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The Art of Dying – Drs Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick

Mary is now over 90 but says that personal experiences she has had throughout her life have aroused and sustained an interest in NDEs and parapsychology. ….As a schoolgirl she often had what she called 'future dreams’ when at times (sometimes but not always in dreams) a picture would come into her mind of an event which would follow a day or two later.

Mary and her husband were both committed Christians, and regarded these experiences, which continued when Francis, her husband, was with the airborne forces as a paratrooper during the Second World War, as God-given guidance. On his last leave they both had a strong feeling that Francis was not going to survive.

On 9 June 1944 I was walking to collect our son from kindergarten and walked 50-60 yards at one point without knowing it, because my mind had gone over to France and I saw a series of pictures like present-day slides of a field with a brick wall, seven or eight feet high with holes in it at intervals for people to walk through. Francis was walking across the field and then dashing for a slit trench and falling - I naturally hoped he was only wounded but felt he had been killed. As I became conscious of walking again his voice said, 'Look up, Mary.' I did, and saw his head and shoulders above a white cloud, and he gave a characteristic wave of his hand, saying, 'You’re right my dear, goodbye.'

I was quite calm, and because of all that was going on did not receive the telegram till 25 June. I checked with the War Office and he had been killed on 8 June (interesting the gap from the 8th to the 9th). Later another officer who knew us well asked me when we met after the war if I would like to know what had happened. I asked him to let me tell him and described the mental slides. He said nothing till I had finished and then said, 'You, 'might have been there.'

After the war, Mary and her son visited the village where Francis had died and she saw for herself the field, with the wall and the slit trenches as she had seen them in her mental picture.