Nancy Auburn Stokes

This is my mother who I adored. Yes I was a mama's boy. It was her birthday yesterday. She would have been 69 on this birthday. She died in 1990, and I still miss her tremendously. There is a story that I want to share with everyone that I will cherish forever.

It was early November 1990, about 2 months after her death. I was working graveyard shift which I had been working for almost 2 years. I already had problems sleeping at night, and now, depressed out of my mind, because I was missing my mother, I was really having some sleep issues. Tammie and the kids were gone somewhere, and I was alone in our house. It was starting to get dark outside and moving rapidly to the hour that I needed to start getting ready for another night at work. I think that I had probably total of 1 hour sleep all day, all in small intervals at a time. Moving from our bed to the couch and then back to the bed over and over again, it seemed hopeless for me to find a comfortable place to lay my head for rest. During one of my transfers, I glanced into my daughters room and noticed something different about her sleeping quarters. She was six years old at the time and like any other young child, she loved to play "make believe". She had been pretending that she was camping out in the wilderness. She had built her room into a cross between a fort and a tent. Inside this tent was a full size mattress that she was sleeping on at night. It looked very comfortable and inviting, so I laid down to see if I test my luck at some sleep in this location. I was getting desperate, and the closer it got to the time for me to go to work, the worse my anxiety attacks were getting. I laid there looking out into the hall of my house thinking of my mom when all of a sudden my mom walked into the room. I wasn't startled or surprised at all, it was like I was expecting her. I didn't say a word. We hugged for several minutes and she told me that everything was going to be OK. That she was OK and for me not to worry about her. Tears were rolling down my face and it felt like something was stuck in my throat and I couldn't swallow it. She kissed me on the forehead and told me that she loved me and to quit worrying about her. She looked at me waiting for some conformation that I understood what she had said to me, so I smiled and nodded my head. Then she got up and on her way out of the room, she closed the door to the room. As she was closing it, the door made a very loud squeaking noise that I never had noticed before. I thought to myself, "man that door needs some WD40 bad". Then I closed my eyes and feel asleep for about 15 minutes. When I woke up, I felt like that I had been sleeping for 12 hours. I felt so rested and restored. I lied there just thinking to myself, "gosh, that dream felt so real". I looked at the door and noticed that it was closed. I remembered that I didn't close the door. The whole time the sound of the squeaking door was tattooed into my memory. I was thinking that surely Tammie came home and saw me in my daughters room sleeping so she closed the door so the kids wouldn't wake me. So I called out her name, and nobody was there. I got up to open and close the door just to see what it sounded like, and to my amazement, it sounded the same way as when my mother walked out and closed it.
I went to work that night and had a very good night at work. Not tired one bit.

What happened to me? Did an angel visit me? Was it my mom? Was it a dream? If it was a dream, why did I feel like I had 12 hours of great sleep in just a few minutes? How did the door get closed?
I heard a similar story like this one a few years later from a friend of mine. She lost her father and she had been going through the same depression and sleep apnea that I had gone through. Her father visited her in the same way my mother visited me.
I will hold on to this forever, and I hope to find out the truth of what I experienced when I die and go to heaven. I still miss my mother big time, but I feel that she is always with me where ever I go.