So, my father died at 1AM on December 26, 9 years ago this coming 26th ... and that was just when we gave the OK to take him off life support, and when we did, he was gone within 30 seconds, confirming that it was just the machines keeping him artificially moving.  That's something I've wondered about before, whether the soul remains in the body even if the body is no longer capable of supporting life, just because the machines stopped kept moving things.  Perhaps he actually died on Christmas Day.

Interesting story that one.  Some months before that, I was visiting both my parents, and when there was no one else around, my father looked at me, dead serious, and told me he'd had this recurring dream where he had died, and the details that stuck out to him were that he heard Christmas bells, and that I was there.  So, that made me wonder if I wasn't going to die before him (assuming the dream was real), since if he had died and I was there ... I interpreted that as meaning I had died already before him, and he was 92.

Now, since my father had been in ICU all day during Christmas, and we all had children and relatives, we would take shifts, and one of my brothers and my sister had been there, and I came to relieve them at about 11PM on Christmas Day.  I insisted that they go home and get some rest.  So I was there alone, of my relatives.  At about 12:30 AM, so about 90 minutes later, the doctor told me that he basically thought that my father was gone, and that the machines were just keeping his heart moving.  After calling my mother and some of my other relatives, we all agreed that it was time to take him off the life support.

So I was kneeling next to his bed praying when they took him off the machines and about 30 seconds later they pronounced him dead.  So the dream about Christmas bells (when he told me about this, it had been Summer) and me being there ... it came to pass.  Recall that all the Liturgical theologians say that the Feast of Christmas lasts the entire Octave, and/or it's quite likely that he had already pass on before midnight, depending on what one might theorize about that question I raised above.

This past December 7, Vigil of the Immaculate Conception (except that it was a Sunday, so kindof bumped), my mother passed away, at around 1:13 AM ... my sister and I were there.  So I'm hoping that my father and my mother and my younger brother Steve will be celebrating Christmas in a way we cannot even begin to imagine ... this year.

I went to Sunday Mass on the day my mother passed away, and then in the afternoon  I sat there in that modest, old, little home we grew up in ... and just went down "memory lane", as it were, recalling all the Christmases we had there, and so many other memories.

But ... life is so short, and it'll seem like the blink of an eye before we're there ourselves and, God willing, make it to Heaven.  When my younger brother passed away at the age of 48, I took that opportunity to try to "scare straight" my own children, the oldest of whom were getting into their 20s, explaining to them that Steve had only been twice their age when he passed away, lest they consider themselves immoral, reminding them that we could pass away at any moment, without warning, and that we need to always be prepared.

Thank you for this story, it’s really important to remember that we don’t know how many days we have left, whatever our age. I have relatives who have also had supernatural experiences when their time of death was approaching, hearing their dead siblings and parents speak to them, hearing music etc…

One has to consider that these experiences could be the devil.

True, have to use intuition and be cautious.