As I sit in the sunshine in my backyard, I feel nudged to share this experience because someone, somewhere, needs to know they are not alone in their “knowing.”

Shortly after my father passed, sometime around the age of 12, one night, as I lay awake in my bed, I heard footsteps in the hallway outside my bedroom. Back and forth, back and forth. I kept glancing out the open door but saw no one. The footsteps persisted. Eventually, I fell asleep. In the morning, when I got up and went into the kitchen, I said nothing to my mother about what I had heard. I was sure she would tell me it was my imagination. She sat at the table in my dad’s former spot, having her usual morning coffee and buttered toast. As I walked by her, she said, “Your father must have had something on his mind. He paced the hall all night long.” She said nothing more, and I said nothing at all. This was my first validation that I wasn’t crazy, knowing things I couldn’t possibly know and hearing things no one else heard.

As the years wore on, my “knowing” and “hearing” continued in varying degrees. In college, these moments were not as comfortable. I would strongly sense that something “bad”  was about to happen or had happened. I was not too fond of that and had yet to learn that other people had these experiences, too. One such case was sitting up all night with my boyfriend. I was leaving for California to have Christmas with my mother. The feeling was intense. My boyfriend had been through such situations with me, so he held me through the night as we sat in the stairwell of my dorm. On the plane the next day, in the Boston Globe obituaries, I saw that my grandmother had passed the previous night. In those days before Twitter, the news was published nearly instantaneously. My mother hadn’t notified me because she thought she’d tell me in person. It was a horrible idea, but who knew I’d see it in the paper on the plane? After that, I successfully pushed all of these sensations away until later years, when they began returning.

I had no idea my experiences were anything but premonitions that others were comfortable shrugging off. I had occasions when I knew a diagnosis before the doctor or that my husband, before the medical equipment that is now available, was having an insulin reaction far away, in a different town. “How do you know these things?” our doctor would ask, and I would shrug and say I had no idea. I wish I had a dollar for every time I asked myself the same question. I just knew. When I took care of my mother, I’d be in another room and knew she needed pain medicine because I’d feel pain in my little finger on my right hand. It all seemed perfectly normal, but also, not so much.

To be continued.

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