Something About My Family

English is not my mother tongue so I hope you could bear with me for my story.

My mom died of cancer in 1981, she was 29 and I was 4 at the time. I have a sister who was a year older than me. My Dad was devastated after my mom's death. My Grandma (Dad's mom) then came to live with us in order to take care of us since my Dad was only in his thirties and it was so hard for him to look after us while working at the same time.

My sister and I both saw our mom together twice one night. I'm not exactly sure about the time, I guess it was within the first 2 or 3 years after my mom's death. My sister and I were staying in a room and sharing a bed at the time. It started when we both saw our mom standing outside our bedroom window, our window was quite small, in fact you could only see a person's head and his shoulder if he was there outside the window. Our mother just stood there and there was no facial expression on her face, all she did was look at us. It's weird that we didn't scream or anything, we just stared at her and she just stood there the whole time.

Anyway we both fell asleep eventually. The next day, we told our father and not surprised he said we were both dreaming.

One time, when I was around 10 or so, we went to our Aunt's place to stay over, all of us kids (with my nieces) were sleeping on the floor. I couldn't sleep at first as you know, it's always difficult to fall asleep at someone's house. When I unsuccessfully tried to sleep I opened my eyes and saw my mother again. She was standing near my feet, looking at me, my eyes were half open and half closed if you know what I mean, I couldn't look at her with my eyes all open. She was wearing something white and I could actually feel her clothes. It's like she's standing there forever but I did go to sleep after a while. The next morning, my sister told me something that she saw during the night, well yes, she saw our mom and she was standing near her feet as well. When we went to tell our Aunt and she said it was her who came to check on us, well although being young, I was sure that it wasn't her, there was no way I couldn't recognize our Aunt and that woman who was literally standing there the whole time was our mother. If she was our Aunt, she would go to sleep after she checked if we were asleep, she wouldn't stand there for ages and not move an inch.

We believed that our Mom came to check on us to see if we were alright, after all we didn't scream bloody murder when we saw her, we weren't really scared when she was there, we knew she would do us no harm.

One summer, our two nieces and our Aunt came to our house to sleep over, they were all sleeping in our living room. My nieces were about 8 and 10 at the time. The next morning they had bruises all over their bodies, they said someone scratched them during the night. That freaked me out as I could see those bruises clearly. My Aunt wiped it off as they might do that to themselves, well in order to keep us calm but of course, we all knew that no one would be that stupid to hurt themselves like that.

This occurrence happened to my sister. One of our relatives died, she was a very old lady, until now I'm still not sure who she was, I mean I did meet her before, she was a very nice old lady but I didn't remember how to address her. Anyways, one night, we were sharing the room with our grandma at the time, my sister woke up and saw that old lady standing next to my grandma's bed looking at her, my sister wasn't afraid at all, she just closed her eyes and went back to sleep. The old lady probably came here to visit my grandma because they haven't seen each other for a long time.

In 1998, my Dad died of cancer, he didn't suffer any pain when he passed away. For all the months he stayed in hospital, whenever we went to visit him, we could see those cancer patients who stayed in his ward screaming and yelling before they died. I was with him when he passed away, I was talking to him then I found that something's wrong with him, I asked him if he needed a doctor, he nodded his head, so I went for the doctor, he died on 29 January 1998 around 6.00pm in the evening. Something I need to bring up was two days before my Dad's death while we were staying in the hospital with him, we were talking to him but suddenly my father asked why there was so many doctors around him, we were pretty scared at the time because there were only us, no doctors, he went on and said those people were all in white and they all had their name tags on them.

We were pretty sure that my father was fully conscious as we were chatting about stuff together a minute ago, we 're told that when a person is going to die, he would see spirits being around him and waiting to fetch him. And one thing, the day that my Dad died, we were making congee to him in the morning, when we tried to put the congee into the container, it literally broke and made a huge noise, coincidence?

That's all for my story, I hope I didn't bore you. Thanks.