Awkward Angel

About the Book

When Deborah Lafferty was ten years old, she died on an operating table in a hospital in Ashtabula, Ohio. Her small body was, as they say, clinically dead. No pulse, no respiration, no brain wave activity. But, in fact, Debbie was elsewhere. Following a route many have now reported, she had been drawn through a roaring tunnel into a bright space beyond our ideas of time and space. The bearded, robed figure who stood before her might be recognizable to many of us from our Sunday School days, but, for Debbie, He was a presence remembered. In some way beyond comprehension, the meeting was a reunion, a place of brief respite and renewal along a highway that extended over millennia. He was decorating a birthday cake for her--making vines of brilliant green on the white icing of the layered cake, artfully crafting sweet garlands of lavender blossoms into His design. For, it seems, Debbie’s death-day was, indeed, a birthday.

When she awoke, back in her body, Debbie had no memory of her life before the surgery. She did not know her mother, her father, her sisters, her anxious friends. She had to be taught about the girl who had fallen ill with rheumatic fever--the Debbie who was lost to her. After she had learned again how to read, old report cards testified to her that the girl she did not remember had been a been a straight-A student. She knew little more than that.

Twenty-eight years later Debbie’s “birthday party” had faded into memory. She was a competent, respected LPN, working mainly in nursing homes. She was a mother who had birthed two daughters--Marcia and Janie. Marcia’s father, Michael, had been the deepest, most passionate love of her life. Janie was conceived with the man she would marry and remain with for more than fifteen years.

While there were brief, sunny plateaus over these years, her life was mostly a relentless struggle with financial insecurity, especially as her stormy marriage became increasingly unstable. Then, on July 4, 1995, Michael died--suddenly and under mysterious circumstances. Debbie’s simmering unhappiness coalesced, then surfaced with devastating power. Even though Debbie and Michael had been in touch only infrequently since their painful breakup, his death triggered more than depression in her, it seemed to rend her very soul. So deep, so inexplicable was her pain that she made plans to end her life. Perhaps it was the darkness of her despair that triggered what happened next.

On August 5th, 1995, Debbie was charge nurse for the night shift at Broadstreet Mental Health Facility in a town near Ashtabula, Ohio. At about 3:15 in the morning she went downstairs to the basement break room, leaving her two aides in charge of the first floor nursing station. A few minutes later she was sitting at a table with fresh coffee, her back to the closed door of the break room. When the light appeared behind her, illuminating the table, she thought at first it was one of her aides playing a joke. Then two things happened: She turned her head to see a stream of light pulsating beside her and the power in the room went out. The stream of light began to intensify, its beam widening from a thin line to a shimmering width of about eight inches. Obviously, this was no ordinary light--it was pouring into her skin, soaking into her body. In panic, she bolted, bruising her shin on the chair she was sitting in, knocking over the one beside it. The stream of light seemed to her a messenger of death. Paradoxically, she who had sought death now fled in panic from an unsought answer to her despair, an answer that would only unfold, painfully, piece by piece, in the weeks and months that followed.

Nothing would be the same for her again. Electrical appliances would go awry in her presence. Light bulbs would explode. Radios would play music that was not being broadcast--Michael’s music. Accidents happened that had no explanation--threatening first her life, then Marcia’s. Dreams came, lucid,

About the Author

Deborah Lynn Lafferty is a nurse, a mother, an aspiring writer, and an out-of-body traveler. She writes this book to share what she has learned in her journeys beyond our ordinary ideas of time space. Robert Turner is an artist, a part-time college teacher, and a professional freelance writer. He lives in the mountains of Virginia, in Blacksburg, with a cat named Merlin and, more recently, a white Maltese named Gina Marie