Charlie Whitfield (Physician and Best-Selling Author of many books including Healing the Child Within), my wonderful husband of 32 years and I came down with COVID in December 2021.
There were a few days when I felt like I was dying. I could feel my life force weakening. As I was starting to pull out of COVIDs grip, Charlie became worse and was hospitalized. We weren’t allowed to visit anyone back then. Three days later, he was moved to ICU. When I heard his lungs were attacked and he was moved to ICU, I snuck into the hospital at 3 in the morning. I stood and looked in the window outside his room. A nurse who was attending to him came to the door and without a word, helped me get into the same isolation gear she was wearing. And then she disappeared. I held him and within a minute he flatlined.
Fast forward through gut wrenching grieving to May 2023. The only thing saving me and my sanity was the tremendous amount of gratitude that kept coming up from the depths of my being. I had been a confused and miserable “Adult-Child” of a mentally ill mother and a first marriage where my husband moved right into my mother’s role, gas lighting me until there was no “me” anymore. Then I had an Near-Death Experience (NDE) and saw the truth of all of it. God showed me and I had been an atheist before this.
Co-incidence?
I met Ken Ring and became a subject in Heading Toward Omega (and later, Lessons from the Light.)
I met Bruce Greyson and became his research assistant. I got to study all of my own after effects that were also common among other experiencers. Dr. Greyson said my Life Review was the “Prototype” for Life Reviews. 20% of experiencers have a Life Review. For me it was the beginning of my healing.
I was doing a lot of talks both on TV, in documentaries, nursing schools, Hospice and on and on. More often than expected, during the break or after, people would come up to me and tell me about their abuse or neglect or traumas in their childhoods and their NDEs. I wanted to look into this as a possible correlation and so Ken Ring added it to his next NDE questionnaire calling it “Unpredictable Violence.”
The percentage that came out of that was significant, in the 50s! And now I really wanted to dig in. No body that I knew of was talking about this back in the 1980s.
Charlie Whitfield entered my life in 1990 (with more synchronicities – in fact, I just wrote a book about them called, “Grieving in Gratitude.” (and it’s all synchronicities, one after another.) Charlie gave me a copy of Healing the Child Within and between God holding me in my Life Review and this book my life suddenly made sense. And this is where all this gratitude is coming from. My head did not order me to be in gratitude. It keeps coming up from deep within me as a felt sense!
Moving
So it’s two years later and I moved from Atlanta where Charlie spent the last 20 years with a great group of scientists at the CDC proving everything he had observed and written about in the 1980s! (more synchronicities, we moved to Atlanta with no prospects for work but we knew we were guided. Then less than a year later, Charlie was invited to join with the ACE Study researchers – “Adverse Childhood Experience Study”.)
The day before I moved into my much smaller home, I said a prayer in the middle of the empty echo-e living room, “Please Dear God, please dear Charlie if you can hear me… Please God, Show me a sign that Charlie is all right.” The next day, two PODs were plopped down on my drive way and three “college hunks” carried everything in. Then a truck from my builder pulled up. The driver was carrying the tile plaque that he bolted just left of my garage door. I had only known my lot number and as I studied the new street numbers my insides started vibrating. The first three numbers 129, were actually the month and day Charlie died, December 9th. But those last two numbers 4 and 6, were an enigma. I ran inside and went to my desk that had just been set down a few minutes before. Top drawer right, and I am holding Charlie’s death certificate! Hands shaking just a little bit. He was pronounced dead at 40 minutes past 6.
Some synchronicities leave us silent. This one does me. Every time I pull in or out of my garage, or stand and talk to neighbors, the sign is right there.
My heart leaps just thinking about it, because Charlie is all right and he is with God!
