Something happened at 3 a.m. the night my friend died, and I still can’t explain it.
I don’t really know what to make of this, and I’ve wondered about it ever since.
On May 2, my friend of three years died by suicide. She died by hanging at around 3 a.m.
I work the overnight shift at a pet hospital, and around 3 a.m. that night, something really strange happened. Out of nowhere, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. There wasn’t any obvious reason. I just felt drawn to her.
I went on my 10-minute break, found an empty room, closed the door, and started dancing around to pass the time. While I was in there, I had this incredibly vivid mental image. I imagined opening the sliding white door to the call center, and she was standing there looking at me with a sad expression. She said, “I’m sorry.”
I smiled because I was so happy to see her. I asked, “Why are you sorry?”
Then the scene changed. I imagined the two of us dancing together in a music video to one of my favorite songs. After that, the thoughts faded, and I went back to work.
I remember thinking to myself that I should call her later that morning when she was awake. I just had this feeling that I needed to check on her. The only reason I didn’t call right then was because it was 3 a.m. and I assumed she was asleep.
About three hours later, I answered the work phone. It was her mom.
She said, “My daughter is no longer alive. She’s dead.”
I asked for her daughter’s name, hoping somehow it wasn’t who I thought it was. Then she said my friend’s name.
What makes it even stranger is that I wasn’t even supposed to be there to answer that call. My replacement had called out, so I had to stay an extra hour and a half until someone else arrived. If everything had gone according to schedule, someone else would have answered the phone instead of me.
I ended up being the first person at the hospital to find out before I told my supervisor and manager.
I’ve never really known what to think about what happened around 3 a.m. I know grief and coincidence can do strange things, and our minds are powerful. But I’ve also never been able to shake the feeling that something was different about that night.
What makes it even stranger is something that happened tonight. I was at the front desk talking with a coworker about my friend’s death. I was telling her about that vivid mental image; about imagining myself opening the sliding white door to the call center and seeing my friend standing there with that sad expression, telling me, “I’m sorry.”
As I was telling that exact part of the story, the light in the call center..., which is directly behind us; suddenly turned on.
I know there are ordinary explanations for things like lights turning on, and I’m not saying it was anything supernatural. But the timing was so unusual that it gave me chills.
Has anyone else experienced something like this after losing someone? How did you make sense of it? Did you see it as coincidence, your mind processing grief, or something you couldn’t explain?