(5 min read)
The other day my housemate told me of a visit from her deceased father as she napped on the sofa. I suppose to many westerners, this is a strange situation. I get it, I’ve lived a lot of my adult life as a “freethinking heathen” away from the traditions and beliefs of my ethnic heritage. However, I grew up in a house with Filipino immigrant parents. So it wasn’t all THAT bizarre as I remembered how the Filipino culture has very strong beliefs in a parallel spirit world. And I got thinking about my own experience with visitations from my own father.
This December marks 13 years since my dad passed away. It was a very snowy day, making driving extremely dangerous…. It came as a great shock when we received the news, and according to a psychic medium I visited once, he was just as shocked to find himself on the other side. Dad and I never particularly had the greatest of relationships, on the other hand it wasn’t terrible either. He was a man of few words, making his actions definitely louder. As a child when my sisters and I were causing a bit of trouble, and his heavy leather Chinelas slipped off his foot into his hand. We all knew he wasn’t messing around when he raised his arm! In the absence of words and affection, my dad was a master provider and he held his duties to the family in high regard. As part of his fatherly duties, he was always available to drive me to where I needed to go.
Mom would always talk about my dads visits to her in the human world. But he’s never visited me this way. He has come to me in my dreams, however. And it wasn’t a surprise when he visited as he was in life: the driver in the car and I was the passenger. According to one expert with the supernatural, there are three main ways to decipher the difference with a visitation and a regular dream.
Visitation dreams:
- Make you feel good and comforted.
- Often involve divine light or hyperreality.
- Involve a direct address or message from your loved one.
(Meder, Amanda. “Visitation Dreams: How You Know For Sure.” Amanda Linette Meder. Amanda Linette Meder, 28 Jan. 2014. Web.)
When I look back to his visits, it was during difficult phases in my life. I’d be feeling emotionally depleted and completing some painful life lessons. During one particularly challenging time a few years ago, he visited up to once a week for about a month. Until that point, I’d been carrying around guilt about our relationship. Because I didn’t feel right about how it was left, and at the time of his death I didn’t quite understand his expressions of love through action and not words – this was something I only realised as I got older. Growing up, I was often envious of friends who had close relationships with their parents. And I’d always wondered if I lived up to his standards. Adding insult to injury the last interaction I had with him in the human world, I had gotten annoyed that I was late for work when he was only trying to fix the car so I would get there safely. For these reasons, I decided I would try to speak to him if he visited again. When the night came, I turned to him in the car and I told him something I never said to him in real life, “I love you Dad”. And like you would imagine when seeing a heavenly being, behind him was that divine light. He had a very bright golden sunburst behind him that seemed to radiate from a point far away. Somehow saying those words helped release a lot of the negativity, guilt and confusion burdening me.
So what does this all mean? Well, I didn’t intend on making a convincing statement about how “the divine works miracles” in our lives, that’s not really my vibe. I’ve realised that as I learn to live life on my own terms, people, places and old ways fall away. This process of transformation is often very uncomfortable. And its normal loneliness hits because all we’ve known becomes foreign. As peculiar as it may sound, having visits from my father during difficult times really had provided a sense of comfort and its allowed me to forgive, moving me forward on my journey.
P.S. Yes, I moved house again. I guess old nomadic ways die hard. But I wanted to tell you, this new place I moved into has its own ghosts as I briefly mentioned at the start. But I’ll tell that story next time.
With Love, Flo xx
