I’ve often written that the night my own father died, he appeared in my room. He started with an apology for years of deliberate cruelty, we talked and argued, and at the very end he gave this terrifying scream and disappeared. But that wasn’t an NDE. I was well and truly alive.
However I went to visit an uncle in hospital who was dying of cancer (later same year as my father died incidentally). As he lay there, under the influence of pain killing drugs, he suddenly woke up. Rather out of it, he said “Grandma’s over there, Robert!” and he pointed weakly towards the wall / ceiling junction.
I think he sensed I was a bit sceptical (I was an atheist) back then, and he cried “Oh, she is, you know!” Then he fell back. But after my own experience on the night my father died, I don’t really have any reason not to believe him.
When I was about 15 I went to visit a great-aunt who was dying in a nursing home. When I got there she was on her knees praying. She didn’t seem to open her eyes, but she said, “Always be good, Robert!” And this strange sense there was something in the room with us at the time. She was a rather saintly woman.
My old pastor once told us a story about an old parishioner of his when he was a very new pastor, in a north Queensland town somewhere. He went to see her in hospital where she was dying. She was ravaged by disease, but prayed for him. Suddenly she sat up in bed, reached out towards the far wall, cried out, “I’m coming Jesus!” and then fell back dead. He said her face lit up just before she died, and she looked like a young girl. In his words, “It was an eye-opener for a young pastor!”
I unexpectedly found a reference to this same incident years later on the net in the form of an e-book about the mission somewhere near Mossman where this must have happened. I was just looking for any references about my old pastor, and I chanced up this to my surprise.
The Passing of Isabella Hetherington
On August 31st 1946, Isabella Hetherington passed away away in Mossman hospital at the age of 75 years. Ethel Vale was with her when she died. Ps. Easton was in Brisbane on Mission business and a Brisbane Presbyterian minister, who was a Methodist minister in the north, the Rev. Robert Missenden conducted her funeral.
*“She was a beautiful woman with snowy white hair down to her waist. I was supposed to pray for her, but she prayed for me. I was with her when she died. I had read about what happened in books, but this happened before my eyes. She sat up in bed and said, ‘Lord Jesus. I am coming.’ Then she lay back and was gone.” (Hunt, 1978). *
These were not NDE’s but I don’t have much trouble some dying people are given distinct hints of the next life before they go there.
For someone to put this incident in an e-book, The incident must have made a deep impression on the pastor, and through him on the author of the e-book.
