Of dreams, birds and butterflies

It's back! Midnight Stories will be posted throughout October to celebrate the month of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Here's our next installment.


Most of the incidents happened in the months leading up to his first death anniversary.

Soft knocks on the door, his voice calling my name, the bed undulating as if someone had sat down on his side of it, movements in my peripheral vision, dreams, birds, white butterflies.

In quiet conversations before he was diagnosed with terminal adenocarcinoma of the lung’s left lobe, we would joke about coming back from the dead to tell the other how it was on the other side.
I made him promise not to do it in a way that would scare me. Maybe just in dreams—or if he really wanted to make his presence known, to do it during daytime.

We would usually be just goofing around before we turned in for the night, nothing etched in stone.

So when he passed in 2014 before I was ready to let him go, he gave me the first sign on the day of his burial.

I was washing my hands in an alcove near the catering area of the chapel where we were serving lunch for the people who attended his funeral when I heard a series of soft thuds.

When I looked out a window where a stainless-steel water tank stood, a small bird was bonking itself on its reflection on the tank’s shiny surface.

Larry. Larry Bird. That is what he used to call himself (after the Larry Bird who used to play for the Boston Celtics). He’d even draw a tiny bird beside his name when he signed it on little notes he’d leave around my desk.

Hello, my love, I whispered, with my forehead pressed to the glass. We miss you already.

In the days following his burial, when I would visit his grave to bring flowers and light candles, I’d see a white butterfly flitting past me while I prayed, or it would flick me on the shoulder, or float towards the windshield of the car as we drove towards the memorial park gates.

Always the same white butterfly with black wingtips. Always just the one.

Or it would be a bird fluttering to the grass at my feet, or trilling out an undulating warble in small bursts from a tree. Sometimes when I’m taking a bath, it would perch itself on the window sill (Larry knew I loved birds on account of my sneaking to our bathroom to try and take their photo when they congregate there during a rainshower) or sing to me while I’m having breakfast by myself in the comedor. From my readings, I know that only male birds sing, so I’d smile and know in my heart it was him.

Then there was the soft knocking on my library/home-office door while I was napping in there. The first time it happened was on Mother’s Day. I asked the labandera and the woman who cleaned house for us on weekends if it had been either of them and they both shook their heads and looked questioningly at me.

Sometimes he’d startle me awake by clearing his throat near where I was curled up on the lounge chair, calling out my name softly or saying “boo.”

There were also sightings. My daughter saw the silhouette of a man behind our bedroom curtains when we brought her back from the hospital after her appendectomy. I had gone out for some groceries and her brother had gone next door to visit with his cousins and Angela was left alone in the house.

She made me draw back the curtains when I got home, certain that a tree or a post had made the shadow—but there was nothing there.

I would be next to witness these strange goings on in peripheral vision, like a soft white shawl falling to the floor or a sudden rush of movement.

During the first year after his death, he always looked morose and thin in the dreams I had of him (like he did when the cancer began ravaging his body in the late stages). One dream placed us in the church where we got married; I was deep in prayer when I looked up and saw him seated next to me. I told him that I had seen his father (my late father-in-law, who we lost in 2006), but he showed no sign that he had heard me. Another dream had him walking ungainly down our street towards my brother’s house in his pajamas and a sando top.

I would wake up from these dreams wondering if he was trying to tell me something and I would fret because I could not understand what it could be.

Only after his first death anniversary—on the eve of his favorite niece’s wedding, to be more exact—did I dream of him looking happy and healthy. I was standing in the silong of their old house and he hugged me from behind, saying he was going to attend Izelle’s wedding the next day.

The other dream which I had just this August had me rummaging through my bag to give someone my business card and when I looked up—and saw him on the other side of the street, mischievously making a naughty gesture as to what he thought I should do with the guy I was with. I burst out laughing, and woke up.

This is how I know that he watches over us still, like a guardian angel keeping us out of harm’s way, always reassuring us of his love and the knowledge that he will be waiting for us on the other side when our time on this plane is over. — BM, GMA News