Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(71)

Donna told my father that my mother strongly felt it was time for him to make some changes. She wanted him to move on and look ahead. She would always be with him, but he had a lot of living left to do. We were all comforted to hear that, knowing he had had a difficult road through the grieving process and that there were times he wished he didn’t have to go on without her.

Though we had said something strange was going on, Donna didn’t feel that it was negative energy, whatever it was. My father told her about the bird and asked what she thought it meant.

Donna was very honest. Basically she said, “It might just be a dumb bird . . . or it might be a message. I really couldn’t tell you. Just pay attention, and if it’s a message, you’ll eventually find the meaning.”

All of us were comforted by our mother’s communications, regardless of whether we’d solved the mystery of the bird. We concluded that if the bird was my mother trying to tell my father something, then she was really, really frustrated that he wasn’t getting it!

A strange thing happened after that day: the bird disappeared entirely.

Once Donna had come and gone, the bird stopped banging the window. No sign of it anywhere. We left town the next morning, and a couple days later, my father left to visit Texas with my sister. When he came home, late in April, he said the bird was still missing in action.

But by then, something was very wrong. My father wasn’t feeling well. He thought he had the flu. When I visited him at the beginning of May, he was still very ill. My pop’s an active guy in his sixties who loves to golf and travel and socialize. It takes a lot to get him even to call it a night. But there he was, lying down under a blanket in the middle of the afternoon with fever and chills.

We had planned for him to accompany me to Ohio on my book tour, and he insisted on going, as we’d planned. But when we got there, he was too sick to get out of bed at the hotel. I was alarmed.

I dragged him to a doctor, who told him he had a bacterial infection. “A few weeks on antibiotics,”Pop told me as I flew home to my own life, “and I’ll be good as new.”

He wasn’t. He didn’t let on to any of us, but his health was declining rapidly. Finally, one morning, he couldn’t get out of bed. My siblings called 911 and my father was rushed to the hospital with—it turned out— massive internal bleeding.

We were told he probably wouldn’t have made it through another night in the house alone. As it was, he spent almost a week in the ICU. Now, weeks later, he’s on the road to recovery.

After he was released from the hospital, he told me that, when he had lost consciousness, he had seen my mother. That’s unusual because, unlike the rest of us, my father never, ever sees her in his dreams.

“I was in the living room, sitting in my chair,”he said, “and she was there, too. She was sitting cross-legged in the air up over the couch. I asked her what she was doing there, and she just smiled and said she was with me, reading her book.”

I have no doubt it meant that my mother was with him in the house through his long, frightening decline—and with him, too, in the terrifying touch-and-go days in the hospital.

It wasn’t until much later that I remembered the bird. I reminded my father.

“I know,”he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, too. I think it was a sign.”

If the bird hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have had Donna come over. My mother wouldn’t have let my father know he still had a lot of living left to do. And maybe he wouldn’t have fought so hard, and made it through.

The bird never did come back. And my father is doing just fine.