sistawendy | Writer's Block: Paranormal activity

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I've only had one supernatural experience. It wasn't an encounter so much as a vision: I saw my father's death from 3000 miles away, about an hour after it happened.

August 26th, 1995 was a Saturday, eight days before my wedding. I had spoken to my father that morning. My father said he was hoping to get through life without wearing a tux, but it was my wedding, and I insisted.

I first learned of his death when my mother called that afternoon, and as soon as I heard her jagged intake of breath, I knew something was very wrong. He had been edging the driveway with the manual tool, she said, when he had a heart attack. I knew which tool she meant: it's basically a small, rotating drum on a long handle, with blades on one edge of the drum. It takes a lot of elbow grease.

As she talked, the vision flashed in my mind of my father falling to his knees on the concrete driveway, clutching his chest with an expression of mortal terror on his face. A second or two later he fell forward onto the concrete. There was no one around to see it; he was discovered a few minutes later by Strawberry Blonde Sister.

Most of the details of the vision match what my family told me: he was badly bruised from falling on the concrete, which was why my sister & mother opted for an open casket funeral. Any doctor will tell you it takes several seconds to die of a heart attack, which is plenty of time to realize what's happening.

There's one detail, though, that no one told me about. When I arrived in Florida, my mother asked me to finish edging the driveway because people were going to come over. (Dad used to joke that he'd get me to do yard work in the Florida heat one more time.) I could see where he'd died from where the edging stopped. It was exactly where I'd seen it in the vision.

After I was done with the manual edging tool, Mom threw it into the trash.

It was an awful experience, but I feel somehow privileged to have had it.