The Call Home

The Call Home

I am a true believer in the paranormal and the study of events outside the realm of what we consider normal. This is a fascinating subject for me, though I can only claim maybe three experiences that would fall into that category.

I was just 14 years old when on a trip back from a friend’s house my mom became ill. As we arrived home about a half-hour later it was obvious that she was in great pain and endured throughout the night until the doctor arrived at the door and climbed the steps to the bedroom. It wasn’t long before the ambulance arrived and the paramedics carried the gurney down the steps through the door that I held open for them. As my mom looked up at me, she said, “Take care of your brother.” I knew then that this was not just a bad stomach ache.

It was a sleepless night for me on the lumpy living room couch; waiting for my dad and oldest brother to get back from the hospital to tell me that things were ok. My brother walked through the door first and said, ”I knew you’d be awake”. Then the devastating news, my mom had passed away during the night from complications of a perforated ulcer.

What does a 14-year-old do, when he loses his mom. I hated sitting in the funeral parlor staring at the casket for three days with my mom’s lifeless body in it.

The day of the funeral came and my mother’s ashes were out in a family niche in a mausoleum In North Bergen, NJ; what seemed like 100 miles away.

I wanted things back to as normal as possible as fast as possible so I donned my baseball uniform and headed for Third Ward Park for our scheduled baseball game. As I arrived the coach looked at me with surprise and said that he didn’t expect to see me. He rearranged the lineup so I could pitch and watched as I pitched us to victory once again. He looked at me as I came off the mound after the last output his arm around me and said, “you are one amazing kid”.

My mom never saw me play, but upon going through her stuff we found every box score and article ever written about me from my little league days to the present.

My mom, whose name is Marie, was adopted as a child and really only knew her adopted mother who lived with us until my parents felt that a nursing home could better care for her. We often visited her, but she rarely recognized us and could not hold a conversation in the present.

The time came for our trip to visit her at the nursing home and try to get through to her that her daughter had passed away. As we arrived at the nursing home that was in a beautiful setting of pine trees, grassy hills, and lots of flowers, we saw my grandmother in her usual place; rocking in her rocking chair on the porch looking out over the hills.

As we approached her there seemed to be some recognition of who we were and as we sat down she started the conversation before we could get a word out of our mouths. She looked over at me and said “ Marie is up there on the hill calling to me, she wants to play”. My dad and I looked at each other and wrote this off as another one of my grandma’s memories from the past, where she now lived.

This would not be anything special or even come close to fitting into the paranormal category if it ended there.

That night my grandma died in her sleep.

I truly believe that what my grandma described was really my mom telling her it was time to come home.