An experiencer details her childhood family dynamics and an incident where she was saved by her Guardian Angel while tumbling down a narrow staircase.
The following account was forwarded by a reader:
"As soon as the hands gently set me on the hallway's cold tile floor, the bubble is broken, and sound returns. I am flying. My mother has lost her grasp on me and I am flying backwards down the long narrow staircase. The wretched pink snowsuit is now twisted around me and my mother is frozen with horror at the top of the stairs. She is screaming but I don’t hear her. I don’t hear anything. I am enveloped in a bubble of softness and comfort and I’m airborne. I don’t feel the smash of stair treads breaking my tiny bones. I don’t feel my skull crack on a series of balusters all the way down. I don’t feel my neck break and I don’t feel myself die in a crumpled pink heap at the bottom of the staircase. All I feel are the strong hands supporting me in a cushioned envelope while I travel in a slow-motion glide–down, down, down.
As soon as the hands gently set me on the hallway's cold tile floor, the bubble is broken, and sound returns. I am completely unhurt and not frightened. From my perspective, the whole thing has been a gleeful ride. Like the slide at the park. I don’t see the owner of the hands but the sense of loving presence and the physical pressure of the individual fingers and upturned palms will brand my body with memory for the rest of my life.
Minutes before, red-faced and angry, I was wrestling against the dreaded snowsuit. Anyone who’s ever tried to attire a tantruming two-year-old in one knows that it’s like trying to get an octopus into a straight jacket. That my mother chose the top of the hallway stairs in the dark hallway of the ancient Brooklyn brownstone to do this, puzzles me still. In her defense, I am choosing to believe that she was out of her mind with grief. Only two or three weeks before, my eighteen-year-old sister died of an undiagnosed heart defect. A fact that will begin another downward descent for my family. One that is unequivocal.
I never knew my sister, my parent's firstborn, but the effect of her tragic death will profoundly affect me. Already sixteen years old when I was born, she was two years older than our brother and four years older than our disabled sister. Somewhere in the years between myself and the next youngest, my mother also gave birth to a full-term stillborn daughter. Some families seem to cope with grief and get to a place of healing. Mine didn’t.
In the days before it was “okay” to talk about your feelings, the only option was to cut them off, ignore and deny them. Of course grief and anger of this magnitude won’t be denied, not really. It just bleeds out in all kinds of toxic and complex ways. In my family, the usual and customary way began with a disagreement. Somebody said something or did something or didn’t do something. Starting off small, it would become a screaming/slamming door/throwing things match followed by days of cold silence.
My sister’s death naturally had a profound effect on my siblings. My brother began acting out shortly after our sister’s death and found himself in juvenile detention for two years. He then escaped completely by marrying young. My disabled sister had lost her biggest champion and mentor. Emotionally challenged already, she was often both the subject of and initiator of much of the conflict. My mother’s coping method was to become an indomitable whirlwind of activity, anger, and anxiety. Even the smallest thing became a matter of urgency to her and I swear you could hear her crackle with energy.
My father who had begun a series of heart attacks in his thirties became her opposite – sullen and morose. He had to retire early with strict instructions not to exert himself. His life became a series of journeys between the couch, the kitchen, and the bed. Unlike my mother’s, his brand of anger was of the slow-burn variety – exploding suddenly and without warning. His broken heart would kill him just seven years after his daughter.
A classic “lost child,” I learned how to dodge bullets and disappear at will. Drawing and reading upstairs in my room became my refuge as the war raged on beneath me. I often note that I was born just in time to sweep up and turn off the lights in my family. By the time I came into the picture, the family was well into the process of annihilation. I often wonder what would have happened if I had died or sustained massive brain damage on that wintry day in Brooklyn. How much worse would it have gotten for them? How much worse could it have gotten? It seems uncannily fortuitous that such a mercy would be bestowed at such a time of tremendous stress.
Most people don’t have any memories at all of their two-year-old self. I’m sure I wouldn’t either except for the indelible memory of those hands. I am enveloped in a bubble of softness and comfort and I’m airborne. I was too young to correct my mother when she’d retell the story of how the miraculous pink snowsuit saved my life. I couldn’t understand why she’d be lying. Didn’t she know about the hands?
It took a few years for me to recognize the fact that invisible hands are not something experienced in the normal course of events. Nor are they accepted as even possible. Like the lifetime of so-called paranormal incidents ahead of me, I kept it to myself. Was it an angel? A spirit guide? Was it the spirit of my recently deceased sister? Was it some aspect of my higher self? Is there a force in the universe that decides when one more death would be too much? If so, how do you account for the staggering succession of children lost to single families in generations past – before there were inoculations against things like Diphtheria and Polio?
To say I am grateful for that near miss would be to simplify it. While I am grateful, of course, I am also confounded. Of course, I didn’t know it then but it was just the beginning of a lifetime’s series of things that would both intrigue and bewilder me. Angels appear to transcend all cultures, races, and systems. They are a part of human history and civilization, sometimes at the forefront, other times in the shadows, but they are always there. They don’t belong to any one particular religion, although many modern people try to associate them with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. No one religion holds total responsibility for the belief in angels. In truth, these religions only support the existence of angels, they didn’t create them." Silver Ravenwolf
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