By Kelly Shoff,Producer
This story starts long ago. Long before there was even a “thing” known as the internet. (Scary, indeed).
Anyway, back in the 80’s my mom used to have these very vivid recurring dreams. She’d wake up distraught because she was in this town and she knew someone needed her help and she was desperate to help them, but try as she might, she just couldn’t find the person calling to her.
And of course, as dreams often are, the place she dreamt of looked nothing like the town we lived in, but it had a very distinctive look, and she was frustrated because she didn’t know where it was. As the years went by she had the dream often enough that she once woke up with the word “Napier” stuck in her head.
Thinking it was a clue, she eventually went to the library (remember, there was no internet to, “Google it”). She started with an encyclopedia and, low and behold, there was her town, the city she’d been to in her dreams, Napier, New Zealand. It was half a world away and remember this was also before there were a bazillion cable channels filled with travel shows.
She’d never heard of the city, but Napier, you see, has a very interesting history.
Back in 1931, a massive earthquake (7.8 on the Richter scale) rocked the city, leveling it. And when town leaders decided to rebuild, they built the entire town in an Art Deco style. Very distinctive. My mom sat there in the library stunned. This was the exact city she’d seen in her dreams, a city filled with Art Deco buildings nestled along the ocean. She guessed that the person who needed her help in her recurring dream was perhaps a person trapped in the earthquake. That’s pretty weird, right?
Well it’s about to get a whole lot stranger.
My mom had always wanted to visit Napier and see the town in person, but it never worked out. This all happened in the late 80’s and early 90’s while I was in college and starting my career. So I wasn’t home a lot during this time and didn’t realize any of this had happened until much later. I remembered my mom having that weird dream but that was really it. Fast forward to 2017 my mom died from Alzheimer’s. And the next year, our son, was approved to study abroad in Australia for the fall semester. So my husband and I decided we HAD to visit him. Unfortunately the only time we could go was in early August because my husband is a college professor, and you know, he has to teach class! We also thought, if we are going all the way to Australia, we should also go to New Zealand, since they are essentially right next to each other. So we started planning our trip and there was one place my husband really wanted to go, Napier, New Zealand.
Now it had nothing to do with my mom. He loves Art Deco architecture and happened to see a travel show years ago about the town and all of its buildings. So our trip included a stop in Napier. As we prepared to leave I was chatting with my dad, who had cared for my mom until the very end, about our plans. And when I mentioned Napier, he started acting really weird.
He said, “Why are you going there?”
And was quite hostile about it. I explained why my husband wanted to visit and there was just silence on the end of the phone line. He finally said, “You know that’s the place that your mom had that recurring dream about. And her entire life she was convinced someone there needed her help.” Instant goosebumps! I remembered the dream but didn’t realize that was the town! Then my dad asked when we were going to be there. “August 7 and 8th,” I said. And as the words left my mouth, a cold shiver went down my spine, I would be there exactly on the one year anniversary of my mom’s death.
(So the story should end here, because that’s crazy! And super weird. I’d love to say that when I got there and looked through the records of the people who died in the earthquake there was someone named Joyce (her name) or had the last name of James (her maiden name) something that spoke to me or helped me understand why she dreamt of this place. But there was nothing. Or it would be super cool, if I had a dream that night and my mom visited and told me she found the person who needed her help. But none of that happened. The only thing I did in her memory was bury a heart necklace she gave me on the beach in Napier, so a piece of her is always there.)
