Then my mother died. Like me, she had believed that nothing made sense if death was an end rather than a new beginning ? and I soon had cause to question whether she was giving me the proof I needed.
On three consecutive nights between her death and cremation, at 8 pm each time, while I was sitting with my husband in a room with a glazed door, I saw a figure flit from the foot of the stairs into the hall. Assuming that one of our small daughters, recently tucked up in bed, had come downstairs to fetch something from the kitchen I investigated. But nobody was there and ? the first time it occurred ? I thought I must have been imagining things or that there had been a trick of the light. When it happened the second time I was puzzled ? and on the third occasion my husband (an atheist resolute in his belief that everything ends on death), to whom I had said nothing, went to investigate. He returned to the room saying ?The girls are both in bed; I checked.? Then he said: ?When your mother visited she always kissed them goodnight around this time, didn't she?? I agreed that she did and nothing else was said for the time being.
Mother having died on 18 December there was quite a gap before her cremation on the 27th and during this period I received and made many ?phone calls. By the telephone table was a rubber plant that stood on the floor and reached right to the ceiling. You probably know that rubber plants normally shed their leaves quite seldom and just one at a time, from the bottom, as a single leaf turns brown and eventually drops off.
Not in this instance! Virtually every time I answered the ?phone or made a call between those two dates a shiny green leaf detached itself haphazardly from the stem of the plant and wafted across the hall to land some distance away. I would watch, fascinated, as each leaf behaved similarly and yet so very uncharacteristically. There was no explaining it, to the best of my knowledge, through logic.
By the morning of Mother's cremation not a single leaf was left on the desolate stem. My husband (not normally the most observant of men) looked where I was looking and asked: ?Didn't your mother give you that plant??
I was surprised that he remembered as she had given it to me years previously, when it stood no more than a foot high. I responded that she had and the subject has never been raised since. But the plant's strange behavior was obviously food for thought ? even for him!
Do you have an opinion on what was happening and on whether I had received a message from beyond the grave?
