Early in August,  in the office in our home. I can hear Lorna in the bedroom down the hall, whimpering, moaning, groaning, even an occasional wailing. I go check on her. She is crouched on the bed. I ask if she’s ok. She looks up at me and very sternly tells me to leave,  “and, do not come back.”

Ten or fifteen minutes later she came out of the bedroom, went into the back yard, and lay down on the grass. I got up and followed her.

She then told me that in the bedroom she was seeing people, one at a time, from throughout her life. People she had  never forgiven. Those that had offended or slighted her in some way.  Those she held grudges against for offenses real or imagined.  People she had been judgmental or critical of. People she had offended or hurt by her actions. She was seeing them all.

When she had finished sharing her experience, she continued to lie on the grass while looking into the sky.

After a few moments of silence looking in to the sky, Lorna spoke up. She told me what she had just seen while lying there: a small school auditorium with chairs that had been set up for an assembly that had just ended. Her impression was that the chairs had been occupied by the people she was seeing during her reconciliation experience in the bedroom.

A man was putting the chairs away and sweeping the floor. He had his shirt unbuttoned down to his waist, his garments were showing. She remembered from her youth that her dad would do the same thing during the summer when he was working in the yard or garden.

The man turned and gave her a loving look of approval. It was her dad, Danny Brashear, who had passed away in 1985.

When she told me this, my thought was that she was being prepared to go home.

She told me later that it was “an anguish of soul experience.” Anguish means extreme mental distress. Syn: torment, torture.