Premonitions of One's Own Death Are Not Always Accurate Immediately, but They Presage the Journey

Lois sat silently in a burgundy velvet chair at the empty dining room table that early Spring afternoon in 1991. She was wearing a cornflower blue dress with a prim white collar, her porcelain hands spread out flat along the grain of the mahogany wood.

The dining room and living room were open to one another, delineated by archways and a change from carpet to tile. I was curled up with a book in a comfortable armchair in the living room, keeping one eye and an ear on my mother-in-law.

A major stroke had taken down this brilliant, tough woman several months earlier. Once she was released from the hospital, she came home to live with Buck and me, to continue her recuperation.

"Well." I raised my head as Lois spoke.

"Lois?" I called to her. "Do you need something?"

"Today's the day," she said, leaning heavily on her elbows toward the table top, her fine, wavy silver hair shifting like falling water.

I was on my feet and reached her in seconds.

"The day for what?" I asked, touching her shoulder lightly.

Lois twisted her head up to look at me directly. "It's time," she said, her fingers splaying in an explanatory movement that suggested I was a simple child. I watched as the arthritic Heberden's nodes on her fingers glowed pink with gathered blood, ineffectual warm stars.

The microscopic anxiety spiders that sleep in my ears woke up and began running all over my head. I couldn't help myself. "Time for what?" I asked, trying to find an inner calm.

"Well, dear," Lois began. "It happens to everybody. Today's my day. It's time for me to die."

Before I could protest, Lois stood up abruptly, looking down from her 5 foot 10 inch height onto my 64 inches, and said, "Will you take me to the bedroom so I can lie down?"

We walked slowly down the hall to her room. I helped her sit on the bed while I took off her shoes. I fluffed up two pillows, eased her down and stretched out her legs. Lois folded one hand over the other on her chest and closed her eyes.

"Can I get you anything?" I asked.

"No, Twitchy Baby," she said, calling me by an affectionate nickname, "but you had better call Buck."

I reached Buck at his office and explained that his mother believed she was about to die. He hung up to come home and I went back into Lois's bedroom to check her blood pressure. She had fallen asleep and seemed to be breathing normally. Her blood pressure was right in the circle of where it ought to be. Other than her words to me, there was no outward clue that she was in any physical distress.

Buck and I sat together by the bed and watched her sleep for more than an hour, trying to decide whether we should take her to the hospital. Suddenly, Lois's blue eyes snapped open, she gave us both a look, and then sighed deeply and said, "Well, I guess I may as well get up and eat some supper."

Lois's true time came in June of 1995. In the five months before she died, I was witness to her extraordinary dreams and visions. Lois gradually seemed to be less confused, but more strange.

During this time, one day we were laughing together about some of her dreams and hallucinations. She said, "I sure do have a lot of miracles around me!"

I agreed then, and it is even clearer now, from the vantage point of almost fourteen years past.

The week Lois died, she talked to me about her late husband, Earl. "He is just growing and growing," she said,"and I am shrinking all the time."

I said, "It sounds like you feel you have a lot of catching up to do."

She smiled. "Yes! I sure do."

The day before her death, when she could still talk a little, Lois held my hand and said, "Twitchy Baby, it's time for me to go on. Sometimes you just have to let go."

But, you know, I'm not so sure Lois was right about that. I'm not so sure at all.