I’ve never been in the room when someone died, but if I ever am and something happens like in this report, sent to us by Michael from Massachusetts, I may need therapy. Or maybe a priest.
“My story relates to a religious experience that happened in my family a few years ago.
My great-aunt Oonagh was a very religious woman. She emigrated from Belfast, Ireland, which was and still is one of the most deeply divided cities in terms of the Protestant vs. Catholic war in Ireland. She was a devout Catholic — went to mass almost every day, wore a scapula, kept tons of holy cards in her purse, the whole bit. Every day, she’d tell her kids ‘Go with God’ before leaving the house, which I know they found annoying (she was my mom’s aunt). None of us in the family are half as into religion as she was.
Anyway,when she was 87, her Alzheimer’s became much more pronounced and her doctors said that she only had between 8 and 10 weeks to live. She had been in a nursing home for a while and was lucid sometimes but really out of it at other times.
Me and my family tried to visit her as much as possible in the home, esp. when we knew that her time was limited. In the last two weeks or so of her life,we would try to have someone in her room at all times so she wasn’t alone when she passed.
Several times when me or my mom was there, she would go to sleep, wake up, and talk to us a little bit about seeing the Virgin Mary and her angels. We just figured she was dreaming and even though she was really sick and out of it, she somehow sensed that she would soon pass away. The closer she got to the day she died, the more frequent these comments would be. She would sometimes wake up in a complete state of panic saying the Virgin needed her right away.
She finally died on August 15, which coincidentally is the Feast Day for the Virgin Mary. That was weird enough, but just moments before she passed away, she looked right at my mother and it was as though the cloudiness of her usual mood/expression (she got confused, frustrated and angry real easily because of the Alzheimer’s) had totally lifted away. She said she remembered how pretty my mother looked in her white dress the day my mom was confirmed in the Catholic Church and how proud she was of her that day. She went on to tell her that we didn’t need to worry about her because she would be with Our Lady and that the Blessed Virgin said she wouldn’t be sick anymore in heaven. My great-aunt was completely calm and serene and was as lucid as she was when she was healthy.
When she passed, my mom said she just closed her eyes and went to sleep. The moment she closed her eyes, though, her room became filled with an overpowering smell of flowers. My mom was slightly startled and looked around the room … she didn’t remember anyone bringing her aunt flowers because Oonagh didn’t like them and thought they were wasteful. She looked around for a big air vent that may have brought the smell in and there wasn’t one visible. The smell became really intense — almost kind of nauseating, she said — so she left the room because she had to find a nurse, anyway.
When she came back in the room, the smell was just as strong, and (caution: this is the most weird part of this story) my great-aunt was somehow sitting straight up in bed and her face looked like it did when she was in her 40s or 50s. It looked like she had backward-aged about 40 years, which completely freaked my mother and the nurse out. They just kind of stared at her for a while and finally left the room so the staff could take care of the body.
The extra weird part of this story, aside from how she died on Mary’s Feast Day, and that Oonagh somehow bolted upright after death (!), is that the flower smell maybe had to do with her strong belief in God and the Blessed Virgin. Mary is associated with roses and after doing some research on this, I found out that other people with strong religious beliefs (primarily they have been in developing countries) have smelled roses like this when someone died.
Anyway, who knows, but I thought I’d share this to see if others out there have heard of this phenomena.”
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December 1st, 2007 at 5:23 pm |
My daughter told us about this story while we were eating dinner this evening and I learned that when my husband’s grandfather passed, that he had a moment of lucidity before dying and said something about the Virgin Mary. When my maternal grandfather died, the same thing happened. Weird…we’ve been married 20 years and never knew this about one another.