My father-in-law passed away on January 27, sometime during the night as he slept, in a nursing home in New Jersey. He had been in the home for the past 18 months and his death came as no surprise, although a death is always a surprise it seems.
I will not go on into a eulogy at this point, as I will be setting up a separate site as a memorial, but instead I’d like to pass on a little story which seems to have significance for this event.
I checked with my mother-in-law later in the day to see if the nursing home could give a time of death, but there were, of course, no monitors and all they could say was that he passed away sometimes before they had gone in to try and wake him. She received the call about 8:00 in the morning.
My wife stayed home and waited for my daughter to return from her exam at high school that morning, and when she told her, my daughter was distraught. Here are the events that occurred the evening before.
I woke up at 12:45 a.m. and came downstairs, not an unusual event, I am always waking up in the middle of the night and coming down to watch some TV until I fall asleep again. I reached up to get a cereal bowl, a nightly routine, when two bowls came crashing down, hitting me in the head right before hitting the counter top, smashing, and falling to the floor scattering broken china all about the room and me. This could have woken up anyone, but I stood quite still waiting to hear stirring sounds before I started to clean up and heard none. I was trying to get my fruit and cereal before going to watch Ghost Hunters, a nightly, when possible, event. I usually, if I can get to the 1:00 a.m. show, watch for about 15 minutes and fall asleep waiting for something to happen. It’s usually a boring show made exciting, as we all wait in anticipation for anything to happen but it never or seldom does.
My daughter woke up at 12:46 a.m., having just had an upsetting dream. She was with our family in my father-in-law’s nursing home when my other daughter was going to try and find her grandfather, whose room had been moved. (This had not really happened but was planned in real life.)
My daughter told her not to go up front to find the new room as their grandfather had not been moved and was right here in this room. However, when she went to go to the room, she was confronted by a sitting figure, a grim reaper sitting outside the room dressed in black with a black hood. Then she woke up!
As I said, “I checked with my mother-in-law later in the day to see if the nursing home could give a time of death, but there were, of course, no monitors and all they could say was that he passed away sometimes before they had gone in to try and wake him. She received the call about 8:00 in the morning.”
I assured her that to the best of my knowledge, my father-in-law had passed at about 12:46 a.m………
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