Joan Message Barbuto
What happens to us after we die? In her book"God Is With Us - Signs in Our Lives" Joan Barbuto gives evidence that there is a God who loves us and a form of existence after death. She draws the evidence from five sources: (1) unexplainable, seemingly miraculous events and signs in people''s lives; (2)reports of angels, miracles, heaven and miraculous healings reported in books, including The Bible; (3)apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the last two centuries, with accompanying miracles witnessed by many and prophecies that came true; (4) incidents in the lives of two saints canonized in this century; and (5)investigations of near-death experiences and death-related visions by noted psychologists and psychiatrists.
Joan M. Barbuto is an author and former journalist who has done extensive reading and research on religion, near-death experiences, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and spiritual experiences that people have had. She was a staff reporter, feature writer, and health and mental health reporter for a daily newspaper, "The New Haven Register," and now writes about topics that interest her.With graduate degrees in English and education, she has the ability and training to research and organize a great deal of material on various subjects. She is also the author of the book "The ABCs of Parenting" (c. 1994) and is working on a historical novel.
Is there another realm of existence to which we go after death and a God that intervenes in our lives? In my own life I have experienced signs that there is a spiritual world intertwined with our lives. Two incidents especially inspired me to do the research which resulted in this book.
Both incidents involved my mother Hattie. The daughter of Polish immigrants who lived in Brooklyn, she grew up in poor Catholic family. Her father, a wheelwright, went to Alaska at one point hoping to strike it rich in the Klondike gold rush, but came back two years later flat broke. Her mother helped support the family with her sewing, and Hattie had to leave school in eighth grade to work in a hat factory. But the family’s scrimping and saving enabled the one boy in the family to attend medical school, and Hattie eventually married one of his friends, another doctor named John, known to most just as Doc.
Life with Doc could be difficult because he was sometimes verbally abusive to Hattie and called her stupid because of her lack of education. But Hattie was a tough woman and held her own. Robust, stern, ramroad straight, she could take on anyone. She would even go down into our dank, dark cellar with a baseball bat at night if she heard a noise, instead of waking Doc, ready to do battle with any burglar who dared enter her home.
We had all the material things we wanted when I was growing up, but one thing was lacking—the influence of religion. Doc, although raised a Catholic, had turned against the faith and frequently criticized and blasphemed the religion and mocked those who practiced it. Although my mother had managed to have me make my First Communion, and she and I sometimes went to church, because of Doc’s influence she never went to Confession and Communion.
After Doc died of cancer, my mother sold our house in Brooklyn and went to live with her sister Ann in Douglaston, Long Island. Since I felt prayers had helped bring my father back to the faith in his last days, I started praying for my mother to return to the sacraments. I talked to her about it, but she didn’t seem interested. We visited them in Douglaston now and then, or she would come stay with us in Connecticut for a week occasionally. Her three grandchildren brought her joy, and she loved making outfits and sweaters for them.
Then about three years after my father’s death, I got a phone call from mother one Saturday in the spring. She told me she and Ann had just been to Confession. They were going on a trip to Florida the next week—mother had always wanted to see Florida—and they thought it might be a good idea before traveling. It came about because they had met one of the priests on the street, and mother told him she was
thinking of going to Confession, but was hesitant because she hadn’t been in so long. The priest encouraged her, and was very nice to her when she went to him for Confession. “He didn’t even bawl me out,” she said. So she and Ann received Communion the next day, and went off to Florida by train the following week.
They returned just before Easter. We went down to spend Easter weekend with them. Mother had come back from Florida with a bad cold, but she still made all the preparations for our Easter celebration. Since she didn’t drive, she walked to the butcher and carried a big heavy ham home Saturday. I was angry with her and said she should have asked Paul to drive her to the store. But she didn’t want to bother him. She made the traditional Polish Easter dinner, with ham, kielbasa, pickled beets and hardboiled eggs. After dinner she insisted we start back early to Connecticut because traffic was always so bad on Easter. So we left her and Aunt Ann with the dishes.
The next day I got a call from her wishing Paul and me a happy anniversary. She sounded sort of strange, and I asked her if anything was wrong. She said she was just tired. Then on Friday Aunt Ann called. She told me Mother was feeling so ill Monday that they called the doctor. He took her blood pressure, which was over 200, and told her to stay in bed. Whether he gave her any medicine for blood pressure, or even if they had any in the 1960s, I don’t know. She didn’t want Ann to call us to tell us she was sick. Then by Friday she was tired of staying upstairs in bed and having Ann bring her meals. She decided to go downstairs to have dinner with her sister at the table. “She started to eat, then said she couldn’t, she had to go back to bed,” Ann said. When Ann went up soon after, mother was lying in bed and she could hear the death rattle in her throat. In a few minutes, she was gone.
During my whole life, my mother had never been sick. Yet less than two weeks after she had returned to the sacraments after more than 30 years, she died. God, I felt, had been waiting for her to
come back to him, and then he took her. To me, it was even more of a miracle than my father’s return to the faith..
About a year after my mother’s death I was sitting on the living room couch one day and on the end table next to me was a small African violet plant. I had had it about five years. It had never bloomed. I was missing my mother very much, and I thought to myself, “Mother, if you are existing somewhere, give me a sign.” I spotted the African violet plant and said silently, “Make this violet bloom. “ About a week later a single pink violet appeared on the plant, seeming to come from a new little plant at the side of the main plant. I can’t recall how long the flower lasted, but in a month or so it was gone, and the little plant on the side shriveled and died. No other violet ever appeared. The plant never bloomed again.
