I can see two angles on this. There are many reports of those who are approaching their own death receiving visitations, sometimes an angelic form, but just as often it is a previously-deceased loved one, often people who passed many years before. Their role seems to be to accompany and reassure the dying person, in effect letting them know that there is no death, but that they will be going on this journey. Often these encounters are joyful reunions and the person approaching death is optimistic and happy to be going with them.
In your own case, it seems the visitor had come more as a messenger to give you advance notification and to allow some preparation for the departure, the separation and sense of loss and all the pain and grief that entails.
But going forwards, from my own experience, our loved ones do come back to us, sometimes there is physical contact, a sense of touch and solidity, those are less frequent. But on a more regular basis, they may enter our thoughts, to communicate or simply be with us. I know this is a difficult area because each person experiences things differently and sometimes the connection is more difficult. In my opinion the deceased do visit us, because they continue to care, but to the living person it may not be so obvious. We each have to find our own way through these things.
I think I agree with that, I remember feeling at the time that I wasn't easy about the vision and looking back now I think that it had come to let me know that she was going to go back, I always kind of knew she was only ever on loan to me, when she was young she once said to me, " I won't live to see old age, and I won't live forever you know"! Oh boy how I can never forgot those words - she knew!
I was not popular with girls at school and so I never approached them because I was not of the 'Wild reckless boy type' that most girls wanted back then and so I was seen as too conservative and boring, I didn't really bother until I started work and I do remember praying each night asking god to let my future wife come to me, months later that girl started work where I worked and after weeks of trying to pluck up the courage I did and she told me that she was washing her hair but this only made me more interested in her, I asked her again and she told me that she only said yes just to shut me up, 31 years later and here we are. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, I saw 'Home' in her face, a feeling on familiarity, warmth and love. I had a good looking girl with a beautiful kind heart and soul, I was wealthy indeed!
I remember thanking god at the time for allowing me to meet her! I am being honest about every thing I say here, I thanked him so much!
I have read about people seeing reapers before loved ones die and I think that is what I saw, it was not like something from a Stephen King film - on the contrary! It was supernatural yes but not scary like a horror movie but I did see it, I remember thinking at the time whether it had come for me and whether I would just go with it but it didn't point at me but where my wife lay so I knew it meant for her.
As she lay in the hospice she remarked on how many people would come and stand around her bed at night - but oh they were not the nurses she would say, she didn't who they were but they were kind and friendly, she also said she could see waterfalls where the walls should be.
I wasn't there when she passed but signs started happening from the night I got back home, her favourite statue in the garden was tipped over, her three favourite songs played on there own on Alexa, my phone kept flashing her picture and froze on it, i couldn't even turn the thing off and had to leave it until the battery drained.
We have dreamt together where we were flying, she was showing me so many things that I couldn't keep up and last night she was in my dream, I was on a bed which was not our bed here but a lovely big bed in a lovely house and she was lying on her front looking at me like she looked when she had just given birth to our first son and she looked so beautiful and she was happy, I asked her what was it like there and her answer to me was " Not much different really"
Does that tell us that on the other side is not too different to here? I have a suspicion that when we pass and this body dies, we just wake up somewhere else! That's my spin on it.
But it is rather strange that after Eva1942 said "why don't you ask your wife to come and help", well I did and that dream occurred that very night.
If all this that we believe is a figment of our imagination and nothing more then I am happy to be deceived by my own mind because of the comfort it gives me but I don't accept that hypothesis, I believe that we just wake up somewhere else until we realize that we have moved out of that old broken body and are in some better reality.
I do hope that I go one and she comes to meet me we had a bond that could never got broken and we also had wolves at our door from time to time and nothing ever got in between us.
Love never dies and it's an energy that I will follow forever.
I also thank god that I found this forum.