Jim Dixon,

What a great story!!

Well, here's mine. Last year my Mum died suddenly & unexpectedly a couple of weeks before Mother's Day, which is a couple of weeks before her & Dad's birthdays (Dad's is the day after hers) and that is a couple of weeks before my birthday. So by the time my birthday arrived I was feeling pretty shaken up.

Normally I would get a phone call in the morning from Mum, wishing me a happy birthday. This was the first time in my 47 years that my Mum hadn't wished me happy birthday.

I had to go to work and it was a long, busy day with lots of classes to teach and driving a half hour from one campus to the next and then half hour to the next.

To help understand the story, you need to know that on the day I had the phone call to say Mum had died, when I was driving the half hour trip to my parents' home, I had listened for the special song which I felt would come on the radio to help me to cope with her death. (This started when my Grandma died and the song was by The Pretenders called Hymn to Her. If you look at the lyrics and think of the maid, mother and crone concept it makes a lot of sense in relation to a grandmother's death. The chorus goes:   "And she will always carry on,   Something is lost, But something is found, They will keep on speaking her name, Some things change, Some stay the same"). Well, the song came on and it was Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven.

So, I was getting more and more upset as the day progressed, and in the last class I was having trouble keeping it all together. The class had to move to another room and so all the young blokes packed up their stuff and went out, except one young man who was a bit slower in packing up. Next thing, out of the blue, he launched into singing a beautiful snippet of Tears in Heaven. I couldn't believe it. He had never sung anything before or since in that class, and here he was singing "Mum's" song.

I managed to keep it together for the rest of the class - just - but when I got in the car to drive home the two young radio announcers were talking about the female announcer having her birthday today. The man said "I wonder if anyone has a terrible birthday where everything goes horribly wrong" and that's when I burst out crying.   

I wanted to phone them and say "Yes! And it's today!" but I was crying too much.

I keep wondering whether it was just sheer coincidence that the young man sang that song on that day at that moment, or whether he somehow felt compelled to sing it because an angel was whispering in his ear.

I prefer to believe the latter.

Helen