Whenever I read about a famous athlete passing away it reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend. Sharon (not her real name) was employed by a large corporation and her salary was well into six figures. Her husband was a professor at a large Midwestern university. I’ve mentioned this only so that you, the reader, will not think she’s some kind of kook. Here’s what she told me:

“I was in my early 20’s and was working in a nursing home that had recently been remodeled…started working the night shift there…early on, I was in the kitchen getting ice out of the ice machine for the patients, and it felt like someone was watching me so I stopped what I was doing and I looked…and back in the corner was this guy standing way in the corner, just watching me…and it kind of took me back but I figured, well, patients get up and wander into the kitchen to get something to eat…he was in a hospital gown…he looked like a patient…probably somewhere around eighty years old…a man, kind of thin, and then when I finished what I was doing and stopped and turned around, he was gone…and it was like, okay, where did he go?…so that was my first experience that something was really quirky there…

“Another time I was walking down the hall and there was a gentleman who was dying from cancer and I walked by his room and I noticed someone was sitting on the foot of his bed and I thought that’s awfully nice…he had a visitor cause he normally didn’t have visitors. And again, it looked kind of like another patient but I didn’t pay much attention because I was on my way to another room…Later that evening I mentioned the visitor to one of the other nurses and she had seen the same guy but as far as we knew we never saw him come in or out, so we thought, okay, that was bizarre.

“So the same part of the nursing home I was working in there was a woman who always used to say that her friend came to see her and I can’t remember the name that she used but again, we always knew which visitors were coming and going and as far as we knew she never had any visitors…and we thought, well she was just senile and imagining things…She was getting pretty close to passing away…she was having health problems…I went in to clean her up one night and I had gotten the little tub we used to wash her up out of her night stand and I turned around and there was a man, standing in the room, the guy I had seen on the other patient’s bed, and the same guy I had seen in the kitchen…and I was so freaked out…I stepped back and I gasped loudly, and the patient said, “Oh, it’s just my friend.” I said, “Your friend?” and I turned around (and again, the doors were completely closed) I turned back around and he’s gone. She said “that’s my friend who comes to see me.” That was about the most freaky experience I had there. I think the guy was there to help them get ready to pass away…cause she passed away shortly thereafter, as did another patient who had similar experiences. Both had passed away.

“And there was another gentleman who passed away and he had either emphysema or lung cancer and he had a terrible, terrible death…and that was before it was okay to give patients morphine so he was really struggling…we felt terrible for him…he was so uncomfortable in so much pain and scared…for three days after he passed away his call light kept going off…and finally the nurse called him by his name and said “It’s time for you to go home” – and that was it. She was talking to his spirit. The light didn’t go on again.

“She was fairly religious and she felt like his spirit didn’t know what it was supposed to be doing and as soon as she said that, the light stopped. People who experienced it thought it was like we were being visited by spirits. And there wasn’t any logically explanation we could come up with.

“The one nurses aid I had worked with wasn’t surprised when I told her about someone standing in the room nor was she surprised about the guy sitting on the other one’s bed…Yeh, she had seen it too but we didn’t normally talk about that kind of stuff. I never experienced anything there when I worked the day shift…it was only when I worked there at night.

“We don’t know what we don’t know…all I know is what I saw…there must be something there to help people get through into the next life…One common denominator was that the people who had this experience didn’t have family there to help them through it…they were all alone.”