“Door Ajar”

(An Inkling of ESP) 
My Dad's ADC

On Aug. 30^th on Wednesday 1939, we were all called by dad to get up & start the morning chores.  This was around 06:00 A.M. as we arose to get the cows and horses from pasture and bring them home to the barnyard and put the cows and horses we wanted into the barn and the rest we did not want back out to the pasture and watering them.  The livestock in the barn such as cows were fed, milked, horses and pigs, chickens fed and watered.  Eggs gathered, barn cleaned out, milk separated and fed to the calves and cream put away in a cream-can ready for shipping to town.

Dad had complained of a bad headache all morning since he had got up and while helping with the chores.  Wednesday was his council meeting day we had and Dad was finished and began his shave so he could leave from the field work and only have to wash and put on his suit and leave for his meeting which was at 2:00 P.M. in the afternoon.

My twin sister Ethel and I had got ready for school and we left at 08:30 A.M. for school by horse and buggy a distance of 2˝ miles.  All morning long I had been watching my father very closely, as I felt a great concern for him, on this particular morning for no reason at all.  He was shaving, when he complained of a sever pain in his left arm and such a crusading headache.  He sat at the table and held his head in his hands and actually cried.  However, this passed and he finished shaving and kidded mother about seeing some good looking nurses and doctors for a check-up. 

By now a sudden fear had gripped my heart and I had a feeling as I watched my Dad that this would be the last time I would see him ever standing on his fee and waving good-bye to us.  Mac, my brother 2˝ years older than us, was staying home that day to help with the harvest.  The three of us usually went to school together.  But that day, an extra hand was needed for harvest so Mac stayed to help.

As I got ready for school, the fear of mine increased to such an extent that I imagined him dying.  I quickly took my mother aside and told her of my fear for Dad and please get him to a doctor.  However she said, don’t worry it was only a migraine and laughed it off.  However three times I repeated my fear of him dying to her.  By then I was wrestling with my mind to be practical about it, however I couldn’t.

My twin sister and I went to school, when we arrived there, I unhooked and put the horse away in the school barn.  Sis and I walked from the barn to the one-room country school.  However I could not settle down to doing much schoolwork as by 09:00 A.M. a voice repeated over and over in my mind, “Your Dad is dying” and to go and call a doctor (this was repeated three times).  But the practical side of my mind said, mother would call a doctor, if one was necessary.

When our first morning recess came at 09:15 A.M.  I went outside the door and as I approached my twin sister, I could see she was crying and I asked her why?  I looked again at the clock and it said, 09:15 A.M., then again this voice said to me, “Your father has just died of a heart attack” (again it was repeated three times).  I knew why my twin sister was crying and that she knew what I knew and as I put my arms around her, it was a terrible struggle to not break and cry with her.  As she had been close to her Dad and was sort of a favorite of his.  Our friends asked why my twin sister was crying?  I could only say, “I don’t know why”.  As no phone call had come to the teacher to confirm this, just our 7th sense, as it was know as then. 

We went back into school after our 15-minute recess was over.  As I sat in school until 12:00 P.M., I knew I was right, I would never see Dad alive again on this earth.  At 12:00 P.M. noon we got an hour recess for our lunch.  The teacher came and called us aside in the cloakroom and told us our father had indeed passed away at 09:15 A.M. and we could get our horse and buggy and go home.  Holding back my tears, I put my arms around my twin sister and said, “Come now, we know he is in Heaven”.  My how she cried and cried so broken-heartedly.

As we left the schoolyard for home, I was okay until I turned the last mile home.  Suddenly our world turned real quiet, birds seemed to stop singing, dogs quit barking, birds seemed to even stop flying and all movement ceased except for us in the horse and buggy seemed stopped.  With the horse and buggy I pulled up in front of the house and Lloyd my brother came out and took the horse and buggy and said he would put it away for us.  Then I saw the car stopped crooked on the runway to the garage, I knew it had come into the runway with awful speed.  I asked Lloyd what had happened and he said I had lots of time, a lifetime to find out.

It was then I noticed all the neighbors’ cars in the yard and neighbor’s wives helping my sister Gertie with the house chores.  My oldest brother Jack came out and took us into the house.  I saw mother in Dad’s chair at the head of the table.  Quickly I crossed over to her, fighting back my tears and kissed and hugged her.  The grief and pain I saw mirrored in those deep brown tear-filled eyes.  I also saw how, she wished, she had listened to me that morning.  Then, glancing at the clock on the dining room wall, it had stopped at exactly 09:15 A.M., the very moment my father had died.

Jack and mother and Ether and I went through the front room into my dad and mother’s bedroom and there we saw for our first time, death of a loved one.  My what a fight to keep back those tears as I laid my hand on my father’s cold chest and kissed his cold, oh so cold lips.  Then just as quickly, we moved upstairs to my oldest brother’s bedroom without mother.  Jack then told us, what he expected of us both.  We proceed downstairs, I was holding my twin sister’s hand, telling her not to cry; Dad was okay and he wouldn’t want her to carry on in this fashion. 

When I got alone with my oldest brother again, he told me I had not cried and should cry.  I said, I would do worse than that.  When we were half way down to the barn, when suddenly I started to shout and scream, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead” and I would never seem him alive on this earth again.  Just as quickly as it started, I stopped and excused myself for my behavior to my brother.  He said it was okay, he understood and said, “Let the tears come”.  But they wouldn’t, only a hard, cold lump, very heavy formed right over my heart and I thought it would surely burst the pain was so great.

That night we left our home to stay at the Sanderson’s, very good neighbors of ours.  They had two twin boys six months younger than my twin sister and I.  The also had and older brother three years older than the twins, John was his name.  We went to school from there.  Going to school kept our minds busy and off our father.  This going to the neighbors was done, so we would be out of the house and away and not see them preparing my father for burial and setting his coffin up in the front room in front of the bay windows.  Funeral parlors were not what they are today.  People were then kept in their homes for burial. 

After two days, we went back home to be greeted by my Uncle Jack, who was the spitting image of our Dad, they could have been twins.  At first I called him “Dad” and then knew how foolish my heart had been to think it might be my father at the door.  My twin sister and I saw Dad in his coffin in the front room.  It was a beautiful hardwood oak coffin, if one can say a coffin is beautiful.

Every morning of my father’s stay above ground before burial, I would arise at 05:30 A.M. and quietly go out to our flower garden and pick a type of flower, blue and white in color, called Morning Glory, his favorite.  Each morning I would pick and place one fresh one in the button-hole on his coat lapel and kiss him and leave quickly and quietly before I could be discovered.  For only too soon I knew I would have to commit that man, my father to memory.

My mother wanted my brother Mack and I to sleep in the room father had died in, which had been their master bedroom.  Not it is three nights since my father’s death.  Remember this figure.  That night we had got to sleep and both awoke with a start that someone was looking at us.  My brother had hold of my arm and said “It’s Dad” and he smiled at us and was in his suit he had on in the coffin.  He said “Boys, I had no chance to say goodbye to you, as I passed so quickly, however remember, had I lived I would have been crippled.  So I am better off out of this body; as there certainly is life after death.  I am fine and must go and say goodbye to mother and the girls and boys upstairs.  He seemed to float in a gliding motion through the air and walls upstairs.

Suddenly I heard mother scream “Charley” my father’s name and continue to scream until they gave her a pill to settle her down.  While father had talked to us he mentioned the clock on the dining room wall and said, “Remember how I use to joke with mother and say that clock on the wall would stop at the time I died and it did 09:15 A.M. August 30, 1939. 

That was the last time I saw my Dad in movement until I was seventeen.  He use to joke and say that since war was unavoidable and would certainly come, he hoped he would die and be buried on the day Canada declared war on Germany.  As he knew his boys would all have to go to war and maybe never come back, or would come back wounded and crippled like so many had from World War I.  If it lasted long enough, even his youngest son would have to me, which meant me and would leave his wife and daughters and him all alone.

War was declared the day my father was buried.  Also, the question that stuck in my mind of what he said, that night he paid a visit to us.  We saw him in his own body he died in, which other body was he referring to when he said, “another body”?