Spirit Smoke, Angel Birds and Dreams

When you reach a certain age, you begin hearing the stories.

A friend’s loved one passes, followed by a remarkable, unexplainable occurrence. The experience is conveyed. The listener nods and, depending on the story, responses are offered.

“Huh,” is a response I’m prone to, as messages from the beyond are shared and processed.

Before my father died, I had come across my share of stories. From feathers and flashing lights, to distant music and familiar smells, I had heard  of post-mortem synchronicities that were hard to explain away. On a freelance assignment for a regional newspaper, for example, I interviewed a couple who had lost their teenage son in a tragic accident. In his memory, they’d started a fundraiser in support of local charity. As I talked with them about the event, they shared they felt his presence everywhere. He’d been sending them signs, rainbows mostly they believed, starting with the day of his funeral.

Driving home after the interview, the conversation ran through my mind. I came to the only logical conclusion I could muster: the grieving mind must search for comfort anywhere it can. Who could fault brokenhearted parents for seeing what they needed, for holding fast to any sign of their child, real or imagined?

As my father lay dying in a quiet critical care room, such stories were far from my mind. Flanking his bedside like watchful soldiers, my mother and I were on a mission to protectively usher him to the Next Phase. He had thrown in the proverbial towel after decades of deterioration from illness and injury. The final straw was a burst appendix and emergency surgery. Upon awaking, he’d been told the news: years of prednisone treatment for an autoimmune condition had made his skin so fragile sutures wouldn’t hold. His wound had been packed and he’d have to be shipped to a rehabilitative facility.

When he discovered he wouldn’t be returning home, back to his worn recliner and the familiar comfort of his own space, he made a final decision.

“I’m done,” he said firmly to the surgeon. “Unplug everything. Stop the medicines. I’m done.”

He was resolute and tired. Who could blame him?

When compassionate care was begun, my mother and I set up our posts, she on one side of the bed, me on the other. One night, as I was slumped in a chair watching the virtually soundless TV above the bed, I caught movement out of my left eye.

My mother sat with her chair pulled up close to my father. The setting sun angling through the window above her obscured my view. She was a shadowy figure with an orange glow, moving her hand back and forth above my father’s head.

“What are you doing,” I asked, wondering if a fly had somehow made its way into the room.

“Don’t you see it?” she said softly.

“See what?”

“It’s smoke. It looks like smoke.”

She stopped waving her hand and sat back. Out of the aura of dusk, I could see her face. She was smiling.

Wait, I thought. What is happening? Smoke? Had she seen a haze from the setting sun? Or was it, as she suggested later, my father’s spirit?

A few hours later, the nurses tell us the final moment has come. They officially declare death and move in to disconnect the monitors, quickly tending to my father’s body. By the time we exit the hospital, it’s after midnight. Exhausted and in tears, we head back to my parents’ house to let the finality of what has transpired sink in. We share a strong drink, then close our eyes; my mother sleeps on the couch, as I toss and turn in my father’s chair.

The next day, after calls are made, we have coffee in the kitchen and take in the view of my father’s bird feeders. He would fill them with a variety of seed and enjoy the winged visitors that came for the banquet. His favorite was the oriole, an elusive beauty he tried attracting numerous times with little luck. Leaving pieces of orange and other fruit on the ground improved his chances of seeing one, he said, but that didn’t work often enough.

In the months prior to my father’s passing, unbeknownst to me, my parents discussed death. Would he send a sign, my mother asked him? My father agreed and decided, if such things were possible, he would send an oriole. No one else knew of this agreement.

Back in the kitchen the day after his death, I am seated at the table with my back to the window. Visitors have come and we are talking and reminiscing. Four of us sit around the table, sipping coffee and allowing the blanket of grief to settle.

My mother, who is facing the window, jumps up midsentence, nearly spilling her cup.

“There’s the oriole!” she yells excitedly. “That’s Jim!”

In the split second I think she has lost her mind she moves to the window and recounts the story of the oriole. Teary eyed, the three women stand in awe of what is unfolding: The bird has flown to the feeder directly in front of the window, then back to the nearby pine tree. As if to be certain it has captured our attention, it flies back to the feeder, pauses, then, once seen, flies away. My mother and the women in her kitchen are laughing and crying.

I watch them and wonder if they have tipped over. I am so tired and cynical. “I’ll believe that bird is dad when I see the sign Jim says hi!” I say with a laugh.

I want to believe but don’t know how. Do you just decide to believe in signs and symbols, then start seeing them? Is there an internal knowing that suddenly surfaces and, despite logic and reason, you come to understand that yes, this is it, this is real?

In the weeks after the bird visit, I have three dreams of my father. They are vivid and clear and each comes with a distinct message: a joke about his death (so him), a message for my brother and, on the weekend his nephew passes, an explanation that he is busy; he is taking on a new role.

I have no idea if these experiences are “real” or if they mean anything beyond the conjuring of a vivid imagination. But there’s no escaping the feeling I am left with; I cannot doubt the clarity of the messages or the comfort they bring.

I consider the possibility that spirit smoke, angel birds and dreams are my rainbows; a grieving mind finding comfort wherever it can.

Years later, I find how I characterize these experiences no longer matters. If these are gifts, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll simply appreciate them for what they are.

Either way, my father always loved a good story. This one would be sure to elicit a response.

“Huh,” he’d say. “That’s a good one.”