White Feathers Comfort The Bereaved

In my previous post I started to talk about white feathers and maybe their meaning.

After my first experience with the white feathers I hit a sad time in my life. In a period of 16 months three very close people died: my mother, my best friend of some 30 years and my daughter. The latter two deaths were quite unexpected.

Needless to say this hit my wife and I quite hard. I questioned many of my long held beliefs and now feel that life is about change, nothing is permanent.

I've been lucky though as I now have some new people in my life such as my wonderful daughter-in-law to be who is pregnant, so my son will soon be a dad and me a granddad (frightening!)

Following my mother's departure from this world my wife and I started to see white feathers. They seemed to be everywhere and these continued following our other two losses as well.

The feathers felt like they were messages saying that things were alright. Often, after we saw one, something nice would happen. Of course, when we are emotional, there can be a tendency to hang on to whatever we find comforting. Some would say that the white feathers were like a crutch.

It's very easy to dismiss white feathers as something by chance or even superstition - feathers perhaps simply out of pillows, or even birds!

The odd thing, however, is that they sometimes seemed to almost answer questions.

On one occasion I was walking across the square in our local town, just after my best friend had died and wondered if he was okay. A daft question some will think, as he was dead, but out of nowhere a white feather appeared and fell at my feet. As I continued to walk it flew on ahead and did a sort of big forward circle before falling again at my feet.

Perhaps I was clutching at straws but I got an instant feeling inside that things were okay with him and I had no need to worry.

This sort of incident followed my wife and I during the sad times. My wife would find a feather and say, "Look, she's thinking of us." And that's how we felt. It was comforting.

The other side of this is that we also came across black feathers and following these something not so good would happen - even one of the deaths.

At the present time the feathers, white or black, have stopped appearing. Perhaps we are getting stronger and don't need them quite so much.

Recently I've been reading about white feathers and theories of their meaning. I don't know if any of these are correct as none of them a struck an immediate chord with me. All I can say is that they helped my wife and I and seem to have helped other people as well.

Gloria Hunniford, a well known televison and radio presenter in the UK, lost her daughter, Caron, to cancer and this is what she said:

"I remember one time in a swimming pool, everybody and everything was awash with water and I just looked down and all of a sudden on the edge was just this white fluffy dry feather and I thought, 'Oh my God!' It's just like Caron popping in to see how the children are getting on."

And on the BeliefNet website I read the following:

"White feathers may appear in the most unlikely places. When you have found a white feather, carry it round with you to keep your angel close. Once, when I was teaching an angel seminar, I mentioned that white feathers are a common angel sign. After the seminar a woman said that, despite what she had heard, she was not convinced of the existence of angels. At that very moment another student noticed a pure white feather stuck to the sleeve of her cardigan."

Angels? Guardian Angels? Messages from the dead? At the moment, I honestly don't know for sure.

Footnote: I would just add that a white feather is also known in the British Army as a sign of cowardice. So much so that in WWI lapel badges were issued to essential workers on home soil to show they were helping the war effort and were not cowards avoiding military action.

They also indicate pacifism in some countries and bravery in North America.

Further Reading:
White Feathers And Perhaps A Deal With An Angel