Apart from waking up a couple of times at about 3 in the morning, to find my daughter standing completely silently, in pitch blackness, next to our bed just looking at me?

When my daughter was 21 months old, my grandmother died. I was particularly close to my Nana, and it’s fair to say that my daughter had been the apple of her Nana’s eye for the last years of Nana’s life.

About a week after Nana died, I went in to give my daughter her late night bottle to find her awake and looking intently at the nursing chair in her bedroom. Now this chair had originally belonged to my Nana, and had been one of her favourite chairs. I asked her what she was looking at, and she said “Nana’s just been saying “Bears” (our family name for an AA Milne poem) to me, and she says you mustn’t cry so much as she’s happy in her new home.” Very creepy but actually kind of comforting.

The follow up to this is that three months later my uncle (who was my Nana’s younger son) died of cancer. It wasn’t really a surprise, but we hadn’t told my daughter he was really ill, let alone dying. That night, at late bottle time (and bear in mind she was only just 3), she woke up and said “Uncle Richard and Nana were just visiting. He says he’s not sore anymore and he’s happy to be staying with Nana in her new home!”