My Late Mother-in-law
A tale of a paranormal experience
In the sad, hazy hours after my husband’s mother died in 2011, I was walking across our hotel room to turn off the television we weren’t watching, when my husband, who was lying on the bed drifting in and out of sleep, sat upright and gasped. A loud wheezing sound rattled inside his chest. I asked Walter what was wrong, thinking he’d just had a nightmare. It was late August, and we were in Iowa; we’d flown in from Montana the day before. His 71-year-old mother, Millie, had collapsed at the Iowa State Fair—she’d gone with her boyfriend, John—fallen into a coma due to an encapsulated infection in her brain, and died in a Des Moines hospital. We’d stood at her bedside, holding her hands as she passed. In that mystical, sacred moment, I’d learned that the body is merely a vehicle for the spirit, and you can see when the soul departs.
Now, back in our drab, beige, corporate hotel, my husband looked frightened. “I just saw my mother, a younger version of her, walk across the room and merge with you,” he told me. His eyes were uncharacteristically vacant, like they were focused on a realm beyond what I could perceive. I assumed he was in that hypnagogic state where strange hallucinatory images float up from the precipice of sleep. It had been a hard, heavy day, the hardest and heaviest we’d ever experienced together. I got in the bed and curved myself around him.
The next morning, I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror while washing my hands in the sink. Dark purplish rings had appeared under both my eyes overnight; they looked almost like bruises, like someone had punched me in the face. I was startled. Yesterday must have taken a serious toll on me, I thought. I’d loved my mother-in-law—she was a brilliant, tough woman, a critical care nurse and uncompromising intellectual who had taught herself three foreign languages and read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety more than once. I was heartsick over her death. I’d planned on many years of friendship.
I smeared on some concealer. I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about eye bags. We’d rented a car and were setting off for Millie’s home outside of Minneapolis, where we’d sort through her possessions and hold a memorial for her on the banks of the Mississippi River, scattering her ashes into the water, as was her wish. In her pin-neat bedroom, I went into her closet and tried on her shoes—I remember a pair of brown suede moccasins. We were the exact same size. From the jewelry box on her dresser, I picked out a ring. It slid onto my ring finger, which is unusually small, as though it had been fitted for me.
In the weeks we spent settling her affairs in Minnesota, I began to experience what I can only describe as a kind of nervous system dysregulation—episodes in which I grew nauseated and clammy while my pulse raced and my heart fluttered around in my chest. I assumed they were blood sugar attacks and ate more protein. When that didn’t help, I decided they were panic attacks. I had never been prone to them, but I wondered if the stress of the ordeal was causing a fraying of my subconscious I wasn’t aware of. By the time we returned to Montana, the attacks were happening with such frequency and intensity that I was convinced I was gravely ill. I went to my doctor, who ordered blood tests and gave me an orange plastic jug in which to collect urine to test my cortisol.
Not long after, I told my friend Tricia, who owned a neighborhood boutique—it was filled with art, candles, incense, and New Age trinkets, and I spent many afternoons hanging out there—about my odd symptoms. She demanded to know when they started. Right after Millie died, I said. She looked stricken. “She’s probably attached to you,” she told me. “That can happen when people die. You need to see a shaman.” The whole notion was too much for me to wrap my mind around. It also scared me. I remembered a decade earlier, when I was living in New York City during 9/11, an Ayurvedic doctor I knew had told me not to go below 14th street because there were many souls not ready to leave this world who were haunting around looking for people to attach to.
I put the possibility out of my mind. Weeks passed. The medical tests found nothing. The nurse who took my blood told me to eat full-fat Greek yogurt. The attacks continued. By mid-November, I was having multiple episodes a day, so many they were debilitating. I began to despair. My mother-in-law died unexpectedly and fairly young, I thought—what if she wasn’t ready to go? Finally, I broke down and went to ask Tricia if she knew of a shaman. As it happened, there was a woman named DeeDee who had trained in Peru and had an office a few doors down from where we lived. I called her and made an appointment.
During our session, she didn’t touch me. She had me lie on a massage table, and, with her hands held about a foot away from my body, she moved along its perimeter. I felt a sensation of energy rippling, of goose-bumpy chills running up and down my arms and torso and legs. “She’s here with us,” she told me, “She’s hanging around in your field. She wants to stay near her son.” What could I say? Of course she did. I understood. When DeeDee finished her treatment, she handed me a piece of paper with detailed, typed-out instructions for a ritual my husband and I were to perform together. It involved ceremonial alcohol, lighting a candle, and saying a prayer to send her off. When I got home, I explained it all to him. That night, we lit the candle, said the prayer, and told his mother, whom we both loved so much, that it was safe for her to go.
I woke up the next day with a feeling of stillness. The symptoms were gone, never to return.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in the compendium of paranormal experiences my friend Tao Lin put together and published earlier this year on his Substack. (These accounts were accompanied by an essay he wrote on the paranormal, which I highly recommend.) I was honored to be asked to participate, and to appear alongside writers like Danielle Chelosky, Dean Kissick, Jordan Castro, Michael Clune, Ottessa Moshfegh, Robert McCready, Sheila Heti, Zac Smith, and Walter Kirn (my husband), among others. Tao has created a fascinating, informative, and important document about paranormal phenomena in our time. If you are remotely interested in the subject, it’s a must-read. Find it here. Have you had a paranormal experience of your own? If you are moved to share, let me know in the comments. I’m genuinely curious.
Thanks for this. I would only caution people to be careful in dealing with these issues; we can be misled, and think we understand -or more foolishly, control- things we do not understand and should not engage. Caveat in place then, I offer this for your consideration, a true story, about Fr. John, and Daisy:
At one time (perhaps still) Hong Kong construction workers often kept semi-wild dogs on building sites to discourage the unwelcome, cruelly abandoning them after the work was complete. Walking past a site one day, Fr. John spotted a shivering puppy, the progeny of these unwanted curs, and decided to take her home. Daisy was too old to imprint properly perhaps and always remained somewhat feral. But she was fiercely loyal to her rescuer, and the Pastor’s dog became a respected member of the parish. (I remember her: Small in stature but with a bull neck and huge jaws, like she was part hyena) But she never barked, and Fr. John said that if Daisy wanted something, she would get his attention with the touch of her cold nose. Daisy lived a long and happy life, and when she died, the parishioners buried her, marking the grave with a little stone in the parish garden.
On one occasion, Fr. John relates, Daisy padded into his room at night and “nosed” him awake. He got up just in time to see a burglar trying to crawl through the window. The man panicked, tumbled out of the window and ran away. Crime –and possible assault- averted. However, Daisy was nowhere to be seen, for by then she had already been in her little grave for some six months . . .
Be grateful for all the creatures God sends your way. And be kind. For, as the guys in the joint taught me, what goes around, comes around, for good or ill.
Thank you for sharing. I believe you and am touched by your relationship with your mother in law. A previous version of me would have probably explained away your experience as a dream coupled with suggestibility before the death of my own father, who passed unexpectedly at 56. My father was raised religiously but fell away from his faith and often lamented giving up the belief in the afterlife due to this. We had discussed it before and he told me, half jokingly and half serious, that he would give me an unmistakable sign of an afterlife after his death were it true.
He passed, there was service, life moved on.... no sign. I didn't think much of it until one day about three months after the funeral, taking the blue line to work in Chicago where I was living at the time, I turned around and saw my father in the passenger crowd, clear line of sight, standing, holding onto a handle. I was not drunk or on any type of substance. I was not dreaming. I was not thinking of him prior to seeing him. It was him, not someone who looked like him. He was looking straight at me, no real expression on his face of happiness or sadness. Just looking at me. It lasted for about 30 seconds, then he was gone. Just dissappeared.
I gasped and dropped my coffee. People around me were concerned. I got off at the next stop and sat on the platform, heart in throat, and eventualy called into work, went home and crawled in bed. When I awoke later that day at dusk I thought maybe it had been a dream, but my coffee stained clothes laid on the floor and my inbox was full of concerned messaged from my manager hoping I could make it in tomorrow for the big presentation we had been working on.
Make of it what you will. But I am a believer.