Debe’s mother-in-law passed away in Wisconsin during freezing January, so the family decided to hold a memorial service at the funeral home chapel instead of at a gravesite.
With so many friends and family members traveling to say their last goodbyes, “We put all her photos and favorite memories out for all to see,” Debe says. “One item I wanted to have on display was an angel that had fiber optics in her outstretched wings.” Debe and her husband had given the angel to his mother the previous Christmas, and she loved looking at it and watching the colors changing on the wings.
“On the morning of the service, I had some new batteries, just purchased, and I put them into the angel to be sure it would light up,” Debe says. “But nothing happened.” Maybe she hadn’t put them in correctly. Debe asked her husband to see if something was wrong with the batteries. While she finished dressing, he checked them out again. “You put them in right, but I did it again,” he told her. “They still won’t light.”
By now it was 9 a.m. and the family was to meet at the funeral home chapel at 9:30. Maybe something had broken inside the angel? But everything looked fine. “We have to go,” Debe’s husband told her. He had taken out the batteries again (although she didn’t know it). “Let’s just have the angel sitting by her photo,” he suggested as he went to start the car.
Debe was terribly disappointed. The lighted angel would have made the display so beautiful. She buttoned her coat and picked up the angel. Just one more try, she thought, flipping the switch. The angel lit up. Shocked, Debe turned the angel over to check the batteries, but there were none.
Heart pounding, Debe looked around, and saw the four AA batteries on the table. She snapped them in and got in the car. “Oh, you found some other batteries,” her husband remarked, looking at the angel’s beautiful glow. “Uh huh,” Debe murmured, her shock preventing her from telling him the rest of the story. If they had ever wondered where their mother was, they knew now that she was close as could be.
A few days later, Debe told her husband what had happened. He had no trouble believing it. “Well,” he said, “that’s Mom. She wanted to have that angel at her service. And she did.”
“You see?” Debe points out. “You never know when angels are around!”
