Illuminated: Peggy Marcantonio

 My life began and changed swiftly with the death of my mother when I was seven weeks old. As I grew, I had the sense that someone or something was always watching me. I somehow knew I was different than the siblings around me.

At night, I would sit at my window and look up at the stars. I would talk to what or whom I did not know. Then at seven years of age, the people I thought were my parents told me about my mother and that she had been killed.

I then knew that someone who I felt was watching me was her: my mother.

As I grew, I had some events that happened to me that might have killed me. I ate an entire bottle of aspirin at age two, and resulted in a long hospital stay. The nurses called me “the little escape artist” because I would get out of the covered crib and crawl up to the window to look out !

Then at age three and a half years,  I fell off of a pier in South Carolina and nearly drowned. Once again, I knew someone was there with me. At age eight,  while chasing my cousin in a game of tag, I went through a plate glass window and nearly bled to death. Again I was not afraid: Someone, some presence,  was there for me.

As I entered my teen years, my dreams changed and became so vivid. When I was 14, I had a dream that my cousin was in an automobile accident.  The next morning, my aunt woke me to tell me that my cousin was just in an accident! Luckily she was just fine; a passerby pulled her from her overturned car before it caught fire.

My life has been filled with amazing events. I was raised and adopted by my birth mother’s eldest sister. My adoptive mother would tell me about women in the family who  had gifts, so I was comforted by that.

I knew I wasn’t alone with whatever gifts I would eventually have to acknowledge.

During the “accidents” I endured there was always the same beautiful lady there in the dark smiling and shining. I wrote a poem at the age of eight to that beautiful woman. 

It goes like this:

When I leave this Earth so far,

I would like to wish upon a star.

When that certain wish comes true,

I would like to be in Heaven with you

 

I sat with my adoptive mother (who was also my aunt), the last two and a half weeks of her being unconscious on her death bed. One day her hospice nurse asked me if my mom were to pick a day to die, when would it be?

it was the middle of September already , so I thought October 3rd. I chose October because my father’s birthday was in October and the 3rd because that was the date of their wedding anniversary.

The hospice nurse didn’t think my mom would last that long!  As September ended, and I had gone home for the night and went to bed, something truly out-of-this-world happened. My husband awoke and got me up because the lights in the family room were half on, not bright but dim and the double ovens in the kitchen were alternating beeping!  We tried turning them off, but it wouldn’t work. We tried turning off the lights,  and that didn’t work!  This has never ever happened in our house before or since.

I knew it was my passed loved ones coming to prepare my mother for her passing. Just as I had predicted, my mother passed on October 3rd!

It was late and I was already home when I got the call. As we drove out of our neighborhood. there were ten deer blocking our path, very very unusual for them to be in that area! I knew my family sent them as if to say “ten of us came to carry your mother to the other side.”

-Peggy Marcantonio