An Angel By My Side: Amazing True Stories of the Afterlife

‘Is that you Eric?’ I asked out loud. The lights flickered on cue in the living room and I laughed. He had announced his arrival in the usual way.

‘Flash the lights once for yes, and twice for no,’ I joked. The lights flicked once more. I swear we had a five-minute conversation using the yes/no system before I felt his energy pull away! I can’t prove it to you, no one was physically there – but I knew it was him! He’d cheered me up a lot! I knew then it was time for bed. I needed to ‘sleep on it’, as they say.

The next day I decided that the problem with my shop job was that I needed to not be there. I decided to leave. I needed to concentrate on my writing. Writing was what I wanted to do for a living and I was just getting more and more frustrated spending my day doing something I didn’t want to do. The following day I handed in my notice. The shop owner seemed very upset with me but I meant nothing malicious by it, it was a personal decision only. I had to follow my own dreams, I needed to be elsewhere.

The next few days were difficult at work. There was a serious tension in the air but I was sad to leave the staff who had become very good friends. I’d been at the shop for a few months – I actually began working for the owner before the shop even opened. Initially, I’d been looking for a part-time job so that I could still meet people whilst I wrote from home. I didn’t want to be isolated totally, and the job in an alternative/new age store seemed the perfect choice.

As the weeks went by I’d ended up doing more and more hours in the shop. I needed to be home to meet the girls after school but due to lack of staff I found myself having to work much later than agreed. As the most experienced member of staff, I became the shop manager by default. I was now beginning to resent the whole thing. I’d only ever wanted to work a couple of days but now my part-time day job was taking over my life and I was beginning to hate it.

Had Eric picked up on my misery when he came and flickered my living room lights that night? I’d wondered whether our relatives on the other side could zoom in on our strong emotions like a distress call; I’ve since discovered that they do.

I had two more days’ notice to work, but when I woke up the following morning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go in that day, but what could I do? I really did feel ill, but felt guilty, too, that I should be working my last two days.

I looked skywards and sighed. ‘Angels? Can anyone help me?’

I had no idea who I was talking to in the seemingly empty room but I felt sure that someone, somewhere in the Universe would hear my silent cry!

‘If I’m not meant to go into work then I need a big sign and I need it now!’

The phone rang immediately. Seriously – it rang the moment the words left my lips. It was a good friend, a local Reiki healing teacher and she needed my help.

‘Jacky, I’ve had someone let me down for my class. Would you be able to come over? I just need someone to lie on a couch so that my students can practise healing on them. Oh, and I always do a vegetarian home-cooked lunch. You’d be doing me a great favour,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve done Reiki I and II before but I thought you might enjoy doing it again.’

I laughed but she’d no idea why. Let me see … go into work or lie on a couch and be ‘healed’? I had my answer. Had the angels stepped in, or was it Uncle Eric intervening? I didn’t mind either way.

As it turned out, my friend needed my help for both days of her two-day course, so I decided to join in the Reiki class, and then later I did the next course and the next. I was ready for a change of direction. Was this yet another coincidence? Yes, I’d done the healing course before but never had I needed healing more than I needed it at that moment.

We always feel stressed and depressed when we find our lives or aspects of our lives are out of control. Part of my life was out of control. This was definitely one of those times for me. The only way to move forward when we suffer from stress is to change something in our lives; to get back in control of one small aspect of it.

Of course, sometimes we can’t control the very thing which is making us depressed. If someone has died, for example, we can’t bring them back: all we can do is change the way we feel about it. It’s hard, I know.

Mourning the loss of a loved one is a natural thing to do. Some people take years to recover a normal sense of life and others may find that laughter comes again after a few months. It doesn’t mean we love them less but we deal with stress in our own way.

Mourning is about feelings of loss for the time we never had together. Moving on is about celebrating the wonderful life they had and the opportunity we were given to share that love for however long or short a time. I wanted to teach the message that I felt my own spiritual helpers were bringing me, but first I had to live some of the lessons myself.

Eric ‘called’a lot at that time, and although I never saw him then, it was clear that my little dog Lady could. I felt Eric come into my living room for a visit one sunny afternoon a short while later. It was that same knowing, that same feeling. Something in the very air around me had changed.

‘Is that you Eric?’ I asked the empty room.

Lady, my Lancashire Heeler, was jumping up and down in excitement and lifted herself up onto her hind legs. She was sniffing and looking at something in mid-air. What could she see? As anyone might, I checked the room for insects or some other distraction but it was clear that the excitement was for something, or someone else!

‘If that’s you Eric, get Lady to pick up her newspaper chew toy and bring it over here!’ I asked, confident of a failure.

Lady was lovely, but not the most intelligent dog in the world. I had given my spirit friend a difficult task indeed … or had I? Lady immediately ran over to her squeaky toy, then jumped back as if someone was there! She rushed at it again and picked it up before turning around and bringing it over to me and planting it proudly on the floor at my feet. Amazing!

I thought about it a lot afterwards. Had my little dog suddenly learnt a new trick? Had she at that moment understood my words? Had she been wagging her tail at some microscopic fly? No, seriously, whatever way I looked at it, the obvious solution seemed to fit better. She had seen a spirit visitor and followed their instructions rather than my own. Eric was there and although I had sensed my spirit visitor, Lady had actually seen him. I LOVED this!

I’ve had many encounters with my spirit friends and not just Eric. Eric, because he had been my uncle, was the easiest to recognize when he visited but others also came in ‘dreams’.

My first spirit visitation ‘dream’was from an old school friend. Guy had died of cancer in his twenties and it was a real tragedy. We grew up together. As soon as he appeared in the dream I immediately became lucid (I was aware that this was not a normal dream and my visitor was actually dead). Even though I was aware that my body was asleep my mind was perfectly awake. This was real, and I knew it was, even at the time.

‘Guy! How lovely to see you. Why are you here? You’re dead aren’t you?’

A short conversation followed about the fact that he had come because he could. I felt like he was testing a new skill. I chatted to my late friend in his spirit body, although I remembered none of the conversation afterwards. I asked him questions about the meaning of life – why are we here and what is our role in life? I obviously wasn’t supposed to remember the answers to those. Shame!

I remember asking him, ‘Can I pass on a message to anyone for you?’ I assumed he had visited me for some higher spiritual reason.

He just told me no, and said it was time to go. Two chairs, me and Guy, sitting in an otherwise empty room – that was it. But even then, I knew it wasn’t a normal dream. It was so real, so vivid, so different from a normal dream, and I knew I was talking to a dead person, and that it was okay to be doing so. And that’s part of the reason why a ‘dream’ visitation is used, because we accept things that we would be unable to do in normal waking life!

It was my first dream visitation but it certainly wasn’t my last.

CHAPTER 2 (#u60aa90e6-82c8-5361-b3ce-65d01de91b17)

I’m Still Here

One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.

Albert Einstein

Eric first introduced himself when he bounced in on a spirit board one afternoon. Well, actually it was a table full of felt-tip letters, A–Z, and the words ‘yes’and ‘no’ stuck around a table at the home of a local medium, but it was the same principle. My sister Debbie and I had gone along for a reading on the recommendation of a friend. I’d had readings before at psychic fairs but I’d never been very impressed. This time would be different, I knew it.

I’d never met the medium, but I’d had the strangest urge to take her some flowers. I ‘saw’something specific in my mind’s eye, a potted miniature rose. When I got to the shops I went to buy my usual white flowers but was drawn to the yellow roses. Why was I buying flowers for a woman I’d never met?

On the way over in the car, Debbie and I chatted about which of our deceased loved ones we were hoping to visit. Would any of our relatives really come and chat to us through the medium?

Perhaps our Nan would come through or maybe Mum’s lovely friend Pat who had passed just six months before, and was still very much in our minds. Wouldn’t it be great if Uncle Eric made an appearance? He was such a funny man and we missed him such a lot. We chatted excitedly about what might or might not happen, and in no time at all we pulled up outside the medium’s house.

Sandra was a small lady and she explained how she’d been ‘poorly’. She made us a cup of tea in her very tiny kitchen, and as an unexpected bonus Sandra had her friend Janice helping out for the night. It looked like we were going to have two readings for the price of one.

Embarrassed, I handed over the plant to Sandra. She seemed pleased but confused. I found myself mumbling about how I’d felt drawn to buy her the flowers but I didn’t know why. The medium explained that a dear friend of hers had always bought her yellow flowers when she’d visited. She felt that the roses were a gift from ‘spirit’. I wondered if a passing spirit had manipulated me into buying the plant or if it was a wild stretch of my imagination. Perhaps it was just me after all?

Janice waited patiently before handing Debbie and me a sheet of paper each. Each sheet had a circle drawn in the middle. We were intrigued as pots of paint sat on the table. She sat us down and had us drop splats of paint into the middle of the paper. We had no idea what we were doing or why, but it was a lot of fun. She carefully folded the paper in half and smoothed the two sides together before opening them up and giving us both a reading based on the smears of paint on the paper. I have to say that it just looked like a big smudge of colour to me but she seemed to see something else.

‘Look at the angel shape on the paper,’ said Janice (I couldn’t really see it). ‘Look, can you see, it looks like angel wings … and lots of purple, that’s a very spiritual colour.’

Hmm, interesting. She wasn’t to know that I had already started collecting angel stories with the idea that one day I might write a book. Maybe she could read something in the paint after all. How disbelieving I was in those days.

We hadn’t yet finished our tea but as we’d finished our paintings we were keen to get on with our other reading. We followed the medium and her friend upstairs to a small bedroom with a sofa, a smaller armchair and a collection of small tables; there were even chairs and a cupboard crammed into the tiny space. This was the reading room.

She looked so normal. I guess I didn’t know what to expect but if I’m honest I suppose I was a little surprised she wasn’t wearing a purple cloak with stars on it and a pointy hat. Sandra started her reading.

‘I have a woman here. She’s quite snooty, stuck up. No, that sounds rude and I feel embarrassed now that I know she can hear me say that. Sorry, love. I don’t mean stuck up, I mean posh. Oh dear … well, you know what I mean.’

We laughed and she continued.

‘She’s very well dressed and she’s showing me that she liked nice things and expensive holidays.’

We both leaned forward on the tiny sofa. This was good stuff and we looked at each other before nodding in agreement. This person sounded familiar.