This happened on the morning of my mother's death, twenty-eight years ago. No one even suspected my mother was about to die. She was 56 years old and was told on her last physical exam that her test results were the best ever.

Early that morning, prior to my awakening for the day, I saw a stairway which resembled the one in "Gone With the Wind," only this stairway was white and surrounded by white light. I remember running to the top of the stairs. Everything remained brilliant white. At the top of the stairs, two people embraced. I do not know for sure who these two people were, but I have surmised they were my mother and father. My father had passed away seven years earlier.

When they embraced, I felt a combination of feelings that human words could not describe. If you could take the most love you have ever felt in your life, along with the most peaceful moment in your life and magnify these feelings over and over, then encase them in a bubble with you at the center, you may be able to explain the experience. It was as though I was totally encompassed with this powerful, indescribable feeling of perfect love.

I didn't want to leave wherever it was that I was. While in this "state," the words "seven years, Linda" came through to me. I have never been able to understand why, unless it is that my mother and father were separated 7 years by death.

While I was encased in the "bubble," I felt a touch to my arm. It was my husband tapping my arm and saying, "Coffee's on." I instantly was angry with him for the interruption. Although at the time I didn't even begin to understand what had just happened to me.

This was Saturday, and we had planned to purchase a new vacuum that day. So off we went, purchased the vacuum, and returned home around lunchtime. We hadn't even unpacked the vacuum from the box when the phone rang with the news of my mother's death.

Not long after her death, my mother came to me in a dream, just as deceased family members often come following a death. We were having a conversation and during the conversation I asked my mother, "Mom, you're dead now, and I know you are in heaven. Could you tell me what heaven is like?" Her response to me was, "Linda, it's not what you think." So after that dream, I began to read books and watch TV programs that dealt with "life after life" or near-death experiences. And Embraced By The Light and The Awakening Heart have verified what I somehow already knew.

I can't say that my mother and I were exceptionally close. I can't even remember her hugging me or kissing me. But I never doubted for one second her love for me. For several years following her death, she came to me in dreams many times when I needed someone to comfort me.

Over the years, I more or less avoided telling anyone about this. But then I told a close friend who is a true believer in God and who I knew I could trust. As I talked about my experience of that Saturday morning, for the first time I began to feel that I had been given a gift from God. It was a forewarning, some type of sign of what was going to happen. I became convinced also that the "Holy Spirit" had come to comfort me throughout the days that were ahead. Now, I share what happened with as many people as I can. People are usually grateful to hear it, and they thank me for sharing.

If I had one wish to make, it would be that everyone could have a similar experience as I had on that Saturday morning inside that "bubble" of absolute and perfect love.

Linda F.