Visitation

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Guest Post by Doug Marman

From: The Silent Questions, by Doug Marman, pp. 242-243

I paused for a moment and listened. What was it? The cool breeze rattled leaves along the walk while I waited, listening. Then it came again. A sound in the wind from far away…a child crying…It echoed within me.

Back in my room, I lay down in bed. I could still hear that sound…like a whisper. For some reason it tugged at me, pulling me out of my own small world into something bigger. Like slipping out of an old heavy coat, I left my physical body behind. The new consciousness I occupied was much like being in a dream, but I was totally aware of where I was and what I was doing.

Instantly, I flew through the walls of my house, out over the trees and down into the valley. I saw a small, two-story white house with a neat lawn and well-kept front yard. Some dolls and a bucket lay abandoned near the front steps, as if some game had been suddenly interrupted. I flew in through the front door and paused at the base of some stairs.

I felt a strange embarrassment, as if I’d walked into the wrong house by mistake. 

“This is someone’s home,” I thought, “what am I doing here?” 

But something urged me on, and I flew up the stairs into a small bedroom. I hovered in the air near the bed where a little girl lay, her face buried in the pillow. 

She was crying her heart out. She was sobbing like the whole world had forgotten her and she was all alone. I could see it with clarity and could feel the emotions as if they filled the air around her.

While I hung there witnessing this private and personal moment, I tried to comfort her with my presence. A sympathetic surge of love rushed out of me.

Suddenly she stopped crying. 

She lifted her head from the pillow and turned toward me. Her eyes widened, but her gaze was strangely focused as if there was something she was trying to see. I could only wonder what it was that had suddenly caught her eye. Then, looking down at my own body, I could see myself clothed in a robe of white light. I looked like an angel!

Instinctively, an urge grew within me, and reaching my hand out toward the girl, I heard myself saying words so thick with emotion that tears came to my eyes and a lump to my throat: 

“You have Bunny,” my voice said, “and you have me…You’ll never be alone.”

She must have heard or understood, because she turned and reached for her little stuffed bunny rabbit. She hugged it close to her. Then, as exhausted as she was, she lay there watching me as she slowly drifted off to sleep. 

Epilogue:

I wrote this story around 1980, but it sat in one of my notebooks until 2008, when it was published in my book, The Silent Questions. Then, about six years ago, something extraordinary happened. 

A woman asked to see me after she just finished reading Visitation. She wanted to tell me something about the story, but she paused, as she struggled to find the right words. I could see she was moved by what she read. So, I was all ears to hear what she wanted to say. 

Suddenly she said, “I think the girl in your story is me.”

Wow. I never expected that!

I wondered what could have caused her to think the girl was her. “Did the description of the house and yard seem familiar,” I asked. 

She nodded. “Yes, it sounds just like my home.” But that wasn’t the reason she thought it was her. Reading the story hit her like she was remembering it. And she seemed just as surprised as I was.

As a young girl, she often cried herself to sleep because her parents had such serious fights. It was deeply upsetting. And years later they would get divorced. 

But the moment in the story that struck her the most was when I said: “You have Bunny, and you have me. You’ll never be alone.”

It turns out that “Bunny” was the exact name she called her stuffed rabbit. And Bunny would end up becoming something she cherished and kept near her all those years. Even now, she still has a well-worn and repaired Bunny because it was so important to her as a girl.

The fact that Bunny was the actual name for her rabbit struck me because when I said those words, I didn’t know why I was saying “you have Bunny.” It never seemed like a name for a toy rabbit. When I wrote it in my notebooks, and even later when I published it, I thought about changing the name. But the whole experience was so strong for me that I knew I had to write it just as I said it.

This probably all sounds incredible. To both this woman and me, it was. But this, still, is not the end of this story. This woman, Stephanie, had married our son, and was mother to our two grandchildren, when she discovered this story in my book.

There is a fine line between deeply felt fiction and truth. And sometimes that line is so thin that it makes us wonder where the fictional part ends and truth begins.

Here’s Stephanie when she was about the age when I had this experience. And yes, even though I didn’t write it in my story, the girl I saw was blond with blue eyes, like you see. 

This is a true story. 

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Please visit Doug’s website for more information about this book, his other books, and his recent interviews: www.spiritualdialogues.com