The Sense of Being Watched

 My dear friend Sara lost her mother to cancer in 2002. Sara has no siblings, and her mother raised her alone, since Sara’s father left the family with warning one day when Sara was but 3 years old. So Sara and her mother were very close - maybe about as close as any mother and daughter could be.

It was devastating, even if the loss wasn’t unexpected. She told me once recently that she grieved for years - she was unable to let go of the deep sense of loss and melancholy she felt over the death of her mom. And she also told me the story of how she felt her mother connected with her from across the veil.

It started happening in about the sixth year after her mother was gone. Sara was having a difficult time letting go, and had missed a lot of work due to depression and lethargy. Her marriage was crumbling, and she just couldn’t seem to pick herself up and move on. Her mother - even after six years - was in her every waking thought, and she kept rehearsing all the unsaid things that she wished she’d told her. She was doing this very thing one night in bed, to the point where she broken down and began to cry. She recounted to me that these were not soft tears, but rather great heaving sobs that shook her torso violently with their release.

And she might have gone on crying like that all night, she said, except for she curled up in the fetal position in the bed and as she did so, she felt the warm caress of someone’s hand down her shoulder and naked arm. It was so sudden that she sat bolt upright, not knowing what it could be. Of course, no one was there - she was alone in her room with only the soft warm glow of the bedside lamp. At the foot of her king-sized bed lay the quilt - folded neatly into a square - that had been her mother’s mother’s - passed as an heirloom to her. She kept it always there, folded neatly, in case she needed it. 

My friend Sara feels as if her departed mother reached out across the veil to her by 

using her heirloom blanket as a means providing comfort in her grief. 

With a sigh and a sniffle, she laid back down. Her thoughts began to drift again, as they always did, and that familiar ache from loss was there. She closed her eyes and willed herself to drift off to sleep. She laid still for what seemed like forever, but sleep never quite came. Finally, just when she was about to give up and get up to get a book, she felt enveloped by a familiar sense of warmth and comfort. It wrapped around her almost like a blanket, like the weight of a quilt on a cold winter’s day…

When she sat upright, sure enough - she was covered by the now-unfolded heirloom quilt that had previously been neatly stashed at the bottom of her bed! Her husband wasn’t home - he was out of town on business. There was no one else in the home. And yet, someone - someone - had covered her with this quilt. Someone wanted her to be comforted.

As we all might do in similar circumstances, Sara went to sleep that night with a feeling of comfort and yet bewilderment. Could her imagination be playing tricks on her? Is it possible that she - in her own search for comfort from her prolonged grief - pulled the quilt around herself without realizing she had done so? Of course she wondered. As would we all.

Sara confided in me that it was that very night that things started to turn around for her. It wasn’t immediate, by any means. And she still struggled with an overwhelming sense of grief. But in the months that followed that night, she says she had the most overwhelming feeling of being watched, no matter where she went. And she was quick to tell me that it wasn’t in a creepy kind of way - not at all. It was more of a constant vigilance by a benevolent, watchful eye - not unlike a parent watches their child on a playground. When she drove home from work, the feeling was there. When she went to the supermarket, the feeling was there. When she visited friends, it was there, as well. And this went on for about two years - everywhere she went, she was watched. And somehow, she said, it helped her.   

Sara is quick to tell me that she would never want any analyst or psychiatrist to know this. She knows that to a medical professional it might sound unrealistic and even fanciful. But she is adamant: that sense of being watched everywhere she went for two years or so helped her get over the large hurdle of her ever-constant grief. In fact, she says, had it not been for that feeling, she might have continued in an ever-constant downward spiral, and who knows how it might have ended?

I asked her, then, how it happened that the sense of being watched finally left her. And she smiled a really big smile and told me that it left quite suddenly one day, when she and her husband were getting ready for a picnic. They’d both taken the day off from work, and were headed out to the local park for a nice relaxing afternoon. She was brushing her teeth, and when she finished, she says she felt the deepest sense of peace she’d ever known, before or since. She exhaled, and said out loud “It’s okay Mom. You can go now. I know it’s all okay.”

And just like that, she says, the sense of constant vigilance left her. She no longer felt as if she were being watched everywhere she went. No watchful presence following her to work, or to the supermarket, or to the post box. Just the earth and sky and her wide open heart, ready now to move forward with the acceptance of her mother’s transition.

Can Sara prove to anyone that her mother lives on? Of course not. But proof to others matters very little to those whose hearts are already solid with the knowledge of this: that life goes on, even if it takes different forms, long after our biomechanics have ceased.