly backwards and was soon in her bed filled with joy and starting to feel better. In fact, she did need medical treatment and was perhaps ‘nearer death’ than she had realised.
I told her I had heard many people’s stories like this one – a classic ‘near-death experience’ – and that she was not alone as she seemed to believe. They are surprisingly common, as readers will know; perhaps they represent nothing more than wish fulfilment, or perhaps there’s more at work here that might tell us something interesting. As with most fortean experiences, they prompt us to look for the universal patterns that underpin our everyday lives and force us to consider explanations that may be mundane or divine.