Christina

It has been many years ago that her parents died, but my mother is still connected with them and they help her. They always announce important things that will happen in the future. In this way, my mother always knew about such happenings – whether positive or negative – before they occurred.

My mother had always had a very close connection to her parents. Her father died when she still was a child. She was the youngest child and the only daughter, so her father was really attached to her and always came to her defence when she had done something that annoyed her older brothers – because, unlike their father, the brothers did not have any understanding or indulgence for their young sister.

Mother’s father – my grandfather – died relatively early of a long illness. My grandmother had, on the contrary to her deceased husband – who had been a very gentle person – a rather energetic and temperamental personality, but was a good person too.

When my grandmother died, she had not seen my mother for 15 years, for my mother had been cast out of the family. This was because she had married my father without the permission of her older brother. But nobody knew that my mother had fled with the permission and the blessings of my grandmother. My mother’s brother had engaged her with another man, without my mother’s knowing. She did not want him, and her brother only had engaged her with another man because the man she really loved – my father – came from another region, and the brother disapproved the connection between them.

Due to this, my grandmother and my mother had been separated for 15 years, even though they had lived only 300 km away from each other. But that had been different times then, and nobody today may be able to imagine how it was like back then.

So, my grandmother lay on her deathbed after years. But she could not die, for she wanted to see her daughter one last time. Finally my mother’s brother – my uncle – was forced to inform my mother about this, and that grandmother wanted to see her again.

I was still a child, but I remember how my parents left hectically after they had received the telegram. When they returned after three days, my mother’s eyes were swollen for she had cried so much, and she was deeply sad. My father did not say a word too. We children were still very young, at least I, and we did not understand what had happened. We never had known our grandmother.

Later I found out that my grandmother had died only a short time before my mother arrived. Mother and daughter could not meet each other in this life again. My mother only could throw herself over her mother’s still warm breast, crying and lamenting this horrible fate which had happened just because of ignorant people.

The older I got, the more insight I got into the mediumship of my mother. She suffered from incurable rheumatism and had terrible crises several times in a year, where she had to lie in bed for days.

But after those crises, she often told us that she had seen her father at the head board of her bed, every time she felt so bad. He consoled and encouraged her, "Hang on, my dear daughter, it will be over soon", he said to her lovingly. It was always a great solace for her to see him beside her, and she felt protected. He was dead since a long time, but nevertheless she could perceive him with her inner eyes, for the illness and the pain even intensified her mediumship.

But it was not only her father who was at her side, she also could always see her mother as well. Unlike my grandfather, she never came near to her, but stood at the door and looked at her. In contrast to grandfather, grandmother was silent and always grave, as she had been in life. But my mother could feel how her parents were united even after death and that they had not forgotten her daughter. Indeed, my grandparents had loved each other really much.

We never believed our mother when, after her crises, she told us about these experiences. She was deeply moved by these encounters and she told us about it, for she wished to do so. We laughed and said that she must have dreamt. But my mother was firmly convinced of it, and nothing we said could change her opinion about it.

When I was 20, my mother had a bad crisis again. This time it was especially severe and she even had lost every will to live. She was in the claws of despair and I really feared for her life. I was desperate and stood beside her bed, like so often, and just tried to be there for her. I felt so helpless because I could not ease her pain. My dismay lasted for many days. No remedy helped. In addition, my mother was deeply depressed for she had not seen her only son for years. He had emigrated to a foreign country and my mother was full of grief and longing. This fact plus the illness made her wish to die more than ever.

On an afternoon where she had calmed down a bit, I had fallen asleep. There I had a dream: from a distance, I saw a man coming up to me. I never had seen him before, but I immediately knew that he was my grandfather, my mother’s father. He looked at me and smiled. I felt a very strong love and I was deeply moved. I felt his love for me and for my mother, but not only this: he also filled me with courage and confidence. All the sorrow had fallen from me, I suddenly was happy and very hopeful. These feelings were so intensive that I woke up. "Mom, mom, grandpa was here, I just met grandpa!" I called out to my mother. She opened her eyes and looked at me bewildered. I described everything I had seen and felt, I described the man I had seen, his clothes, and what he had transmitted to me. "Oh God, this is my father, yes", she said and her eyes filled with tears. "So I will overcome this and everything will be okay", she added after a while. It was as if the hope and courage that my grandfather had communicated to me in the dream, now had reached my mother. She won her will to live again and overcame the crisis.

On another occasion, grandmother literally saved our lives. It was around 1997, when almost the whole population of Albania had sold their belongings and invested the money in dubious companies. These companies were pure "pyramid schemes" and there was zero safety. But at this time, nobody knew this or nobody wanted to know it. The greed for money was bigger than sanity and reason, although it was very suspicious to obtain up to 50 % interest rate per month.

Those intrigues went well for four or five years. My father had invested our whole money in such a company, too, and we lived on the interest amount for a few years. With the portion of inheritance of my father, we had bought a flat and invested the rest of it in the companies.

Two weeks before the abrupt and total crash of the pyramid scheme – which meant that all the investors would lose their whole money and never get it back – my mother had another dream. Her mother came up to her, looked at her and said in a grave voice: "Keep an eye on your money." Then she went away.

Hereupon my mother was really worried. She took the warning of her mother very seriously and now tried to convince my father to withdraw all our money from the company. But my father refused to accept this, because there was no apparent reason to do this.

But in the meantime, my mother had had another dream; it had not been a dream with her parents, but it had been a dream with really prophetic features and she did not longer doubt that something very bad was about to happen. She insisted on withdrawing the money, and in the end my father had no choice and went to the company.

When he arrived there, he saw many people queuing up. They waited for depositing their money. My father thought by himself that he was crazy to withdraw all our money, while the others did only wish to deposit theirs. Nevertheless, he withdrew our money, but he left the interest amount and the money which belonged to us children, because my sister and I had asked him to leave our money there. Still, he had 70 – 80 % of the whole money back now.

Not even a week had passed, when all of a sudden all the pyramid companies closed down. Nobody was able to withdraw or deposit any money. Nobody knew what had happened and where the money had gone. The whole pyramid system crashed, because the system only works as long as the money keeps moving. The people lost their savings and the country plunged into a complete chaos. The whole governmental system had broken down, there was no police anymore, the army deserted. Gangs and criminals ruled the streets, there was blood and thunder, plundering and abduction, and countless people committed suicide out of grief and despair, for they had lost everything.

But we, my parents, my sisters and I, we sat at home, watched the news, looked at the chaos from our balcony, and we were silent. The suffering of all these people and the terror that ruled was too big, so we could not think of our own luck. We felt paralysed. It was a hardly believable nightmare that happened back then. Only when the situation improved a bit, we began to understand the great luck we’d had. Every now and then, one of us pronounced the silent words "thanks to grandma". And it was true. For if my grandmother had not been there to warn us, we would have lost all our money and, with it, our whole existence. God knows how we would have survived then.

That we had lost a part of the money still, did never made us lament. For we had saved the bigger part of it, and what we had lost was exactly the interest amount we had lived on for the last two years. So, in the end, we had exactly saved the amount of money that my father had invested at the beginning.

Since then, nobody of us laughs anymore when mother speaks of her encounters with her parents. I was deeply moved by how true love can overcome any borders and does not know any separation. And these experiences woke my interest in spiritual things right from the start.