hen I saw my first ghost, I was nine years old, visiting my grandmother in North Carolina.  I was playing on the front porch when an old man appeared.  He was sitting at the opposite end of the porch, fast asleep and snoring loudly.  At first, he startled me, because he hadn’t been there a minute before.  But I couldn’t take my eyes off him.  I was riveted by his every move, and an eerie feeling enveloped my body.  Suddenly, he woke up from his nap, grabbed his chest, and fell right off the porch and onto Grandma’s flower bed.  I rushed over to help him, but when I looked into the flowerbed he had vanished!

Covered with goose bumps and with my hair standing straight up on my head, I looked over at my brothers.  Before I could ask them if they’d seen the old man, I already knew they hadn’t.  So I did what I was good at:  I kept my mouth shut and didn’t tell anyone. Months later, I overheard Grandma telling a friend about the former tenant who had died before she’d moved in. In a matter-of-fact voice she said, “Yes sir, he died of a heart attack right there on the front porch.”

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Raised in a strict family where the motto was “Young’ uns are to be seen and not heard,” my brothers and I knew better than to go against the grain, or else a hard backhand was sure to follow.  Grandma baby-sat my three brothers and me during the summer while Mama worked two jobs. My brothers and I were afraid of our grandma.  Staying with grandma meant living in a world of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. I vowed that as soon as I was old enough to leave, I’d never go back to her hellhole of a house. Ever!

I met Tim in the early 1980’s, when I was twenty years old.  Immediately, we were best friends.  I confided in Tim about seeing dead people and angels as a little boy. Tim was fascinated, and he also believed that something great happened to us when we died.  “It can’t all just stop when we’re six feet under,” he would say.

Later, after years of sharing Grandma horror stories with Tim, he said I should make peace with her before she died.  I strongly disagreed, but Tim was persistent.  He promised he’d come back to my old stomping ground and be supportive. Two weeks later, Tim and I were sitting in Grandma’s darkened living room.  Grandma and I had little to say, but we managed to keep a conversation going despite our discomfort.  She sat there in her rocking chair with a stack of Bibles on the floor beside her, a glass of bittersweet tea in one hand, fanning herself with her trusty butter-bean hat with the other hand.  When it was time to go, I hugged her good-bye and kissed her on the cheek like I had done a million times as a kid.

A year later, Grandma died.  I thought the only reason for being at her funeral was to support my mom. Less than a month later, Tim was hospitalized with chronic pneumonia.  Within forty-eight hours of his admittance into Duke University Medical Center, he was diagnosed with AIDS.  We were devastated.

For the next three and a half years, Tim was in and out of the hospital more times than I can count. We talked openly about what happens when you die.  I did everything possible to empower Tim before he transitioned from the physical realm to the nonphysical realm.

During one of Tim’s numerous hospital stays, I recall bouncing into his room with his favorite family pictures to cheer him up.  He was sitting in his bed, as white as a ghost.  I asked if he wanted me to call a nurse, and he just held his palm to me, gesturing no.  When he regained his composure, he told me what had happened.

“A hospital volunteer came into my room and stood beside the bed.  She was an old lady who smiled at me and straightened the bed sheets. She never said a word to me.  Then I began to recognize her, but I wasn’t certain how I remembered her.  She made me feel like everything was going to be all right.

“The weird thing was that she was fanning herself with a funny-looking straw hat, sort of like a garden hat.  When I asked her about it, she just smiled at me.  Then a nurse entered the room to check my vitals, and the volunteer beside my bed vanished right in front of me!  That’s when it hit me who she was!

“Eddie, it was your grandmother, and she was holding that damn butter-bean hat that you used to always make fun of!”

I was excited for Tim about his communication with the other side.  However, Tim was not as enthusiastic about Grandma coming to check on him.  But we did agree on one thing: this was a clear sign to us that the spirit world was alive and well and on our side.

Continue — Part II