Many will say I'm deluded, but I just know we all have a guardian angel, says LORNA BYRNE

Last week it was reported that a third of Britons are convinced a guardian angel watches over them. This will come as no surprise to Irish mother-of-four LORNA BYRNE, 56, who claims she can see and talk to angels.

Many will dismiss her as a fantasist, but her first memoir, Angels In My Hair, was an international bestseller two years ago. Now, in her second book, Stairways To Heaven, she describes how angels helped her through the untimely loss of her husband — and the remarkable story of one paralysed boy...

An angel stepped through the trees — and as he came ­closer to me, the aura of light surrounding him grew brighter. Tall and elegant, he had a ­human appearance.

He was ­radiant, his face was gold in ­colour and his eyes gleamed with a pearly light. His clothes were draped over his figure, but as he moved not a fold changed. As with all angels, his feet didn’t touch the ground as he walked.

He was surrounded by golden birds in flight and on the ground around him were all kinds of other, smaller birds — crows and jackdaws, robins, sparrows and finches.

As the angel walked towards me, he opened his enormous wings and moved them gently. I could see each individual feather, some huge, some tiny — all white with a tint of gold.

I knew this was the comforting Bird Angel I had last seen shortly before my husband Joe’s death a few months earlier. I knew he’d come to help me.

I see angels all the time. I cannot remember a time when I haven’t. These days I see them as clearly as I see my youngest daughter, Megan, 14, sitting across the dinner table from me.

I talk with them as I talk with other people, but I can also communicate with them without words. To me there has never been a day when I haven’t seen angels — it’s the most natural thing in the world, and they are my best friends and companions.

The angels told me when I was quite young that I should keep what I was seeing a secret, but when I became an adult they told me that I had to write a book about them.

When I was younger, the angels I saw generally adopted a human form — to make it easier for me to accept them. Now that’s no longer absolutely necessary.

The angels I see now do not always have wings, but when they do I am sometimes amazed by their form. Sometimes they are like flames of fire, and yet they have shape and solidity. Some angels’ wings have feathers, like the wings of the Bird Angel.

When angels have a human appearance — with or without wings — their eyes are one of their most fascinating features. Angel eyes are not like human eyes. They are so much more alive, so full of life and light and love. It’s as if they contain the essence of life itself. Their ­radiance fills me completely.

I don’t know why God has chosen me in this way. I don’t think I’m ­better than anyone else. I’m just an ordinary person. But He did choose me and He sent His angels to teach me. When I see an angel, I want to stop and stare. I feel like I am in the presence of a tremendous power.

That’s how it was when the Bird Angel visited me. When he approached me, he knelt down in front of me and wrapped his enormous wings around me. I could feel the gentle pressure as they encircled my body. As I snuggled into the feathers, I suddenly felt at peace. I whispered to him: ‘Thank you for coming to comfort me.’

That was just a few months after my husband, Joe, had died in March 2000 from complications following a series of strokes. He was just 47.

When the angel came, I was missing Joe terribly. But saddest of all was that I’d always known that I would find myself in that position — right from the age of just nine or ten.

As a schoolgirl, an angel called Elijah — a strong, broad, rust-coloured angel who has appeared to me at ­crucial points in my life to give me strength and courage — had shown me a vision of Joe.

Elijah told me then that Joe was the man I would marry and have children with, but that he would fall ill and we would not grow old together.

Our destiny was preordained from my childhood. Tragically, everything happened just as the angel had ­predicted. Many years later, Joe applied for a job in my father’s petrol station, where I worked after leaving school, and we fell in love.

We bought a little cottage and got married, but even before our wedding, Joe’s health was starting to deteriorates. Because I’d been sworn to secrecy by the angels about what would happen to him, I used to alternate between begging God and the angels to make him better, and castigating them for letting this happen. But to no avail.

It was God’s plan — and after we were married Joe had one health problem after another.

He became a diabetic, and then the diabetes affected his heart, leading to heart surgery. For the past ten years of Joe’s life he was bed-ridden for most of the time. Towards the end, he suffered a lot of strokes.

Despite his illnesses, however, we were very happy together and had four children: Christopher, Owen, Ruth and Megan.

In the last weeks of Joe’s life, I would watch angels wrapping a spiritual blanket around him as he sat in his chair at home. The blanket was bright and looked like cotton wool. The angels were so loving and so gentle with him. I could see that they were trying to help his body to be less sore, to ease his pain.

At home, the night before Joe died, I woke up many times and turned to look at him sleeping in our bed beside me, to check he was OK. I knew the angels were going to take Joe’s soul very shortly.

His beautiful guardian angel, who had loved and cared for Joe so ­tenderly throughout his life, and ­particularly in those last years, was no longer behind him where she should have been. Instead, glowing incredibly bright and radiant, she had moved through Joe’s body and was holding his soul.

Each time I woke up, I would just look at Joe with tears in my eyes and then his guardian angel would tell me to go back to sleep. I would fall asleep instantly, then, an hour or so later, I would wake again.

Eventually, at seven the next morning, I awoke to find Joe was no longer breathing. His soul, looking like a ­perfect, ethereal version of himself — and accompanied by his guardian angel — was already moving away towards a beautiful light, to Heaven.

I wanted so desperately to ask God to allow Joe to stay, but I knew I couldn’t, that the answer would be no. An angel touched my lips and I couldn’t speak. It was time to say goodbye.

Every single human being has a guardian angel with them at all times, regardless of their religion, their nationality, the colour of their skin — even if they have no faith. I have never seen a human being in my whole life who hasn’t had a guardian angel.

So, regardless of whether you believe in it or not, you have a guardian angel there, trying to help you. Your angel is a gift from God.

I often see guardian angels as a column of light about a yard high, appearing about three steps behind a person. Sometimes a guardian angel will open this light up for me and show me a very beautiful, perfect human appearance. This happens most days.

Your guardian angel never leaves you for one moment — from before your birth to after your death. Your guardian angel loves you and is there to help you. You are the most important person in the world to your angel — he is there to do everything he can for you.

Once the angels allowed me to talk about them in public a few years ago, I started getting calls from people who wanted me to help someone they knew.

One of those needing help was Conor, a young man in his early 20s who lived near me, who’d been in a terrible car accident. He was pushed in a wheelchair up to my front door by his parents.

As we sat around the kitchen table, I looked at Conor; the light of the energy around him was so dim. He couldn’t speak and was motionless, slouched in his wheelchair.

His mother cried as she told me he was severely brain-damaged and paralysed. He didn’t seem to understand or hear anything. There was no response and there was no way of communicating with him.

The doctors had said he would remain in this state for the rest of his life. I looked at their son. There were healing angels around him, yet no light of energy around his body.

But the light of his guardian angel opened up to me, showing a great masculine strength and he said to me forcefully: ‘He is not a vegetable, Lorna! Talk to him — he will hear you. He needs a reason to live. He needs courage to fight to get up out of that wheelchair, to walk and live his life.’

I stood up and walked over to Conor and, praying silently, touched his legs, his hands, his arms and his chest. As I felt his heartbeat, I put my hand on his head and looked into his eyes.

‘I know you can hear me,’ I said. ‘I know you will get well, but you have to fight for it. You have to struggle to walk and talk. You have to do it. You must want to get better. You can get well, have a job, marry and have children, but you mustn’t give up on yourself.’

I stopped talking for a little while, praying over him. Six healing angels surrounded him. Their arms were outstretched, touching every part of his body. ‘I know you can hear me,’ I said to him. ‘I know you have heard what I have said, even if you can’t show it. You can do it — but you have to fight.’

Around a year later, his parents rang to say they wanted to bring Conor to see me again. He was a completely different person. He was still in the wheelchair, but he could move his arms and his head. And he could talk in a faltering voice. He told me he’d heard what I had said the last time he had visited.

‘You gave me belief and courage to force my body to respond. Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know I will get ­better. Will you keep praying for me?’ I prayed over him again, as healing angels descended.

The last time I saw Conor was about a year ago. He was walking down the street, laughing, hand in hand with a girl. He didn’t see me, but his guardian angel opened up and gave me a big smile.

For me, it was a joyful moment, and proof — not that I needed it — that angels truly do guide us throughout our lives.