When my son died in a car accident coming home from his daughter’s soccer game, I was on my way home from FL to TN. I got the information on the side of the road outside of Atlanta, where I was planning to spend the night with a friend. My first reaction was to scream, hit the steering wheel, and cry. I forced myself to stay calm, arrived at my friend’s house and there I collapsed and gave in to my pain.
My friend had to leave for a short, short time and I assured her that it was okay to be alone. As I sat wondering why, crying and feeling overwhelmed with sadness, I felt an overwhelming presence. Suddenly I knew that my son was fine, somewhere, and I felt a total calm, almost a serenity.
Of course, I still cried, but it was for my loss and that of my family and his family, a wife and three daughters.
His daughter, who had been in the car with him, was in the hospital with a broken ankle and a torn pancreas. My daughter-in-law asked me if I would stay with her overnight. My oldest daughter and I did. I told Shaye about the sense of peace that she felt and that her father’s presence felt. She smiled a bright smile and thanked me for telling her. She said that during the night she felt that someone was taking her by the hand, there was no one, she knew it was her father.
One of the things I loved about being at Steve’s house was seeing the blue jays in the bird feeder. He had mentioned it to him and he said they could be really bad birds.
During the days leading up to his funeral, I sent him mental messages asking him to send me a blue bird, in my mind it was a blue jay.
The morning of his funeral, I looked out my bedroom window and two blue jays flew into the tree, lit briefly because the tree branches are not very strong, they flew away, but they were there. They were definitely there.
All of this happened in late May and early June.
My granddaughter, after hearing me talk about blue jays, said, “I’m going to ask Uncle Steve to send me some too.” She was 9 years old at the time.
In the fall, she called me from Gainesville, where she and her mother, one of my daughters, had been to a Gator game. Steve had gone to the University of Florida and had been a loyal Gator fan.
“Guess what grandma!” His voice was excited. Uncle Steve had two blue jays flying in front of us at halftime. “
I know, I’ll probably take a chance, no pun intended, on this, but how often do blue jays fly in front of the crowd, during halftime?
The following incident happened to one of my other daughters, I have 4, one who is very skeptical.
Almost a year after Steve’s death, the family was together for the first annual Steve McCauley Memorial Golf Tournament to raise money for needy students at the local high school.
My daughter was sitting in her office preparing a CD to play at the “exit” cocktail party the night before the tournament.
I get another phone call. “Mom, you won’t believe this. Oh wait a minute, I’m talking to you. You will.”
“Do you believe what I asked you?”
“I’m sitting in Steve’s office, trying to decide what songs I want to put on the CD when I look out the window. Guess what was in the mailbox!”
I didn’t have to guess. I knew.
“Mommy!” – he almost screamed – “it was a blue bird”. A blue bird, “he repeated.
Four years have passed and I still send little messages to Steve. The loss is relieved to think that he listens to me.
One morning he was waiting to pick up his wife at the car dealership service center. It was parked under a ledge next to the showroom. A blue jay hovered in front of my car, perched on one of those rounds, put out the cigarettes, spun around a bit, then in front of me, flapped its wings and flew right over my car.
And my friends, you can call me sentimental, or someone looking for straws, I want to believe, over the hill, Mom and Grandma, but I know those birds that were flying next to us were not a coincidence. And that’s why I believe in life after death.
I know, Steve is there somewhere.