Premonitions

I don't understand premonitions... but they have touched my life several times.

My father was only four when his father became a soldier in World War I - a cook on the front lines. At some point, his father, August Gellert, had a feeling he would not be returning from the war. Perhaps the reality of the dangers around him fueled his fears. In any event, he asked his wife, Helene, to bring their two children, Wladyslaw and Elsie, to see him. She did - and, for the rest of his life, my father treasured the memory of that visit - the memory of his father holding him, carrying him around.

He had a mole behind his ear, he recounted. And as he carried me around, I played with that mole.

That was his only memory of his father.

Leap ahead 80 years... The next premonition (if it was a premonition) occurred the year of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. They were planning to visit Europe in May. The iron curtain was down, and a relative in Germany had offered to drive them to Poland to visit the village of my father's birth.

My father's two nieces, Elsie's daughters, had wanted to plan an anniversary celebration in Edmonton, Alberta - the city where my parents were married and where they still had family and friends.

Don't plan anything until we get back from our trip, my father had insisted. His mind was focused on one thing: returning to his childhood home.

Visiting the farming community where he grew up, my father was ecstatic. Pointing out buildings where he had gone to school and to church, where this person and that person had lived, he also showed my mother the cemetery where many of his relatives were buried.

If I die right now, just bury me here where it all began, he told her. That was his way of talking - nobody gave it a second thought... until he got sick on the way back to Berlin, developed a fever, was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and died two days later of bacterial meningitis.

My mother, shocked and overwhelmed, didn't know what to do... until she remembered his words. She buried him in Europe, and - comforted in some measure by what he had said - returned home alone.

Instead of celebrating a 50th wedding anniversary, family and friends gathered for a memorial service in Edmonton.

The third premonition occurred a few months before that time. Before going to Europe, my parents had come for a visit to Ottawa in March. They talked excitedly about their European adventure.

As they prepared to leave for the airport, my father - who liked to be there early - stood in the kitchen drinking his coffee instead of sitting down.

Are you ready to go? I asked, as he leaned against the kitchen cupboard, coffee cup in hand.

As I looked at him, sipping the last of his coffee, the thought flashed across my mind: This is the last time you will see him.

I was taken aback - dismissed the thought... Strange the ideas that run back and forth in our brains...

But that was the last time I saw him. And the picture in my mind of him standing there, downing the last of his coffee - is with me still, as clear as if it had happened today.