Hattie Edmonds
If angels are real, what else have we got wrong?
Posted on: Wed 01-Apr-15 19:10:08
(122 comments )
'Angels? Reality or a load of old tosh?' was the original title for the Gransnet blog post about the possible existence of angels, and when I wrote it, I didn't expect for a millisecond that it would get such a massive response. The thread has been running for over five months now and still the extraordinary stories are winging their way in.
So, recently I sent an email around my friends to see if they'd had any similarly inexplicable experiences. Within forty eight hours my inbox was jammed, but for obvious reasons of space I've had to select just two from the dozens of replies.
First is Sophie, who was incredibly close to her mother and was finding it very difficult to cope after her death. When some friends invited her and her family for a week's holiday in a place called Silver Island in Northwest Canada, she was unsure of whether to go so soon after the funeral, but eventually she accepted.
One morning, she woke feeling particularly sad and set out to row across the lake to Silver Island. On the way there, she was suddenly filled with a sense of peace, feeling that her mother was "somehow very close". Arriving back at the house and still feeling that her mother was very much with her, she went into the kitchen and there on the breakfast table was a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. She picked it up and it fell open at a photo of her mother along with a full-page obituary.
To this day, Sophie has no idea why an obituary of her mother, Simone Mirman, should appear in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. Granted, she had been a very talented milliner who had lived in France and once made hats for the royal family, but was that enough to merit an entire page along with a photo?
But if we dare for a moment to believe that angels really do exist, what else about life - and death - might we need to rethink?
"I’m a very rational person," said Sophie, "but I know it was a message from my mother… her way of saying goodbye."
And then there's Diana, a mate from my yoga class, who described an incident from seven years ago, when she was driving with her then-husband along the motorway at night. He’d had a bit to drink and had asked her to stop so he could have a pee. She told him it was too dangerous, but he insisted so she eventually gave in and pulled over onto the hard shoulder, whereupon he jumped out of the car, weaving across the motorway towards the other side.
Diane raced after him and was halfway there, still in the middle of the second motorway lane when she saw a pair of lorry headlights hurtling straight towards her. It was then that she blacked out. When she 'woke up', she was standing in her garden back in London. Family and friends were gathered both outside the house and inside, although nobody was saying hello to her. So she pushed her way into the house, to the sitting room, in the centre of which was a coffin. She walked over and peered inside.
Staring down at the body laid out, she saw it was the exact double of her. At this point, the eyes of the 'other' Diane snapped open and she saw the whole story of her life playing out in front of her, like a film. She felt herself being born (a very visceral experience, apparently), saw herself as a child walking to school with her best friend, as a teenager, then as a twenty-something in her first job, right up the present day. When the film ended, she heard herself say "I am going to be thirty six in ten days time, what have I got to show for my years?"
Then suddenly, the 'real' Diane was awake again and standing on the motorway. But this time she wasn't in the middle anymore. "It was as if someone had physically moved me seven or eight meters, back onto the hard shoulder. Yet the lorry’s headlights were in exactly same position as they had been before. Seconds later it thundered by, missing me by meters.
"I still can’t work out how I could have moved that distance in what could only have been a split second," she says, "all I know is that the experience made me completely change my life."
Several years ago, I would have thought such stories were simply the result of over-active imaginations. But now, at the magical age of 51, I’ve started to feel differently. With the anecdotal evidence growing, it’s not quite so easy to brush aside anymore. But if we dare for a moment to believe that angels really do exist, what else about life - and death - might we need to rethink?
Hattie Edmonds' first novel Cinema Lumiere is out now and available from Amazon.
