Bite-size shivers
I asked for a sign and Granddad kept them coming!
Iwas woken by a banging on my bedroom door. Answering it I found my nan in tears, shaking. Granddad had collapsed and died on the way to their usual Sunday car boot sale.
I couldn’t take it in. Granddad John was a big man who liked a smoke and drink and had health problems, but he was only 61.
Oddly, the night before I’d woken in the early hours and a pang of dread and sadness had hit for no reason. A premonition?
Although he wasn’t my biological granddad, John was married to my nan and I’d grown up with him in the flat above an office block, where he and Nan were caretakers, with my mum and Auntie Paula.
Granddad had helped raise me, turning up to my school plays, taking me to Brownies and dropping me at my prom.
We’d had our moments, arguing like Tom and Jerry at times! But I’d adored him.
Now I was desperate to know if he was still around, so the day after he died I said tearfully: ‘Just show me a sign, any sign.’
Instantly, my bedroom light flickered.
My heart skipped a beat, before I brushed it off as coincidence...
The next day we were chatting about the arrangements we had to make, when a magpie flew up to the living room window.
Pigeon spikes meant bird visitors were rare, but this one popped his head inside the open window and stared at us all, squawking. ‘Granddad?’ I wondered.
Then the next day, out shopping, Dance the Night Away by The Mavericks came on and I gasped. I’d first heard the song on
holiday in Benidorm with my grandparents when I was six and Granddad would play it for me in his car on our trips to the video hire shop. Hearing it gave me chills. Another sign...
Granddad had always got up at 6am, ready to unlock the building at seven. Now he was gone, Nan had to do it.
But one morning when she almost overslept, a knocking on the window woke her at five past six. The magpie!
Four months after losing Granddad, I was walking the dog in the park behind our flat when something made me look back at it. We were about to move out, so I took some snaps on my phone.
That evening, looking through the photos, I froze. In the window of what had been Granddad’s bedroom was a face. I took in the familiar nose, eyes and profile – Granddad!
For a while it seemed that was to be the last sign from him... until my birthday in March when I was on the bus home from shopping with Nan and Dance the Night Away came on!
Granddad’s taught me that although people pass on, they’re never truly gone.