I've posted this story before, so here's a cheap copy/paste:
*TL;DR* Suddenly dead grandfather watching my back making sure I'm safe.
Back when my grandfather died, his children and some of the grandchildren took turns in staying over at grandma's house. We'd spend the night and help her out around the house, while also having some time alone in the house we all love and spending some final moments with grandpa, his (embalmed...?) body in the living room where his big old desk used to be.
The house was on a pretty big plot of land with a nice big barn, and while grandma loved her gardening, grandpa used to take care of the lawn. One day he had felt a bit weezy while mowing the lawn, so he went inside and eventually ended up calling the doctor and going to the hospital. He unceremoniously died three weeks later, unwilling to fight the cancer that had formed in his gut over the past few years.
As one of the older grandkids, I stayed over one night as well. Bluntly speaking, I was a bit on edge with just having a dead body in the house, but nothing really eventful happened that night. Said goodnight to my grandfather (ya, felt weird) and went upstairs to rest.
The next morning my grandmother was already preparing dinner for all the people that would be coming by to pay their respects. She, quite sternly, told me she wanted to do this particular thing alone, so I decided to start the day by mowing the stretch of lawn my grandfather never got to finish. I knew how big he and grandmother have always been on having the garden in top shape whenever there were people over and I didn't want to let him down. It wasn't a small patch of grass, but I figured the electric push-mower should be more than enough. I hooked it up using a long, orange extension cord and got to work.
Now, you have to know, my grandfather was a skilled, but supersafe, handyman. He was an electrical engineer by trade and always working on the house or tinkering in the barn, doing the bigger gardening projects my grandmother couldn't do, making us toys or fixing our bikes, etc. We always got to help him out, but he always kept an eye on us with whatever we were doing, making sure we were using the tools in the correct way, weren't running around with screwdrivers in our pockets, *teaching us how to work with the electric mower and how to handle the long extension cord to not run over it with the mower*.
When I was mowing the lawn, I was thinking about all of that instead of actually minding the extension cord. I f****d up. I ran over a coil of it, slightly damaging the cable down to the copper, but not c*****g it in half completely.
The safest way to proceed would be to unplug the cord, roll it back up and get another, not-damaged one. What I did puzzles me to this day;
I was nearing completion anyway and decided to continue a bit longer, (now...) carefully avoiding the cord. After finishing up, I went to roll up the cord around my arm, as I always did, as my grandfather taught me. I was thinking about him, how hard this was on grandma, and I stopped minding where I grabbed the cord. I grabbed straight into the exposed copper. I felt a short, sharp jolt in the palm of my hand and immediately realised what happened. I tried to let go but my hand and arm cramped up. At the time, naively, I thought I was gonna die, and I thought how stupid I had been, and how this would impact my already grieving family.
It must've only been a split second, but it felt like I had stood there for ten minutes. Suddenly the reflexes in my arm kicked in and I threw the cable to the floor. I took a moment to breathe and stood there, dazed out of my mind, listening to the wind in the trees and trying to figure out what had happened. I made my way into the barn to unplug the cord from the wall.
*It wasn't plugged in*.
I figured I must've yanked it out of the wall with my (not-so)Ninja reflexes, but quickly realised the angle for me to be able to do that were all wrong, and besides, there was a tonne of slack in the cable.
I checked in and around the barn, but there was noone on the property. I could see my grandmother through the kitchen window, still working on preparing meals for the tens of people that would come around later. The dog was still in his own enclosed section of the garden on the other side of the house, ears pointed, tail in the air, eyes fixated on me and the barn behind me, nervously whimpering and pacing back and forth.
I had never believed in something of a spirit world, an afterlife, souls or 'energy' staying behind in the physical world, any of that. But as silly as it sounds, on that day I did.
On that day, I was convinced my grandfather was watching my back to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.
Alright so it turned out to be quite long, and I'm sure this will be buried (as opposed to my grandfather; wrapped in cloth and cremated on nothing but woodboard, his choosing) but it felt good to write this out.
*TL;DR* Suddenly dead grandfather watching my back making sure I'm safe.
Back when my grandfather died, his children and some of the grandchildren took turns in staying over at grandma's house. We'd spend the night and help her out around the house, while also having some time alone in the house we all love and spending some final moments with grandpa, his (embalmed...?) body in the living room where his big old desk used to be.
The house was on a pretty big plot of land with a nice big barn, and while grandma loved her gardening, grandpa used to take care of the lawn. One day he had felt a bit weezy while mowing the lawn, so he went inside and eventually ended up calling the doctor and going to the hospital. He unceremoniously died three weeks later, unwilling to fight the cancer that had formed in his gut over the past few years.
As one of the older grandkids, I stayed over one night as well. Bluntly speaking, I was a bit on edge with just having a dead body in the house, but nothing really eventful happened that night. Said goodnight to my grandfather (ya, felt weird) and went upstairs to rest.
The next morning my grandmother was already preparing dinner for all the people that would be coming by to pay their respects. She, quite sternly, told me she wanted to do this particular thing alone, so I decided to start the day by mowing the stretch of lawn my grandfather never got to finish. I knew how big he and grandmother have always been on having the garden in top shape whenever there were people over and I didn't want to let him down. It wasn't a small patch of grass, but I figured the electric push-mower should be more than enough. I hooked it up using a long, orange extension cord and got to work.
Now, you have to know, my grandfather was a skilled, but supersafe, handyman. He was an electrical engineer by trade and always working on the house or tinkering in the barn, doing the bigger gardening projects my grandmother couldn't do, making us toys or fixing our bikes, etc. We always got to help him out, but he always kept an eye on us with whatever we were doing, making sure we were using the tools in the correct way, weren't running around with screwdrivers in our pockets, *teaching us how to work with the electric mower and how to handle the long extension cord to not run over it with the mower*.
When I was mowing the lawn, I was thinking about all of that instead of actually minding the extension cord. I f****d up. I ran over a coil of it, slightly damaging the cable down to the copper, but not c*****g it in half completely.
The safest way to proceed would be to unplug the cord, roll it back up and get another, not-damaged one. What I did puzzles me to this day;
I was nearing completion anyway and decided to continue a bit longer, (now...) carefully avoiding the cord. After finishing up, I went to roll up the cord around my arm, as I always did, as my grandfather taught me. I was thinking about him, how hard this was on grandma, and I stopped minding where I grabbed the cord. I grabbed straight into the exposed copper. I felt a short, sharp jolt in the palm of my hand and immediately realised what happened. I tried to let go but my hand and arm cramped up. At the time, naively, I thought I was gonna die, and I thought how stupid I had been, and how this would impact my already grieving family.
It must've only been a split second, but it felt like I had stood there for ten minutes. Suddenly the reflexes in my arm kicked in and I threw the cable to the floor. I took a moment to breathe and stood there, dazed out of my mind, listening to the wind in the trees and trying to figure out what had happened. I made my way into the barn to unplug the cord from the wall.
*It wasn't plugged in*.
I figured I must've yanked it out of the wall with my (not-so)Ninja reflexes, but quickly realised the angle for me to be able to do that were all wrong, and besides, there was a tonne of slack in the cable.
I checked in and around the barn, but there was noone on the property. I could see my grandmother through the kitchen window, still working on preparing meals for the tens of people that would come around later. The dog was still in his own enclosed section of the garden on the other side of the house, ears pointed, tail in the air, eyes fixated on me and the barn behind me, nervously whimpering and pacing back and forth.
I had never believed in something of a spirit world, an afterlife, souls or 'energy' staying behind in the physical world, any of that. But as silly as it sounds, on that day I did.
On that day, I was convinced my grandfather was watching my back to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.
Alright so it turned out to be quite long, and I'm sure this will be buried (as opposed to my grandfather; wrapped in cloth and cremated on nothing but woodboard, his choosing) but it felt good to write this out.