My Nana was buried in a small town in Alberta, Canada that she lived in for a big part of her life. She raised her kids there. She got married and lost her husband to death there. She had friends and family there. It was her home and that’s where she wanted to be buried – beside two of her kids.
The cemetery is four hours away from where we live and because she didn’t want a funeral, all of the family went on their own time. My parents, myself, and my husband went up together a few weeks after she was buried.
My Nana and I were very close. I was the baby in the family, and she treated me as such. I spent a lot of time with her when I was young and loved her more than words can say.
In her last decade alive, she had dementia and didn’t recognize anyone or communicate very well.
But, sometimes at home, I would smell her perfume and feel like she was around me. I like to think that she was able to escape her mind and get in touch with her spiritual side.
Asking For A Sign
When we got to the cemetery, I asked for a sign that she was there from an animal. I assumed it would be a bird because the cemetery was surrounded by a wall with homes and commercial buildings on the other side, so it never occurred to me that any other animal would be there.
I kept looking up to see if I saw something unusual. I didn’t.
I prayed for a sign she was around as I sat by her grave. I didn’t get one.
While I sat there, my mom had been off looking for a couple of graves where my Nana’s in-laws were buried. She spent a good half an hour walking around the small cemetery, but she couldn’t find them.
So, my husband and I started to look as well. We spent about a half an hour looking, but we couldn’t find the graves either.
My mom gave up and wanted to go, but for some reason my husband wanted to keep looking. He said, “Let’s just look for a few more minutes,” and my mom agreed. He took off to a place we had already been and I followed him. We passed through an opening in some high hedges that were surrounding graves. I stayed in the section of graves enclosed by the hedges and my husband went through an opening on the other side. Suddenly he called my name and outstretched his hand to me.
I walked over terrified of what I was going to see once I got past the hedges. He looked so still and mesmerized that I couldn’t even imagine what he was looking at in my frame of mind.
When I grabbed his hand and looked to see what he was looking at, I saw a deer a few feet away staring at us. It was just standing there looking at us. Then, it turned around and walked towards a tree against the wall that outlined the cemetery.
It stopped at the tree, looked over its shoulder at us, and then reached up with its mouth to tug on the tree a few times. It looked at us one more time and then walked away and disappeared around a corner.
We walked sideways so that we could see it around the corner, but it was gone.
That wouldn’t be so weird, but there was nowhere for the deer to go! There was a 10 foot wall around the corner and the deer would have had to walk along the wall back into our view or jumped that 10 feet and been totally visible to us.
It just disappeared.
We walked towards the tree and when we got there I burst into tears. The two graves my mom had been looking for were on either side of the tree.
I got my sign.
That was the most incredible experience I’ve had with a deceased loved one. I wish my parents would have been able to see the deer, but they said they saw nothing from where they were.
To make things even better, I fell asleep in the back of my parent’s van on the way home, and when I woke up and opened my eyes, there was a perfect heart-shaped cloud in the sky.
