Otherworld encounter

At the very end of April 2010 I was at a small gathering of women I knew where we lived until the end of June 2009. There was an older lady there, I'll call her Kay, who was a member at the parish I attended before we moved away and who was at our George's funeral in May 2009.

Kay came up to me quietly and said she had the strangest thing happen to her just weeks after our baby boy's funeral. She said she had a dream, an exceptionally vivid dream that a young woman came to her and said she was her sister and that Kay had to help her get things sorted out. Kay was puzzled because she has brothers, but not a sister.

Not too long after she saw her elderly mother and shared with her this strange dream. Her mother got very quiet and started to cry as she shared with Kay that she did, in fact, have a sister. Her mother had given birth to a full-term, stillborn baby girl when Kay was herself just a toddler.

Unlike me, Kay's mother was not allowed to see her baby or hold her. In fact, she wasn't even supposed to know the gender of her stillborn child. She begged a nurse who relented and told her that she'd had a daughter, but swore her to secrecy because if anyone found out the nurse had discussed this she'd be fired. Even though Kay's mother was Catholic and wanted a funeral the hospital's policy was that stillborn babies were disposed of by the hospital. She had no idea where her baby was put to rest. Kay's mother, like many women of her generation, never discussed her baby's existence so Kay grew up with no knowledge of her little sister.

Kay made it her mission last summer to find out where her sister's final resting place was. She applied for access to information and worked her way through old hospital records until she was finally able to call the cemetery. It turned out that the babies were buried in a mass grave, unmarked, and that the cemetery was in the process of trying to find the next of kin of these babies so they could be properly buried in identifiable graves.

Kay and her mother were able to attend a proper burial service last fall for this little baby girl after decades. All because of a dream, when the sister Kay didn't remember reached out to her to sort things out.