My Dad was always such a stickler for privacy. That being said, the experience bothered him on some level, because Dad is the type of person who believes there is no life after death, despite his numerous paranormal experiences to the contrary.
I understood Dad not wanting to share those with anyone; this was the only time he had a positive experience that I know of, and I think that bothered him more than anything else. He spoke of it often to me, and kept asking what I thought it meant. So, here is the story as best I can recall.
My Dad was falling asleep everywhere. In the living room while watching the news. At the kitchen table while working on his crosswords. He fell asleep one day in the middle of a conversation with my mother. It didn’t seem to matter how much sleep he got or how early he went to bed.
Mom and I discussed in hushed tones about sleep apnea and how we were going to broach the topic with Dad (a man who hated doctors and who wouldn’t take kindly to us telling him he had to go) As expected, he totally lost his temper, screamed bloody blue murder at both of us and then ignored us for days to teach us a lesson about trying to make him do something he didn’t want to do. Dad can get violent and abusive, so I walked off with the attitude that he was just going to kill some poor family on the roadway someday because there was literally no way to keep him home or get him to a doctor. Mom muttered darkly about what her next step should be because SOMEBODY had to do SOMETHING.
In the end, the decision was taken out of our hands in the strangest of ways. My father, being the kind of man he is, decided that he wanted to go fishing one fine morning. He gets up at 4 am to get to the place where he likes to fish by daybreak. Dad is a morning person. By the time Mom and I get up around 9 am, he is usually home from fishing.
We got up this particular morning and both of us are immediately heartsick for two reasons: (a) he is obviously out fishing by himself and (b) he has not returned at his usual time. Mom is at the phone trying to contact her brother-in-law (Dad’s brother) to get him to go check on Dad, when our car rolls into the yard, about a half hour late and with grass and mud clinging to the front fender.
Dad is okay, but he is obviously quite shaken up. He tells us that he got to the fishing hole just fine, and there were no bites “because the wind was wrong” so he packed up to come home. He was coming down Kelly’s Mountain when he started to feel tired. He did that trick where you roll down the windows and you turn up the radio. He says he didn’t even know he fell asleep. He said he started hearing something hitting the window by his head, and it hit him that what he was hearing were trees slapping against the car. He panicked, but a voice told him “Don’t lay on those brakes and everything will be just fine”. So he didn’t. The car came to rest at the bottom of the speed limit sign at the bottom of Kelly’s Mountain.
He showed us several times afterward and it is the gentlest slope of a ditch he could’ve managed to land in, especially when you consider all the ground he could’ve landed in before that. (There are a lot of drop offs in that area.) Somehow my father managed to sleep drive his way down the three biggest curves coming down that mountain (he has no memory of driving it at all) and land in best place possible, coming out of the whole thing with not a scratch on him.
He always shakes his head at this part of the story. “I guess I’m meant to be here, huh?” he says. I asked him once about the voice he thought he heard. He got very emotional. “You’re gonna think I’m nuts. I thought I saw my Dad in the passenger seat for just a quick second.” He laughs uncomfortably. “My guardian angel, mebbe”. My Dad’s father died of cancer when I was seven. I’d like to believe he was there, looking after Dad when we couldn’t. Somebody so obviously was.
Elizabeth D,
Cape Breton NS
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