My dying mother stroked her dog and an angel appeared… I didn’t believe in miracles but what she saw is proof of the other side

I’ll never forget the fear I felt when I saw my mom lying in bed, hooked up to so many machines, fighting for her life in a hospital.

While this was my first visit, my mother, Aileen Morrison, 61, is no stranger to medical facilities.

She was diagnosed with renal tubular acidosis in her 30s, and her kidneys had been slowly failing ever since.

The condition meant her kidneys could not properly filter acids from her blood, causing it to become too acidic, which can lead to a malfunction that triggers extreme fatigue, confusion and nausea among other things.

By the time she was in her late 50s, she needed a transplant. The operation itself was a success in 2016.

But then, five years later, she found herself suffering a life-threatening side effect: sepsis.

Organ recipients are particularly vulnerable to the often deadly reaction to infection because they typically take a lifelong course of immunosuppressive drugs. These weaken the immune system to prevent it from attacking the transplanted organ. But it can also make fighting off ordinary infections especially difficult.

In my mom’s case, an infection had somehow spread to her bloodstream and transplanted kidney – potentially caused by strep bacteria, though we still don’t know for sure.

And on that terrifying night at a New Jersey hospital in October 2021, she started to go into septic shock. My mom was at risk of organ failure and her odds of survival had plummeted.

My sister had called me in Washington, DC, where I was an over-caffeinated 27-year-old health policy journalist accustomed to running around Capitol Hill. I was shocked to hear the panic in her voice and I immediately booked an Amtrak ticket to New Jersey. 

I visited shortly before the situation turned dire. She was able to speak to me and reassure me that she would be okay. I couldn’t tell if she was scared, but I think I was probably scared enough for the both of us.

Yet it was here that something miraculous happened.

Machines beeped in a steady rhythm as my mom drifted to sleep after many courses of antibiotics and intravenous (IV) fluids. IV poles hovered over her bed, keeping her hydrated and delivering doses of medication.

‘I remember having difficulty breathing, my whole body hurt, and I had a couple of IVs, and I had a catheter in, and I was on a monitor – you know, all the things, so it’s completely uncomfortable,’ Aileen told me several years later. 

‘And I remember I was lying there, and I kept imagining that [our family dog] Jackson was on my lap and I was petting him.’

She told me she had been stroking the air for about an hour, believing our pet was sitting on her lap, before she experienced a bright light emerging from the back corner of the room. She told me it was being emitted by what she believed was a guardian angel.

‘All of a sudden, over my right shoulder in the right corner of the room, I see an actual, I assume, angel with the kindest, most calm radiance about her,’ she claimed.

‘And she actually had wings, which is kind of crazy. And I just looked at her like it was the most normal thing in the world to have an angel in your room.’

She recalled experiencing the figure at her bedside asking, ‘Do you want to get out of here?’

Then she felt a though she had become separate from her body – an ethereal her floating over the real her lying in bed.

‘Next thing I know, I’m flying over the hospital – like over the parking lot and everything – and then I’m all the way in, like, a galaxy of just stars everywhere, all over me, and we just start flying,’ she told me.

My mom vaguely remembers being asked by the angel where in the world she would rather be. Her first answer was London, despite never having been, ‘because it seems festive at the holidays.’

She claimed that the two of them flew among stars to the city, where they stayed for what seemed like hours – invisible to Londoners dipping in and out of shops late in the evening toting shopping bags full of newly-purchased Christmas gifts.

The experience turned to them strolling down the street, where she said she suddenly became aware of the biting cold – as well as the fact that she was only wearing a hospital gown and socks.

‘Let’s move on,’ she recalled telling the angel.

They took to the air again, soaring across the water to a rowdy neighborhood pub in Belfast. She described loud music and ‘old people’ drinking and having a good time. 

She doesn’t know how she ended up in Belfast, a city she has never visited, on this supernatural journey, but she said it’s possible she ‘just said generic Ireland and that’s where I went.’

A teetotaler for more than a decade, my mom said she didn’t feel comfortable in the pub. She claimed that as soon as she had that thought, she and her angel were flying once again.

Her next stop was Africa, another totally new destination, where she soared above a walking herd of elephants – her favorite animal. Though, she only saw them from above, as she claimed the angel said it wouldn’t be safe to land.

‘Then we were flying some more,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where else we went – back through the stars. And then I just came back into the hospital room.’

While reflecting on the event, she told me she never saw a light that she felt would carry her to the afterlife if she walked through it.

It wasn’t game over, she said, just a time-out from life, from her illness.

Before returning to her body, she claimed she saw herself from above once again, asleep in a hospital bed, tethered to monitors and drips. Whether she woke up immediately upon returning to her body is a bit fuzzy, but when she did, she felt a sense of calm she had not enjoyed in weeks.

‘I felt psychologically calm, like this road trip really helped me,’ she said. ‘And I felt better, but I was very disappointed that I was still there in the hospital.’

After a week in the hospital, she recovered and was discharged home, where an ice cream cake and our family eagerly awaited her arrival. 

But the experience has stayed with her, and her connection with ‘the other side’ has only deepened. 

‘Isn’t that strange to think that you could be just walking down the street and someone’s astral projecting around you?’ she asked me.

The appearance of a guardian angel (who my mom claimed appeared female but said their name was Adam) confirmed Aileen’s sense of being watched over. It wasn’t scary, she said, but rather exceedingly normal.

After all that, she came away from the experience learning that consciousness is not bound by tubes and a hospital bed.

On the grander scale, we’ve all learned that recovery is not a straight line – there are advances and setbacks, good days and bad days. 

Organ transplant recipients are required to take a laundry list of medications to prevent organ rejection, and those come with their own sets of risks.

There are immunosuppressants like tacrolimus and mycophenolate, which can cause further kidney damage, high blood pressure, tremors, and increased infection risk. 

Then, there are corticosteroids like prednisone that further suppress the immune system and prevent rejection, which can lead to weight gain, diabetes, mood swings, and bone thinning.

While some of these side effects are constants in my mom’s life, she has said her experience irrevocably changed something for her, leaving her feeling more grounded and in tune with the earth.

My mom is a former pediatric ICU nurse used to working 12-hour shifts. But these days, one of the most frequent pieces of medical advice she doles out is to ‘go touch grass.’

In fact, she’s calling me now. I guess I should put my shoes on.