Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
Retired elementary school teacher Carole Bigras is starting to settle into her new role as a local author, following the release of her first book Le rêve magnifique de Mila, out on November 10. Since releasing the children’s book, she has sold over 130 copies, and has been invited to multiple book readings throughout the community. Bigras admits that the attention is at times overwhelming, but she enjoys sharing what is a very personal story, as told through the proxy of the titular character, and spreading the book’s positive message.
“What happened is that in 2010, when I was 45 and my kids were in their teenage years, I suffered a double pneumonia. It was so severe, I was sent to the emergency in North Bay, and from there they flew me out to Sudbury. I was put into an induced coma for 3-and-a-half weeks, and was in hospital for over 6-and-a-half weeks. While I was in that coma, I saw something, and someone spoke to me,” Bigras describes. When she eventually got out of the coma, Bigras was told how precarious the situation was, saying “it was 50/50 if I was going to make it.” During this near-death experience, she believes that the voice she heard had to be God sending her a message.
“I saw myself in between two Earths. One of these Earths was colourful, vibrant, birds were singing, the trees, everything was beautiful. It’s indescribable just how splendid and serene it looked. I wanted to stay there. On the other side was the same earth, but it was all in black and white. It was dull and lifeless. Then this figure appeared in front of me. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his white robe, his white beard, and his hair,” she describes. Bigras says that she tried to insist on going to the first Earth, the vibrant and inviting one, but the figure kept repeating that she “couldn’t go there yet,” and that she “had to go there,” pointing to the black and white planet. Finally, when she told the figure that the place he was pointing to wasn’t nice, Bigras says that he told her, “Carole, you see the crayon in front of you? Take it and colour your Earth.”
It was then that she saw a crayon, and reluctantly did as the figure asked, and as she began seeing the colour coming to her world, she understood what the message was. “You see Carole? You can colour your Earth. You can make it beautiful,” she remembers the figure saying. “What I took away from this is that to colour your world is to make life beautiful by doing good things in your life. What I tell kids through the book, is that you do that by doing nice things like sharing, lending a hand, forgiving, loving one another,” she explains.
