Along with green eyes, red hair, and freckles, I inherited something else from my Scottish ancestors, an odd ability that I didn’t seek and wish I didn’t possess. Entitled taibhsearachd in Gaelic, loosely translated as vision of two sights, I often receive foreknowledge of a family member’s death during sleep.

I was in ninth grade living in Annandale, Virginia, when I dreamed that I was dying, my paternal grandfather sitting by my bedside holding my hand. He resided in Royston, Georgia, five hundred miles south and I hadn’t seen him for over a year. When news came the following week of his heart attack and sudden demise, it was a complete surprise to our family, including me. Only later did I realize that my dream was not about me but him, a foresight which has haunted me ever since.

Fast forward two decades. I’m living in the foothills of Appalachia, driving home one night with my three sons in the car. A large owl zips over the front of the hood heading toward the windshield. Its yellow-orange eyes stare at my first-born son, Dean, riding shotgun in the passenger seat, then the owl wheels skyward and disappears. In Appalachian folklore, an owl’s appearance is often seen as a sign of death. I didn’t believe that old wives’ tale and set the event aside until a dream confirmed the omen.

Dean and I were standing beside a deep canal with water barreling past the ice-laced edges. My son lost his footing and fell headfirst into the current, the weight of his winter clothing dragging him downward. I dove in after his sinking form, then finally caught him. I pushed off from the bottom, my son clutched to my chest, propelling us upward using my free arm, kicking my legs and feet, fighting for our lives. We didn’t make it to the surface in time and in my dream, we both drowned.

“NO!” I shouted at my bedroom walls, sobbing awake from the nightmare.

Just before Thanksgiving that same year, Dean and I were waiting in an Atlanta hospital for his test results. The diagnosis was juvenile leukemia, which transmuted into Burkitt’s lymphoma, a virulent form of cancer. My son was accepted for a bone marrow transplant at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, located four hundred miles north of our home. In his fragile condition caused by skin-penetrating rounds of chemotherapy, it was risky for him to fly on a commercial airplane. Angel Flight, a non-profit organization of pilots who volunteer their private planes to fly sick children, agreed to transport us. After we lifted off from McCollum Airport, my two younger sons waving goodbye to us, the small plane banked right to fly over Lake Acworth. Looking down at the shimmering surface, I heard a voice say,

Dean will not return to Georgia alive.

I snapped my head toward my nine-year-old to see if he heard this shocking prophesy. Listening to air traffic chatter through headphones, he was gazing out the window enjoying the view. The pilot and copilot sitting in front of us also showed no reaction. No one heard that revelation but me. We landed that afternoon and stayed with a girlfriend overnight. My son became violently ill and between vomits of black, blood-laden fluids asked me,

“Mommy, am I going to die?”

What was I to say? Yes, a disembodied voice told your mom you’d be leaving the earth soon? I chickened out and replied,

“I don’t know baby. But what will happen if you do?”

He became very still, pondering, and said,

“I’ll go to live with Jesus.”

My son entered the hospital the next day for the final three months of his life. During his treatment, I took copious notes in a wire-bound notebook with college ruled paper, the type used for high school assignments. It was my coping mechanism, writing down his every treatment, each blood test result, and medication prescribed. I became a translator, able to comprehend and discuss specialized medical terminology, then relay it in layman’s terms to the rest of the family. After one discussion with his care team, a pediatric oncologist asked me if I worked as a nurse in my home state.

“No,” I said, “I’m just a mom.”

A year after my son’s death, I opened that dog-eared notebook. It crackled like a broken piece of my heart to see lettering similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. I couldn’t read the medical terms or decipher the notes penned in my own handwriting.

Why I receive admonitions and enigmatic knowledge beyond my level of education, I’ll never know. It may be a DNA inheritance from my Scottish ancestors, my paternal Clan Gordon family, or maternal Clan Buchanan folk. Some Highlanders believed clairvoyance, an da shealladh in Gaelic, the ability to see both worldly and spirit spheres was passed from parent to child. Deemed a
privilege in the past, this phenomenon of portent was reverently received from forebears, too sacred to discuss with outsiders, knowing not everyone is receptive to premonitions or can receive a sign. In today’s society, it’s categorized as superstition at best and psychosis at worst.

But I wonder if having two sights is a sort of grace, a celestial forewarned is forearmed, to help one function when others fall apart. Even so, there are those who measure affection via volumes of frenzy, love proven in heights of hysteria where calmness in a crisis is characterized as uncaring. In the hospital family waiting room before an audience of onlookers, my son’s paternal grandmother berated me as being coldhearted, rejecting my acceptance of the inevitable, vowing Dean would recover due to her fervent supplications. She was unprepared when he succumbed to his disease on the seventh day of March, a cold winter day, three months before his tenth birthday.

Thirty years later, during the COVID pandemic, I didn’t receive forewarning of my father’s passing. But three years after his funeral, he appeared in a dream and said,

Tell Marilyn I’ll see her soon.

I wrote down his words and stuffed the paper into my top dresser drawer. No one wants to hear a prediction of their ending, so I didn’t share his request. When my older sister, Marilyn, passed within a year of his caveat, I was not surprised. If anything, my dad’s promise to greet her when she left this physical realm was comforting. That’s what I anticipate when I die, to be welcomed by loved ones, chiefly my son, Dean. As I look forward to my reunion with him, I’m not afraid of death, though I’m not trying to hasten my expiration date either.

Finally, I haven’t discerned this odd ability in either of my two living sons, so I’ll rely on the owls. The next time I hear one call or visit me in the night, I pray I’ll know if it’s summoning me.

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