Opening Heaven's Door

I had no idea there was this kept-hidden world all around me

- Patricia Pearson

MY FATHER DIED UNEXPECTEDLY OF cardiac arrest in his bed in the spring of 2008. He was 80. The next day, we all got the phone call. But my sister Katharine, 100 miles away in Montreal, Canada, received her message differently.

“It was about 4:30 am,” she said at his funeral, “and I couldn’t sleep, as usual, when all of a sudden I began having this amazing experience. For the next two hours I felt nothing but joy and healing.”

She sensed a presence in her bedroom. “I felt hands on my head, and experienced vision after vision of a happy future.” Unaware that our father had died the night before, she described her experience to her elder son the next morning, and wrote about it in her diary.

We were in shock. Had Katharine had a vision? My sister wasn’t prone to spiritual experiences. Stress she was familiar with, as the mother of two teenagers. Laughter she loved. Fitness of any kind. Fantastic intellect, fluent in three languages. But she hadn’t been paying much attention, in essence, to God.

Later, I would learn that this sort of experience when someone has died is startlingly common. Families shelter their knowledge like a delicate heirloom. At the time, I only understood what a gift this was for Katharine, who was about to face her own death, from breast cancer.

Just two months after Dad died, Katharine was moved to a hospice. In her final ten days, she spoke little, yet seemed profoundly content.