Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as your ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
Ralph Ellison
Each day a hummingbird visits the garden outside my writing studio. She loves the red trumpet vine that bears delicious nectar. She hovers in the centre of the flower for a few seconds, levitates and then moves on to the next vine. Her movements are so quick that I have to keep a close eye so as not to miss her before she flies away. She seems to have a lot to do over the course of her day as she bestows her magic on plants and other sentient beings.
It’s been said that those who were close to you before they died commonly send messages in the form of bird spirit guides. Hummingbirds, in particular, resonate at a high vibration, which makes them more connected to the spiritual realm. They’re also joyful reminders and tend to open our hearts and make us smile. They’re referred to as messengers from the heavens because they often show up when people grieve the loss of a loved one. In this way, they can also be healing.
If you ever watch a hummingbird, you’ll notice that it can come to a complete stop when travelling at high speed. Also, their movements are often in the shape of an infinity sign; thus their connection to eternity.
Some Native Americans believe the presence of hummingbirds brings unconditional love and harmony. The Aztecs, in particular, viewed hummingbirds as brave and courageous fighters. They also believed hummingbirds to be immortal, connecting us with our ancestors. The fact is that, whenever one appears, it’s sometimes viewed as a visitation from an ancestor or a manifestation of a dead person’s spirit.
In Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing (2017), Dr. Daniel Foor states that connecting with our ancestors is beneficial for our psychological and physical health. Not only can it boost our confidence and intellectual performance, it also makes us aware of family predispositions that can benefit us and future generations, in addition to helping to promote forgiveness. Further, it encourages introspection and can bring clarity about our life purpose. Those who are connected with their ancestors often feel more supported and comfortable in their skin.
Foor (2017) has described how connecting with ancestors can help heal intergenerational trauma or family dysfunction. The fact is that when you’re a child of someone who has experienced tremendous trauma, those memories can become yours. It’s almost unfathomable, but children can live with memories of events that never even happened to them.
Many studies are emerging on the significance of epigenetics—the study of how behaviour and environment can alter the way one’s genes work—and we now know that there’s a connection between preconception parental trauma and epigenetic alterations that are present both in the parent and in their children.
Many intuitive individuals believe that hummingbirds are the greatest proof of messages from heaven. When settling down to sleep at night, these birds have the ability to lower their metabolism to the minimum necessary to sustain life. To conserve energy, their metabolism comes to an almost complete standstill. They can also easily travel backward, which reminds us that it’s OK to look to our past and connect with memories of loved ones who have passed away.
Visitations from my grandmother
I’m quite sure that my grandmother, who died in 1964 at the age of 61, frequently visits me in the form of a hummingbird. She sends messages of love and offers me ongoing protection. She reminds me that everything is temporary and of how important it is to enjoy my time here on Earth.
She tells me that her time here was too short and that being my grandma and caretaker was one of her greatest joys and accomplishments. She reminds me to rise above the everyday, rudimentary concerns of life and look at the larger picture. She says that, with love, we can accomplish almost anything, and a life without love is an empty one.
If we pay attention, the universe has a way of sending us signs. I believe that if we pay attention, we receive signs from the departed that help show us the way. Some people call these entities guardian angels, while others refer to them as spirit guides. They visit in different forms, so you must open your heart to the secret messages being sent your way.
I’m not the only one who receives messages from the departed through birds. Birds are like omens. Some people say they’re a source of spiritual inspiration. After all, like angels, they have wings. This makes sense to me, as birds are able to fly close to the heavens and gather wisdom and messages to bring back to us here on Earth.
Over the years, I’ve learned to be mindful of these messages. I’ve become more attentive during this chapter of my life, my sixties—the same decade of life in which my grandmother died. So, whenever a bird visits me, I tune right in.
My father as a dove
My father, Edward, is another ancestor who has visited me. Dad was short in stature—standing about 5 foot 9—but he had a big personality, always with a smile on his face exposing his perfectly aligned, capped teeth. He had a large forehead and black, thinning, slicked-back hair. He loved making jokes, and his loving nature thrived on making others happy.
Living through the Holocaust from the age of 15 to 20, my father lost his parents and youngest brother in Dachau’s gas chambers, so a growing family became very important to him. His life mission after emigrating to the United States at the end of the Second World War was to bring as much peace as possible into his life and into the lives of his loved ones. Decades later, he was especially joyful when he was the first grandparent to meet his grandbaby. He was a retail toy salesman and yearned to start bestowing the latest toys on his first grandchild.
My father died more than 30 years after Grandma. Now he visits me as a dove, symbolizing peace, which I need during challenging times. I was navigating tough waters while raising three teenagers and facing—and then surviving—two cancer journeys.
Even though my father left this physical plane so long ago, I believe that the dove’s visits are his way to remind me of his presence. He continues to remind me to seek peace for myself and for those I love.
Unconditional love and guidance
When my grandmother and father were alive, they provided me with unconditional love, and they continue to do so on their visitations. They don’t give me direct, detailed instructions. Rather, they support and guide me on my life journey.
I sometimes feel their presence over my right shoulder as if an energy were coming through—a physical sensation such as tingling or chills in the upper part of my body. Once in a while, I feel their presence when one of my extremities falls asleep. Sometimes I hear Dad giving me advice or telling me that everything will be OK.
My grandmother’s messages come to me in other subtle ways—an unexpected bird, an out-of-the-blue phone call, a certain book falling off my shelf, a certain song playing on the radio, a light flickering in the house, or her whispering into my right ear. It might only be a word or two, but it’s usually enough to relay an important message, much as the hummingbirds seem to do.
This connection with birds can also be a way to connect with our own souls.
“Seer” vs. “new soul”
My mother was in her thirties when Grandma died. That’s too young to lose a mother. In the wake of this misfortune, perhaps during her long hours of birdwatching, my young mother was searching for her lost soul. She seemed empty, as if an essential part of herself were missing. Grief dimmed her aura. As James Joyce said in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), “Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.”
While Grandma had been a “seer,” my mother was more of a new soul. (I think the “seer” characteristic skipped a generation.) But she was a keen observer. After my grandmother died, I’d sometimes find Mother sitting in the yard, birdwatching, remarking on their varieties and behaviours. She had all sorts of bird feeders, some elevated on poles and others hanging from trees. Her passion was to study what food each species of bird liked, and she’d fill the feeders accordingly. In the winter, she filled the feeders with suet cakes embedded with assorted bird seed. “The fat helps them keep warm,” she told me.
Unfortunately, since I moved her into an assisted-living facility five years ago, my 93-year-old mother has lost her joie de vivre and no longer expresses interest in birds or in the horses she rode until she was 80. As an only child, I’m the one who makes all the decisions about Mother’s care. I insisted she stop riding when she was 80 because she’d had a terrible fall and ended up in the ICU with a concussion. Now, cognitive decline has begun to set in, as is often the case when we’re no longer able to tap into our passions. But her small, six-hundred-square-foot (about 55 square metres) apartment at her assisted-living facility has photos of her riding her horse on each wall.
Like a hummingbird who can fly backward, my mother had a tendency to look back on life rather than to look forward. She has always been obsessed with the past and often lingered there. She had difficulty adapting to not having her mother around. It was as if she was unable to function or make any decisions, whether it had to do with making dinner or what to do in her spare time.
Often depressed and tired, my mother slept for long stretches on the weekend and on her days off. She’d worked at my grandparents’ general store, Klein’s on Broadway in Brooklyn, when younger and then as a unit co-ordinator in the local hospital during the last 25 years of her working life. She was never a good cook or housekeeper—tasks she suddenly had to take on when my grandmother passed. Mother detested them. On the days she worked, she’d do the grocery shopping on her way home from work. Much like Europeans in those times, she’d buy only enough food for one day.
After Grandma died, our household consisted of just four people—my mother, my father, my grandfather and I. In order to do the domestic work my grandmother had done, Mother shortened her working hours outside the home, which I suspect she resented. By nature, she wasn’t a very nurturing woman, a characteristic exacerbated by the depression brought on by losing her mother. So, when my primary caretaker was gone, I felt abandoned because my grandfather, father and mother were all gone much of the time—if Mother wasn’t working, she was riding her horse or meeting with friends.
As a result, I became quite independent. It seems I was destined to be a survivor. In my youth, I survived the loss of my primary caretaker while also surviving being the only daughter of a mother with narcisstic tendencies. According to Mark Epstein in his book, Thoughts Without a Thinker (1995), “When a child, seeking contact with another person rather than just instinctual gratification, comes up against a narcissistic parent, too preoccupied with her own search to attend to the child’s, the child is left with a feeling of absence that becomes the seed of her own fear and insecurity” (p. 37).
There’s no doubt that this is what happened to me.
Positive energy and empathy
Years later, I became a two-time cancer survivor. I’ve intuitively known how to care for myself by surrounding myself with those who love me. I’ve sought good and lighthearted people. At home, I was often the mediator between two warring parents, so I tried to infuse all other realms of my life with calm.
I began meditating in the early 1970s before it was trendy. I was selective about my friends, and it took time for me to trust people. Losing my grandmother had hurled me into a barbed cycle of fear. As a teen, when boyfriends broke up with me, I remained locked in trauma long after my friends in similar situations had moved on. I was constantly in a state of self-protection, afraid that through death, abandonment or both, I’d be left alone.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that difficult moments of our childhoods can continue to trigger us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes when I felt unloved or reprimanded, I’d shut down. Five years after my grandmother died, I had a heated disagreement with my mother. I can’t recall what she said, but I do remember it was the first time I realized that our worldviews were in complete opposition. She had a way of diminishing my self-esteem and making me feel empty inside. For example, she’d ridicule me in front of others.
People have often asked how it is possible that I’m her daughter, as our energies are completely different. My mother’s negativity often made people feel deflated. In contrast, I’ve been a positive person who made people feel good about themselves. As Maya Angelou wisely said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The fact is, as children, we don’t initially realize the impact of crises such as losing a loved one or learning that we weren’t wanted. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score (2014), says that if we feel safe and loved, our brains become specialized in play, exploration and co-operation. On the other hand, if you’re scared and feeling unwanted, you’ll be dealing with feelings of fear and a sense of abandonment.
It took many years for me to feel safe and loved. The first time I felt that way was when I was 18 and met the man who became my husband. That was in 1972, and now, more than 50 years later, he’s still not let me down.
I always felt he’d protect me when my mother said and did hurtful things—for example, calling me two weeks before my wedding day to say she wouldn’t pay for my wisdom teeth removal, even though she had the money to do so. Or saying she wasn’t interested in helping me choose my wedding gown, even though she really liked my husband and his family. My husband disliked her for how intentionally mean and insensitive she was, especially to me. I suppose the silver lining is that I became an empath.
For the most part, children and young adults take things in stride; but sometimes, if they have a difficult time expressing their feelings, their bodies give them messages. After my grandmother died, my parents began fighting a lot. It was difficult to watch and impossible to process. I believe my childhood asthma might have signalled that I was stressed by circumstances at home. According to the Cleveland Clinic, traumatized children have shown asthma rates 50 times higher than their peers.
As an adolescent, I hung out with teens who took illegal drugs, and I stayed away from home as much as possible. I felt adrift, searching for a way to reconnect with Grandma. Now I’m left to wonder if the hummingbird visitations are a way to make that connection. Are her messages a way for me to heal from my grief both over losing her and over not being wanted by my mother?
5 reflections and writing prompts
- Write about an incident from your childhood that transformed you.
- Who in your life, alive or deceased, provided you with the most unconditional love? Describe how they displayed their love.
- Discuss the first time you lost someone whom you loved deeply.
- Write about an experience you’ve had with a visitation from a deceased loved one.
- Write about a book or books that changed your worldview or perception.
Excerpted from the book Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors ©2024 by Diana Raab. Printed with permission from Modern History Press—www.modernhistorypress.com.
image 1: JillWellington; image 2: Grey85; image 3: EnergieDeVie
