Loose Leaf Notes

In November of 2014, I visited my elderly mother in my hometown of Hull, Massachusetts to help with her care. She’s been physically disabled for four years now and has hired caregivers from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I’ve helped with her care on several occasions before, but this was a trip I had been resisting. It felt so hard and heavy. I wasn’t sure I could muster the energy to make it, but the caregivers and some of my siblings were feeling burned out and needed some fresh input, I was told.

The trip turned out better than I expected. I met several new babies in the family, and the time with my mother was sweet. I asked her if she had a good day and what was good about it each evening at bedtime. Sometimes she would name a family member who visited or mention a good meal she liked. Other times, she would adamantly say, “Nothing!” There was nothing about the day that she liked.

During the visit, I had an honest conversation with a sibling I had been concerned about. I talked with caregivers and listened to their concerns.  I was happy to see my sister who is under cancer treatment and doing well. I also visited a brother and we had a loving connection, the first in a long time. There had been hard feelings between us because he had reached a low point and was drinking heavily in the years that he lived with my mother. Now he was on his own and sober.

My dad, who dealt with alcohol addiction and was a WWII vet who suffered from PTSD, died in 2005. Whenever I’m home in Hull, I stay in his room, and this trip was no different. The morning after I visited my brother, as I was getting dressed, I walked across the floor of my dad’s room and heard what I thought was a motor running. It sounded like the tremble of a fan humming and seemed to be coming from the dresser, the one that held the photo of my dad as a young boy that I had just been staring at. Did my footsteps turn something on? Was it running inside one of the drawers?

I followed the sound with my ear and was shocked to discover that the plastic holy water bottle that my family had used in the hospital before my dad died was vibrating. There were lots of bottles on top of the dresser, but only the empty holy water bottle was shaking. I smiled, picked it up and said, “Hi Dad.”

But as I was walking away, I heard it again! I followed my ear and traced the sound to a second plastic holy water bottle! It was obscured behind a couple of large perfume bottles, and I didn’t know it was there. By this time I was floored! I picked up the bottle in disbelief and felt a rush go through me. I felt as though my dad was thanking me for being there, for seeing my brother, for being with my mother and understanding that everyone was doing the best they can.

I’m not always a “happy” person, but I was happy all that day. I felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted. I might be one of the biggest skeptics in the family, skeptical of angels and traditional ideas about God. But, in this case, I couldn’t easily deny that my father’s spirit was speaking to me. Even so, I spent a lot of time trying to make those bottles vibrate again; not so much because I wanted to call up my dad again, but because I wanted to understand how it could have happened.

That’s not the end of the holy water bottle story. The next morning, one of my sister’s came over. We talked about the paperwork we had to file for the VA (Aid and Attendance) because my mother’s reverse mortgage money that was paying for her care was running out. I had spoken with a local VA representative and found out that we would need our father’s military discharge paper. We knew it existed but that it would be really hard to locate because no one knew where it was. It could have been buried anywhere.

I went out to do errands while my sister stayed with my mother, and when I came back she had more of the holy water bottle story to tell. After hearing my part of the story, she wanted to spend some time in my dad’s bedroom and see if she could feel some of that burden lightening. She went to his room and, while looking at the bottles, had an unexplained desire to the open the drawer right below them. Inside, on the top of a stack of unrelated papers was my father’s military discharge paper!

Now some think that the location of the discharge paper was what he was trying to tell us all along. Maybe some even thought he put it there. We all knew that my dad wouldn’t rest if his military service couldn’t be proved. I knew I had a transcendent experience.

On Sundays, most of the family comes over for dinner and to spend time with our mother. When they did, I took them all upstairs to my dad’s room and reenacted the story. There were hugs, an uproar of laughter and pictures being snapped. I think we all felt that our burdens were lightened that day and that we were blessed by my dad and his holy water.

_________Read more about my dad from a WVTF Memorial Day radio essay, Let Me Clue You in About My Father, HERE.