My sister died of Lou Gehrig's disease at the age of 33 in 2000. She was living with my parents with her two young sons. My mother passed away of the same disease three years ago. Its a degenerative disease. Both Mom and my sister began paralysis at the feet and it crept up to their heads in three year's time, so they died unable to move anything from the neck down. Walking was the first thing to go and the thing they both longed to do for themselves.
My dad lives with my sister's two sons (whom he and Mom adopted) and 'the boys' are now 20 & 21.
My dad knows when the boys are out, and often he can hear someone upstairs walking around when no one is home, and sometimes very late at night someone is walking from room to room, stopping, and moving to the next room and he knows it is my sister from the sound of the footsteps. He thinks she is just looking in on her sons, checking on them.
Once, my uncle was over & they were watching something on TV and they turned the sound down (annoying commercial) and my uncle said to my dad, "I thought you said the boys were at work?" My dad said, "They are. Those footsteps you hear is my daughter." My uncle at first, thought Dad meant me. No, said Dad, Carrie. My uncle ran up the stairs to find the source of the footsteps, but no one was up there. Had him a little shaken, but Dad is very used to it and doesn't even give it any thought.
Not long ago, he was asleep on the couch and he kind of half-asleep glanced up, and rolled over, thinking he saw my nephew coming down the steps, and going into the kitchen, and my dad thought, out the door for school. He hollered to the kitchen, "Before you go, make sure you clean up your mess!" Not 5 min later, down comes the very same nephew (who is a spitting image of his mother, but a lot taller) He'd JUST gotten out of bed - he had not been down the steps - still wasn't even dressed for school and came down to look for clean pants in the laundry - and his brother was still upstairs in bed snoring. Dad knew it was my sister again, but this time, he actually sort of saw her. He'd wished that he had actually LOOKED rather than glancing up half asleep and shutting his eyes again.
Took my dad a few min to realize that he never heard the kitchen door open, and no voice said, "Bye Pap!" as this he usually yells to my Dad.
He has heard my mother, too, and felt her caress his face, although he's never seen her except in dreams.
I did dream of Mom just once, and in this dream she told me that I'm
not going to die of cancer. Thanks, Mom. That leaves about 3,000 other things I could die from.
Couldn't you have just told me something useful from the grave, like the Powerball numbers?