Category: unbreakable bonds

A Sense of Spirit · concepts · making contact · remembering · spirituality · unbreakable bonds

The Souls We Remain With, Throughout Time.

Joanne10 Comments

“Do we continue to share our time with the same souls, being reborn, year after year, time after time, within the same families, as brand new people; people who know one another; people who remain with you throughout time?”

On a Saturday night a few months ago, my son, child number four, and I sat in front of the television and watched a show about the ‘supernatural’. I forget the name of the show as I am not a huge fan of such shows, finding they are sensationalised by the producers, no doubt to draw viewers in with the unbelievable topics portrayed.

This particular show, however, did not slot into this category. The show may have been called “Celebrity Ghost Stories”, or some such name, as those chosen for the show, in which they shared their amazing but true stories, were celebrities.

One of the stories had my son gripping his seat, whilst declaring that he hated watching these types of shows, because they were too scary and would give him nightmares. But he didn’t leave the room, being so transfixed by the story being told.

As the story unfolded, the female celebrity told of an incident which happened many years ago in her home, when two little girls had appeared out of nowhere, and began to laugh and skip around one of the rooms in her home, laughing and playing together. Yet she didn’t know who these two girls were, she had never met them.

One night some time later, again, she heard children laughing and singing outside of her window at her home. She looked outside and saw the same two girls, playing together and having a lovely time as they chatted and laughed in their carefree way.

Fast forward to some years later, when the woman was married and had two daughters of her own, and she remembered the incidents from years ago, as she watched her two real daughters, playing together and laughing. She recognised the two girls she had seen before, many years earlier, as being her own two daughters!

My son heaved a sigh of relief. This woman hadn’t claimed to have been possessed by the spirits of two evil spirits, or any other such other gruesome ending to her story. My son declared that he had enjoyed her story, said goodnight, and off he went to his room.

What my son didn’t know was that I too had been mesmerised by the story, but for another, more personal reason.

In my early twenties I had longed to have a child, but my husband had other ideas, claiming we should wait until the “time was right”. In our home in Sydney, we had two spare bedrooms, the one at the back of the house being painted in light blue, and the room I had intended being the babies nursery, when my stubborn husband finally decided that it was the right time to start a family.

At first, I brushed off the faint smell of babies powder I could smell each time I went into the room, but as time progressed, it was there constantly, when I stood beside the window, looking out into the garden.

Within a few weeks, the laughter started.

I could hear the most beautiful babies laugh I had ever heard in my life. And I knew it was the laughter of a boy. He came to me a few times, and even though I didn’t actually see him, I heard him, and knew him. And he would talk to me at the most unexpected times.

Late one night, as I drove home alone, after a visit with a friend, the child told me that everything would be okay, that I shouldn’t worry about anything! His laughter and child’s voice rang in my ears, as clearly as if he sat right there beside me in the seat in my car, speaking to me.

The months passed by and he didn’t speak to me again, but I knew he was there, constantly.

It came as no surprise to me when I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. I didn’t think about the child’s laughter and voice during my pregnancy, but I knew my child was a boy. And, I knew him; we had been together before.

Right throughout the months of my pregnancy, to me, my son was Sam, although I knew my husband wouldn’t agree to the name, as it had been the name given to my father, grandfather and great-uncle. My husband didn’t want our family tree to appear “boring” with the same names repeated generation after generation.

When I saw my son for the first time, his soul was so familiar to me. There was no doubt in my mind that we knew each other, and now I could see him, touch him and knew what he looked like. Those seeing my new baby for the first time would often comment that he had an “old soul”.

His nappy change table sat right under the window in his blue room, right in the spot where I had smelled his baby powder, and as he grew, and I heard his laughter, I heard the exact same laughter of the child who had visited me, long before my son was born!

My eldest son is, and always has been, my rock; he makes everything alright for me. As a toddler, when we would park the car in a large shopping centre, I would worry that I might forget where I had parked the car, and my son would tell me not to worry, it would be alright, he would remember where the car was.

And so it has continued throughout his life. He makes everything alright for me. He tells me not to worry; he takes care of things, just as he did before his birth.

My next two children were daughters, and I could always rely on my son to watch out for his sisters, with his attitude of don’t worry, and casually, quietly and efficiently taking care of minor details that the two girls would overlook.

The day my son’s baby brother was born, when he was twelve years old, I was positively bursting to tell my boy that he had a baby brother. When I told him, as he stood beside my bed in the birthing room in the hospital, he told me he wouldn’t have minded being the only boy, he would love the new baby just as much as he loved his two sisters, regardless.

My new baby grew and his big brother played with him and cared for him constantly, just as he had played with and cared for his sisters.

And as time progressed, he nick-named his little brother George.

The name caught on, and for quite some time George was the alternate name used for my youngest child, and everyone knew who we were referring to. George suited him.

A few years ago, as I traced my family history and began to discover the names of my ancestors, I learned that my grandfather, Sam, had been a twin. The name of his twin brother, who had passed away at only one year old, was George.

Sam and George; the alternate names for my two sons. 🙂

A Sense of Spirit · making contact · realities · signs from spirits · sisters · unbreakable bonds

Are Tarot Cards Really Necessary?

Joanne12 Comments

During the final few weeks of my mother’s time on this earth, spent in hospital, with my father and eldest sister constantly at her bedside, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to her, to ask the questions I wished to ask or to discuss matters with her that only she would understand.

Mum tried to tell me things but with Dad and my sister as an audience, I know I didn’t react to what she told me in the same way as I would have, if we were alone.

If I cried when I visited my mother, Dad asked me not to let Mum see how upset I was, as it may upset her to see me that way. I had wanted to cry over the impending loss of my mother; I didn’t want her to think I had become so hardened to her illness than I no longer felt emotion, but Dad was of the “old school”, believing Mum must be protected from adverse emotion in her delicate state.

I don’t blame my father for feeling that way. I know that he believed it was for the best.

I didn’t.

The relationship I had with my mother had been one of trust and open honesty for all of my life. Mum and I had raging arguments at times, due to our honesty with each other, but neither of us ever held a grudge. As soon as we were through with our argument, Mum would say, “Go and put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea”. A cup of tea made everything right, you know. Mum was an English lady, who knew within her heart and soul that a shared cup of tea would fix anything that ailed her world.

And it did.

For the two of us it did, anyway, although none of my sisters seemed to have the same capacity to get over a row with Mum in the same way as I did. I still believe the relationship that Mum and I shared was unique on so many levels.

My mother has been gone since 1993 and back then I had one child at school, one at pre-school and my baby who was only nine months old, a baby who my mother had said was “her baby”.

I dropped my two elder children off at school one morning and on the spur of the moment decided to call in and see Mum at the hospital in the morning, rather than waiting until the afternoon when I would be collecting the older two from school, as I had planned.

My baby and I walked into Mum’s hospital room and instead of seeing my father and sister at her side, I found my Mum alone, lying peacefully in bed in the coma she had been in for the last couple of days.

Without giving my actions a second thought, I walked over to my Mum’s bedside and began talking to her by telling her I was visiting her with my baby and that Dad and my sister hadn’t arrived yet. I chatted away to her for a while, in the same way that I would have spoken to her had she been conscious.

It would have been amazing to hear her voice again, but it knew that wouldn’t happen ever again. I stroked her smooth face and her silver hair. I looked at her hands, her strong, healing hands, trying with all my might to embed the image of my beautiful mother permanently within my mind’s eye.

Before I left the room I told her something that I had wanted to say to her when she was still conscious. I told my mother that I knew she would want to contact me from the other side and if she felt the need to contact me for any reason, to let me know and I would find a psychic, or tarot card reader, to help her get through to me.

Mum and I had often made visits to such people, with Mum telling me that she wished she had the same ability that they did. Mum said she wasn’t afraid of psychic phenomena, and I shared her beliefs. They came as naturally to me as breathing, most likely due mostly to my mother sharing her beliefs with me for my entire life.

Up until this particular day, before leaving the hospital, I had said to my Mum, “See you later Mum. I love you”, not having the strength to say goodbye. I hadn’t wanted to say the final goodbye to this precious person who meant the world to me.

This morning had been different though. Mum and I had spent time together, alone, time to communicate.

Time for me to realise that I had to let her go.

She rested so peacefully and I indulged my eyes for the last few moments, again memorising every minute detail about her.

I noticed a pulse beating slowly at the side of her neck. Ah, so she was still alive, I thought to myself, although her spirit seemed not to be with the body I looked at lying in the hospital bed.

Leaning over my mother I whispered to her, “Goodbye Mum. I love you”, and left the room.

Later in the day I found out that a nurse had watched me leave the room and went in to check on my mother.

She was gone.

Down in the hospital car park I strapped my baby into her car seat and turned on the ignition.  On the radio that morning they were playing hit songs of 1975 and the song that came onto the radio was “All by Myself” by Eric Carmen, one of Mum’s favourite songs and one which she felt had been written just for her.

“All by myself,
Don’t wanna be, all by myself anymore.”

The years passed and I waited for some kind of sign from my mother, but there wasn’t one. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t, or couldn’t, get through to me. In life, we had talked constantly and I believed with every fibre of my being that Mum hadn’t left me, that she was beside me always.

So where was the sign to contact the psychic? I’d been waiting, and looking, and there was nothing!

This lack of contact began to play on my mind and I thought back over the last couple of years to anything that may have lead to a sign that I may have missed, but every incident that I recalled had gone nowhere; every question I had come up with had been answered, every problem I had, had been solved.

The contact had been right there in front of me, the whole time! Mum had been helping me through every day, without me realising it!

Perhaps grief had shut my senses down; I’m not sure what had happened to me. All I do know is that once I opened my heart and listened with my soul, she could speak to me.

The tarot cards and the psychics are not needed to bring my mother and me together. There is an invisible golden thread joining us together, which can never be broken. She will never leave me, nor I her. She knows she can release the thread more these days as I don’t rely on her as much as I used to, but she knows when I need her. And she is there.

Photo credit ~ Dreamstime.com

A Sense of Spirit · making contact · signs from spirits · unbreakable bonds

Finding Uncle Albert

Joanne2 Comments
Uncle Albert in England, 1917.

During my entire adult life, researching family history has been a hobby, perhaps even an obsession of mine. Even as a child I would constantly ask my parents to tell me what they knew about their families, to tell me any stories they remembered, and what were the names of our ancestors.

Unfortunately they didn’t have much for me in the way of detail, although I hung onto every snippet of information they had, however remote it may have been, etching the names and events into my memory so as not to forget a single detail.

It also helped that my family obligingly repeated said stories, ad nauseam, every single time I asked them to. “I’ve already told you that story”, they would protest, by which time I would be jumping up and down, pleading, “I know, but tell me again. I might have missed something”. I must have been the most annoying child what with my inquisitive mind, and my family must have loved me a great deal to tolerate me, repeating the old stories upon request.

I always referred to the family stories as the “England Stories”, as my entire family came from England, with yours truly being the token Australian back in those days. My father in particular remembered uncle-this-aunty-that-and-cousin-someone-else, although he didn’t have the foggiest idea as to how they were related to him!

It wasn’t until about 2003 that I finally discovered that the internet was THEE place to research my family history.

Armed with just the names of my parents and grandparents, my family tree has since grown to seven-hundred-and-seventy-three family members, a fact which both of my parents would be astounded by, if they were both still here for me to tell them!

The relations that I have focused mostly on throughout my research have been those who are the closest to me, such as great aunties and uncles and my direct line of grandparents (I know who my own aunties and uncles were).

In among some old photos of nameless relatives given to me by my father, (passed on to him by his mother, who hadn’t a clue of who any of them were either!) there was one photo that stood out for me. A man, wearing an army uniform, posing among his civilian dressed family, had a familiar face. He reminded me of my father’s first cousin, who I called Uncle Jim.

I was determined to learn exactly who this man was. The inscription on the back of the photo, written in pencil, is “Albert’s ten days leave, January, 1917”. The photo was taken by a photographer in Manchester, England.

My research revealed that the man in the photo was my father’s Uncle Albert, although I could find nothing of his army record, nor any marriage or births of children.

During one of my moments of scrutinising the old family photo, the penny dropped; Uncle Albert was wearing an Australian army uniform!

Ultimately, with my research now focused on Australian records, I discovered that Uncle Albert had emigrated to Australia as a teenage and had joined the Australian army in 1916 during the First World War. The family photo was taken whilst he had leave during his time in the Australian army in England. Uncle Albert returned to Australia after the war ended in 1919, later marrying and spending most of his years living in Sydney.

But I still had questions; did Uncle Albert have any children? How long had he lived?

Through various ways in which I have discovered information can be found in the NSW Births, Deaths and Marriage online register, with next to no information on the ancestor being researched, I discovered that Uncle Albert had lived until 1951, and he was buried at MacLean, NSW.

MacLean! Just three hours drive from my home!

Last year, after yet another online search which gave me the name of the cemetery where Uncle Albert was buried, I headed off to MacLean with my then thirteen year old son.

MacLean is a small town, so we had no trouble finding the cemetery at all, although we hadn’t counted on meeting up with thousands of bats, living in the trees, which lined the back of the cemetery. It turned out that the bats were the only living creatures we clapped eyes on during our visit in MacLean. The noise of the screeching bats really rattled my son’s confidence; well the bats, along with the fact that his crazy mother was thrilled to bits at having the opportunity of finding the grave of some old dead guy that he didn’t know!

The trees at the cemetery were full of screeching bats!

We wandered around the cemetery for quite some time, reading headstones, minds boggling at some of the extremely young, and extremely old, who had been laid to rest here. But no Uncle Albert.

My son was beginning to get restless; he’d had enough of the bats and was spooked over spending so much time in a cemetery. To be truthful, I’d grown quite weary myself. Where was Uncle Albert?

In a moment of frustration, I spoke out loud, “Where are you Uncle Albert?”

A loud cracking noise came from a section of the cemetery just ahead of us. In a flurry of shock, my son announced, “I’m getting out of here”, as I told him “Uncle Albert’s over there”, and I headed directly towards the noise.

Uncle Albert's Grave

Sure enough, there he was, right where the noise had come from. My son only came close enough to me for me to throw him the car keys, which suited me just fine. It allowed me the time to enjoy a private visit with my great-uncle, a man I had searched for, for many years.

At the bottom of Uncle Albert’s grave there was one single word engraved – “Father”. So, he did have a child, or children!

One simple word ~ "FATHER".

Shortly after I returned home I made contact with Uncle Albert’s grandson, through a family research website which we are both members of.

Time means nothing at all in the spirit world. Uncle Albert had been gone for sixty years, yet he still managed to find a way for me to find him. That is an important lesson I have learned ~ keep yourself open to the subtle signs, sent to us when our loved ones are trying to contact us.

We could pass the signs off as ‘coincidence’ or we can heed the signs and open ourselves up to the messages that are too good to miss, which for me was finding Uncle Albert.

A Sense of Spirit · birthdays · remembering · sisters · unbreakable bonds

A Bond that Lasts for Eternity

Joanne4 Comments
The many faces of Anne, the child

Speaking from my own point of view, (as I can have no other!) to have a sister is to feel an indescribable bond with another person, which I can liken to no other relationship I have ever had throughout my life.

My parents kindly provided three sisters for me, before I was even born. There is an age difference between us of a number of years, though, and my sisters often doubled as “mothers” to me. A double blessing!

All three of my sisters were born in England, during and just after the Second World War. My Mum told me a story once of a day when Gypsy’s came to her door, selling clothes pegs. She didn’t recall whether or not she had purchased any pegs; what she remembered vividly was the predictions one of them made for her life.

The Gypsy told my Mum that she would travel across water to live in another country, far from England, where she would give birth to a fourth daughter.

At the time, Mum laughed in disbelief at the Gypsy, although a few years later they all emigrated to Australia and some years after that, I was born.

So, there you have it. Gypsy’s can be very accurate with their predictions!

It doesn’t matter how much time may pass during which my sisters and I have no contact. Sometimes life just gets in the way and we can go months without speaking, but when we do speak, we carry on as if we only had a conversation yesterday; such is our bond.

My eldest sister was named Annette and I could best describe her as my sometimes sister, sometimes mother and always a friend.

The last time I saw Anne, just over four years ago, I knew it would be the last. Anne was extremely ill. When we said our goodbye’s, I wanted to hold her forever and never let her go. When she finally left, I cried so much and so hard that I thought I may stop breathing.

How do you say goodbye to your sister? I found out the hard way, that day.

Since she’s been gone I’ve looked for signs that Anne is about, wishing she would contact me in any way she could find to get through to me. I’ve asked my youngest sister (she’s only twelve years older than me!) if she has heard from her, but neither of us had.

Until Christmas Day, 2010, and I wasn’t even thinking about Anne at the time.

For Christmas my sister had sent me a book, “An Angel by my Side”, by Jacky Newcomb. The book was sealed up in a cellophane wrapper and I hadn’t had a chance to open the pages at all.

I decided to watch a DVD on Christmas night, but for no apparent reason the DVD player wouldn’t work. My husband thought he could easily fix the player, yet it took some time to repair.

I began to wonder if there was something else that I was meant to be doing, as I waited impatiently for the DVD player to work. I noticed the book my sister had sent me, broke off the cellophane wrapper and flicked through the pages.

Nothing in particular caught my eye, so I had a look through the contents, to get a “feel” for the book. And there it was, Chapter 12, “Love from Anne”!

Almost immediately, the DVD player started working.

The next day, I could hardly wait to phone my sister who had sent me the book.

“Did you see what one of the chapters was called?” I blurted out.

You see, Anne always signed letters and cards at the end with “Love from Anne”, which my sister also knew.

We both believe that it was Anne’s way of wishing us both a Happy Christmas. A book sent from one sister to another, with that chapter name. Our Christmas Day was complete.

Today, if Anne was still here with us, in the flesh, she would be celebrating her 70th Birthday and I would send her a birthday card, saying “Love from Joanne”.

But wherever she is, Anne knows that. 🙂