One need not believe in visions to have them.
I don’t, and yet ever so rarely, I do. We may all be wired for visions, after all.
This one was a red-blonde girl in her early teens, a few stray wisps of hair flying out as though her head had been on a pillow. She looked in through my kitchen door as I drifted up from sleep on the living room couch. She was similing. Her smile was full of unaffected love and her expression was certain everything was and would be somehow alright for both of us.
I had never seen that girl before, or the rumpled dress she wore. I have seen enough MacIlwinen family pictures to know she was Lisa in her teens, happy as in her last year she told me she would never be again [And each time she told me that, I would dissuade her/make her laugh.]. She had come to tell me farewell. She had been enjoying the sight of me asleep and had pushed gently into my consciousness to keep a promise she made – a promise to come back if she could, even if only for a moment, and touch me with her after-knowledge if it would be good and right for me to know.
The afternoon she made that promise, we were talking on the phone. I recall saying, “You don’t have to do that, Lisa. You may have other concerns, you know.”
We laughed hard together at that and then she said, “I know, George. But if there is any possible way I can, I will. Be sure you remember that. Don’t you dare forget.”
I remember. I remember she also said her passing by would not presage anything bad, and now I shall remember that she kept every promise she ever made to me.
Because somehow Lisa MacIlwinen stopped by to share her joy at what was, what is and what will be – before she stepped forever through the unseen door on Nov. 24, 2009.
The world is a far poorer place without her loving/forgiving heart, smile, glad voice, insightful mind, sustaining love and gentle laugh. She loved and was loved by her sister Dianne, Cathy, nephews Jack (to whom she was, long ago now, Aunt Lisa Beesa) and George Rankin, their father George, others … .
She was during her final years one of just three living people who had loved my sons, Jack and George Rankin, continuously since before they were born. She rejoiced in the knowledge that they would be born, in their birth and in every moment of their lives for as long as there were moments in hers.
Now there are just we two, grieving.
Filed under: Farewell , death, Farewell, Lisa MacIlwinen, spirit, visions