Marsha Hensen/NV

JESUS AT MY BEDSIDE

Are you familiar with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross? She is the psychologist who did all the research on grief and dying. Her first book is called, On Death and Dying.”

I met her when I was a nursing student in Chicago and she was at La Rabida Children’s Hospital. She was on the floor with the hospice children and I was downstairs with seven of my fellow nursing students. Elizabeth came down one afternoon and spent two and a half hours with us talking about faith. We were a bunch of Catholic girls so she said that she really admired us for being able to have faith but that she herself was agnostic.

This was somewhere around Easter of 1979 and there was an extraordinary article on the front page of the Chicago Tribune about her and her writings. It was in this time frame that she decided that she was finished with all of her research on grieving and dying and that it was time to move on to something else. Elizabeth was sitting in her office at her desk and she looked up and in front of her was a nun who had died several years earlier.

This particular nun had worked with Elizabeth on her research and shared her personal findings with Elizabeth. They knew each other well. But here, standing in front of Elizabeth, was the nun who had been dead now for several years. The nun told Elizabeth, '“You cannot leave your research. This is your mission.”

So Elizabeth responded to the nun saying, “How do I know you are not just my imagination, an apparition?” The nun picked up a pen and signed her name. That signature was later analyzed by professionals and it matched identically to the nun’s signature when she was alive.

So Elizabeth stayed with her work on grieving and dying and came up with several more books that were published before she passed.

Now, this is my own personal story. Many years later, when I was thirty-seven or so I started doing Bible studies in the Catholic Church. I had not had a Bible before so this was all new to me. I became fascinated with the Transfiguration and wanted to read about it in the Bible. I searched but could not find it. I wanted to use a concordance but didn’t have one, actually I didn’t even know what is was at the time. I spent the whole day in the gospels but I was at a loss. It was important to me to be able to read this remarkable story first hand from the Bible for myself.

I went to bed that night. I didn’t pray or anything but I woke up in the morning and remembered that I had had a dream. It sounds kind of crazy but I was looking down at myself sleeping and Jesus came to me and sat on the side of the bed while I was sleeping and He whispered in my ear, “Mark 9:1-8”

Then He left. I figured the quick departure was because He had a whole lot of other people to see. He was simply dressed, very simple. I want to say a kind of tunic similar to that painting of the “Prince of Peace” picture. He was very simple, very, very simple. There was nothing glorious about it, no bright light or anything like that.

At the time I thought about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross because she too had seen a spiritual person and so this too must be real. When I got out my Bible and looked up Mark 9: 1-8, sure enough - it was about the Transfiguration.”

story submitted September 2025