The day my grandmother died, I went to the nursing home to be with my mom. I remember seeing my grandmother’s body and thinking that it looked nothing like her. Of course it was her body, her face, her hands. But she wasn’t there anymore. I was looking at an empty vessel.
After the coroner took her body, we gathered her things and brought them back to my mom’s house. There is something very strange about that process that’s never quite sat with me well. Someone you love has just died, and almost immediately you’re sorting through their belongings and moving them out of the place where they lived. There is this practical expectation that life has to keep moving even though, for you, something enormous has just stopped.
We brought her things to Mom’s house and made plans for her to come to my house for dinner and the evening. Before we left, she needed to go upstairs to use the bathroom and get her purse and a few other things. The normal, polite thing would have been for me to wait for her so we could leave together. I stood there for a moment and suddenly had a very distinct feeling that I needed to leave right then.
I resisted it because it seemed rude. But the feeling persisted, so I called upstairs and asked if she minded if I went ahead. She didn’t, so I walked out to my van.
When I started the engine, I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe was playing on the radio. I immediately recognized it as a message from my grandmother. I had the very strong sense that she was letting me know that she had crossed over and that everything was better than well. Through the tears, I said, “I hear you.”
I realize how easily something like this can be dismissed as coincidence, and I don’t blame anyone for seeing it that way. There were just a few details that made it feel very different to me. The radio station my van was tuned to was a pop Top 10 station, and I Can Only Imagine wasn’t part of its genre or normal rotation. And the song wasn’t just beginning when I got into the van; it was already almost to the end of the first verse.
That detail matters to me because if I had gotten into the van when I first felt the urge to leave, I would have heard the song from the beginning. Instead, I hesitated. I questioned the feeling. I waited long enough that when I finally got into the van, I arrived at exactly that point in the song.
Could I explain it another way? Certainly. There is always another explanation if you want one badly enough. But I wasn’t looking for a sign that day. I wasn’t expecting anything unusual to happen. I was simply leaving my mom’s house, thinking about my grandmother and my mom, and following a feeling I couldn’t quite explain.
I didn’t hear it as a random song on the radio. I heard it as my grandmother saying, I’m here. I’ve crossed over. You don’t need to worry about me.
And somehow, in that moment, I believed her.
