Mysterious things my wife told me
before (and after) she died

17 years ago today, my son Jonah was born on my late wife's 40th birthday. During the cesarean, the attending doctors and nurses sang Happy Birthday while vacuuming out the amniotic fluid.

Nicole had spent the three previous months living in the high-risk pregnancy ward in a far-off big city hospital. We'd talk every day on the phone, but I only saw her once a week, when we'd spend the entire day together.

Her previous pregnancy ended with a stillbirth, weeks after Nicole had suffered a minor heart attack. Previous to the pregnancy, she had already been seriously ill — having developed type-1 diabetes when she was 12-years-old. By her mid-thirties, she was in the later stages of chronic kidney disease.

After the death of our daughter, I was totally against trying again as bearing a child was a big threat to her life. She made a hard-to-reckon-with counterargument that having a child gave her a reason to live and would help keep her healthier.

We finally agreed we'd try once more, but that would be it.

Well, Jonah was born in 2007 without requiring any medical interventions. He came out screaming and didn't seem to stop for a few years. We were so happy he was alive, we didn't mind the screaming or the fact it looked like he was born blind.

A few years later, Nicole's kidneys failed. So I'm not sure if her theory that having a baby would keep her healthier turned out to be true. But it did seem to help keep her will to live. Most people in her age range only survive seven years on dialysis, she made it to year twelve.

But once Jonah was taller than her, she felt her time had come.

She told me she was convinced that the last two years of her life were borrowed time she was granted to overcome the chronic depression she had been struggling with her whole life.

She also had a "vision" — that I neither doubted nor believed — that our daughter was waiting for her on the other side, along with her grandfather (whom she was quite fond of).

Then two months before her death, she told me that our "other child" was also waiting for her.

"Other child?"

"Yes," she told me, "we have three children. Two died. The first was a stillbirth, the other was a fetal miscarriage."

Nicole often suffered excessive menstrual bleeding, which could easily have covered up a first-trimester miscarriage. I filed it away in the interesting and possible cabinet in the back of my brain.

This summer, I ended up doing some work with a naturopathic doctor in Spain. When she found out my wife had died, the doctor told me that ever since she was a little girl she had been able to contact dead people.

To say I was skeptical would be an understatement.

I asked her if she thought she could contact Nicole.

She said, "I think so."

I said, "If you do, I'd need proof you were speaking to her. Nicole needs to tell you something that only she and I would know. Something specific. Preferably multiple things."

Well, the doctor went off and did whatever she does to contact the departed. An hour later she sent me a message saying, "She says you always wanted to take her to Venice."

She was right. That was something we'd talked about many times, though I doubt I ever shared it with anyone else.

But, hey, maybe every husband wants to take his wife to Venice. It could have been a lucky guess.

"Nicole also says," the doctor told me, "that she wants you to know that when she arrived on the other side three people were waiting for her: Your daughter; a man with a suit and your spontaneously aborted child."

That sure sounded like the three people Nicole said would be waiting for her: Our daughter who died at birth, her grandfather (whose photo we had on the wall wearing a suit) and the mysterious third child she claimed to have lost to a fetal miscarriage (for which there is no word in Spanish, only aborto espontáneo).

The medium-doctor went on to deliver other information, including observations Nicole was making about what Jonah and I had been up to after she left. For example, she said Nicole was happy to see that Jonah had taken up martial arts and that I was recording the audio book of my novel.

The doctor also said Nicole was very happy where she was now and spending time with very "interesting people." And that she was very happy to no longer be on dialysis anymore or suffering in her physical body.

It's hard to discount what this medium claims to have heard. I told no one about Nicole's belief that we had had a third child. Only I, her mother and a friend of hers knew. There is almost no way this naturopathic doctor, with only moderate English-speaking skills, living in Spain, could have known.

So I hope Nicole is as happy as has been reported, in whatever realm awaits us after death, with her daughter, our mystery third child (of unknown gender), her grandfather and the other "interesting people" she is working with.

Nicole had asked me not to keep her here any longer. She wanted to go. Letting her go was the hardest thing I've ever done. If I had known how hard, I would never have agreed.

You can listen to music videos I made about Nicole, and learn more about her life, death and after-life here: https://blazingpinecone.com/about/mysunflower/

And for skits and music by our son Jonah, check out: https://jonahsworld.net/

—John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/