Jan of this year, my middle daughter’s best friend of 12 years and the father of her then 1.5 year old son, lost his battle with depression and passed away. He was 21 years old. Today is his 22nd birthday. 

I help my daughter raise her son while she finishes her college degree and works a 3rd shift job. He sleeps at my house during the week so I can take him to daycare in the mornings. 

For the better part of 2 months my daughter had been having terrible migraines, nausea, and feeling out of sorts. She was back and forth to the doc, CT scans, thyroid tests, wellness checkups, etc. They couldn’t find anything wrong. 

Then one night she calls me. She confides in me that she’s been hearing footsteps in her house, bangs from the kitchen, things that go bump in the night, and she feels like she’s losing her mind. I give her a camera to place in her living room for peace of mind, but consider that grief is causing all of this. 

A few nights later she calls again and this time there’s something on the camera. She’s home alone in her bedroom, she has no pets, and she hears noises from the front of the house so she views the camera and sees someone/something. 

For context: her living room is small. She has the camera on a side table in the corner between the arm of the loveseat and the arm of the sofa. The camera view is the rest of her living room as if you were sitting on one of the sofas (against the wall). 

Her area of concern is the reflection of the TV. The TV is facing towards the couch which is against the opposite side of the room. So what she sees in the reflection of the TV, is standing in front of that couch. 

I instantly recognize the reflection as her son’s father. Wearing the dark hoodie he passed away in, his chiseled face, his head full of curly dark hair. But I didn’t say a word. 

She’s shook and I tell her to pack a bag in her room and come to my house for the night. 

When she gets here we stay up talking for a while. She starts telling me things that line up with a gas leak. Her house sometimes smells like rotten eggs. She gets dizzy, and nausea when she lays down in her bed at night. The head of her bed is on the same outside wall that the gas meter is on. 

The next morning I go to her house to check things out. I smell the egg odor, check the house over good, check the attic for phroggers. Then I call the gas company.

The meter at the side of her house has been leaking. For a long time. Bad enough that the gas company had to dig it up completely and cap the line. Her house was tested and carbon monoxide was detected. 

Later in the week when things are all settled she calls me “Mom, I know it was him. I didn’t wanna say it, but I just know. And he knew I wouldn’t leave unless I felt scared. He was trying to get me out of that house. I have no doubt in my mind that if I would have stayed home that night, I would have fell asleep and not woken up.” 

The glitchy part for me…when my phone rang and I answered that call, I knew we’d had that conversation before. Not in this timeline, but a different one. I could have mimicked every word she spoke to me, as each word was coming from her mouth.