I started thinking about the day and all of the memories people had wanted to share with me. I started talking out aloud to my father, saying I hoped that he enjoyed the service and the send off. I needed to know I was right and it was what he had wanted. I suddenly found myself asking him to give me a sign if he was happy and enjoyed witnessing his friends talking to me about his life. The guilt of causing a temporary rift between my mother and myself was oppressive, because she didn’t deserve to feel hurt about anything. If anyone had walked in at that moment, they would have thought I had lost the plot, I understand that, but it just came pouring out. I was leaning over the coffee table at the time, trying to retrieve something from my make-up bag. All of a sudden I felt a weight on my lower back, just above my hip, two distinct pressures about five inches apart – too real to ignore. I gingerly turned around, expecting to see Tiggy on the chair behind me, having put his front paws on my back to attract my attention and I didn’t want to unbalance him. I was honestly shocked to see that he was peering at me from the top of a roll of carpet over in the corner! Even as I looked at him totally stunned, I could still feel the after effects of the pressure above my hip – in the way one would if someone grabs you firmly and the sensation remains after they let go. I instantly knew what it was.
My father would always hold open the door for ladies to pass through ahead of him. Often, with females he knew, he would place a guiding hand gently but firmly on the lower back, to guide them through. It was something he instinctively did and was a throw-back to much more genteel times.
I realised instantly that my father had given me a sign in his own, special way. What was one of the saddest days of my life was suddenly filled with a real sense of having made him happy. Even in that dingy, muddly room I felt this overwhelming sense of ‘relief’ and ‘well-being’. That my father had been able to see and hear what was going on and that I really had been able to do one last special thing for him, meant so much to me. It wasn’t my first psychic experience, although I was still in denial and ‘filing’ episodes away in the back of my consciousness, but it was the first time I had felt something tangibly physical. Was I scared? No, of course not, it was my father saying ‘thank you’ to me, there was nothing to be scared about.
This was June 2004, the beginning of my journey experiencing ‘contact’ from my father. On this occasion I was the only one to ‘feel’ it; as time went on I gained a witness – someone who started out being an even greater sceptic than I had been initially. This series of articles documents how two sceptics then became two believers, this is a part of a much longer story I wrote immediately after my beloved mother’s death in 2009……