Ferrara,

That is amazing! To have been given that experience is wonderful.   A "Milky Way of golden sparkles" - a very special experience.

Your experience of the song on the radio is one I have had, too. Musical messages are part of the way I know that the "dear departed" are talking to me. (By the way, we sang Whispering Hope at Mum's funeral, too.)

When my Grandma was just about to go I was driving back home, thinking that that would be the last time I saw her, although I saw her again the next day just before she went. I had an urge to change the channel on the radio and just as I did the song by The Pretenders, Hymn to Her came on. I had listened to that song before but never as carefully as that day.

Let me inside you
Into your room
Ive heard its lined
With the things you dont show
Lay me beside you
Down on the floor
Ive been your lover
From the womb to the tomb
I dress as your daughter
When the moon becomes round
You be my mother
When everythings gone

....

Keep beckoning to me
From behind that closed door
The maid and the mother
And the crone thats grown old

It was the message from the old religion: the maid, the mother and the crone. All of the stages of womanhood and Mother Nature, and the cycles of life.

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

Now, when I hear that song I think of my Grandma, but also all of those bigger, universal messages.

But the radio message from my Mum, which I again heard by being compelled to switch radio stations as I was driving up to her place, after having been told that she had passed away suddenly, was Eric Clapton's Tears from Heaven, the song he wrote about the loss of his son. That wasn't the amazing bit, though.   A couple of months later, on my birthday, I was having a terrible, terrible day. She always used to phone me in the morning on my birthday and this was the first time ever that she wasn't going to do that. I had a very busy day, teaching at one campus, driving without a meal break to the next, then driving again to the next without a break.

At the last class of the day I decided to take them, a motley group of mostly boisterous young men doing a pre-apprenticeship course in horticulture, up to the computer room because I wasn't holding it together very well that day. So I told them to pack up and move to the other room.

One fairly quiet young man was still packing up after all the others had left the room and I waited until he was ready. As he picked up his belongings, and without looking at me, he started to sing Tears in Heaven. Just one verse, and then he went out of the room.
I don't know whether it was a coincidence or whether he was psychic, and if so, if he knew he was psychic, or if the song just popped into his head and he just followed his instincts that day. The way he seemed to be slow in packing up his belongings seemed deliberate to me or maybe he was just "being told" and he couldn't resist the urge. I don't know. But I know that my Mother was giving me a message on my birthday.

I am so grateful to that young man for giving in to his instincts and singing that song. I never heard him singing before or after that day, either. Logically, if he saw how distressed I was in the classroom he could have deducted that I was in a grieving state and Tears in Heaven is a logical choice to sing, but there are plenty of other possible choices too, so I prefer to believe that it was a specific message.


Generally, I will often get a quick visit soon after someone's passing, and then, 3-6 months later, after they have recovered their normal healthy self I will often get a visit again which is a bit more of a chat.   to tell me how they are getting on. Often this will be in a dream, but sometimes it is a presence with messages. My Aunt was a week late for her funeral. She had had a stroke so it took her a week to realise she had gone. I dreamt about her funeral the following week, on the same day of the week as her funeral, and she was standing in the church looking at everyone and realising that she had gone. I

My Grandma, on the other hand, was standing on the dais at her funeral, with one hand on her coffin, looking intently at everyone's faces, alternating between looking bemused at how much love we were sending her (she didn't seem to realise how strong a presence she is to everyone in our family) and looking at everyone as if she wanted to imprint our faces on her memory for the last time so that she could hold us in her heart when she left.

Helen