Strange Convergence of Events

I’m going to tell you a true story that has a mystical slant. You might call it coincidence. Some might even say it was fate, and I really don’t know how or why this occurred, but occur it did. It still gives me goose bumps today to recall it.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1878. She was (as grandmothers usually are) closer to me than my mother. She also had a sense about her that she knew secret things about us kids that she just shouldn’t have known. For instance, she could always find our hiding places for our ‘secret’ objects and she would know about things we had done out of her sight. Of course, she was a direct descendant of one of the Salem Witches, so we always knew from where her powers came.

Grandma McKeever lived to a ripe old age, was approaching her 99th birthday and was living with her daughter – actually my mother was her niece, but that’s another story – in Buffalo, New York when I moved my family from Buffalo to Omaha, Nebraska in May of 1976.

In the fall of the next year, I was called back to Buffalo as a witness for the prosecution in a trial. That was due to the fact that I had been the agent-on-duty when the defendant had picked up a package from our freight department at work. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that package contained pornographic materials, which became the focus of the jury trial two years later.

I was served with a subpoena in Omaha to appear at court expense in Buffalo to testify. This was in October of 1977, and I went back to Buffalo as ordered. I did decline the court offer of hotel and expenses, however, since I wanted to visit with Mom and Grandma, and I certainly preferred home cooking to restaurant food. I stayed at Mom’s house for the two days of my testimony in the trial.

My part in the trial took up Monday and Tuesday, so I had some quality time to visit at the house those evenings. I left Buffalo for Omaha on a Wednesday morning, but my homecoming was short-lived.

On Thursday evening I received a call from Mom that Grandma McKeever had passed away that day. I was back on a plane for Buffalo the very next day for the funeral.

It was truly amazing to me that I was able to have one last visit with my beloved Grandma McKeever just a few short hours before she died at the age of 99. It would not have happened except for that trial, which had been delayed several times.

Call me superstitious – I am also a descendant of the Salem Witches – but I’ve always wondered if there was some intervention that caused the convergence of events that enabled me to have that one last reunion.

It has been nearly thirty-four years since the passing, but I can still envision a strange smile on her face as Grandma McKeever bid me goodbye that last time. What a gift!