Late one night, I found my son sitting upright on his bed, whispering into the darkness as if holding a quiet conversation with someone I couldn’t see. My heart skipped — children notice things adults are too busy, too skeptical, or too hardened to perceive. But his face wasn’t frightened. He looked calm… comforted.
When I asked what he was doing, he simply pointed toward the rocking chair in the corner and said, “Mommy, the big man sits there. He sings.”
The chair was empty — at least to my eyes — but it rocked gently, the way it does when someone has just stood up.
The next morning, in the safety of daylight, I asked him again about the “big man.” My son described him carefully: kind, old, white hair, and wearing “a hat like the ones in Grandpa’s pictures.”
My chest tightened. My father passed away long before my son was born — and the wide-brimmed hat he mentioned was my father’s favorite, captured only in faded photographs my son had never seen.
Curious and trembling, I pulled out an old family album. He flipped through the pages until he stopped on one photograph and tapped it confidently. “That’s him, Mommy. That’s the man who sings.”
It was my father.
That night, as I tucked him in, I whispered, “If someone is watching over you, then we’re very lucky.” He smiled and drifted to sleep peacefully. No whispers. No movement.
And the rocking chair in the corner stayed perfectly still — as if whatever comfort my father wanted to give had already been delivered.