Neville recounts that at the moment his mother died in Barbados -- wracked with pain and looking, at sixty-one, far older than her years -- she appeared to him in a vision as a young woman of about twenty. He immediately wrote to his sister Daphne describing the experience. Because wartime conditions meant no regular air travel to Barbados and all cables were censored, Daphne's reply describing their mother's actual death (which she confirmed, by the hour, matched his vision to within the one-hour time difference between New York and Barbados) took eight to ten days to reach him by ordinary mail.
Date (happened)
1941
conclusion · probable
Why
dc1-agreement-20261004, pm-actor-551 (PM 8702)
Reasoning
All 2 claims agree on 1941: passage:528444; passage:543127.
1941
relative · probable · preferred
Reasoning
hist_event 5960 (certain) already dates the mother's death to 1941. He says the letter reporting it took eight to ten days to arrive by ordinary mail, since wartime conditions (no airplanes to Barbados, censored cables) ruled out anything faster. Probable rather than certain because the exact day of death within 1941 is not established, so a very-late-December death could in principle push receipt into 1942, but this is unlikely.
before 1968
bound · probable
Reasoning
Full-read Low6 judgment: completed past narration before the telling.
Told / reported
1970
estimated
Reasoning
Lecture nid 1036 carries two doubtful catalog claims (1957 catalog #74, 1968-05-10 catalog #443), both explicitly flagged by the node's own v1.1/l1.3b/w1 annotation for lowering because the text twice names 1970 as the present year and discusses Bertrand Russell's death (1970) as recent; the certain, internally-sourced 1970 claim is preferred per the catalog-vs-transcript rule.
17 July 1968
estimated
Why
Flag for another lane: this same mother's-death vision story is also told in passage 528444 (nid 1036, 'The Divine Body') with 'eight or ten days' instead of 'a week', and echoed in passage 541943 (nid 1530, a different vision - dying nephew Billie - that reuses the same 'letter arrived N days later, timed to the hour' structure). None of the three tellings names a calendar year. Separately, event hist_event:7751 (same corpus run) dates a cable saying Neville's mother was 'desperately ill' to August 1941 from a different lecture (nid 1752) - plausibly the same real-world illness that ended in her death described here, but the witnessing passage for THIS event gives no textual link to that cable, so I have not merged the two into one date. Worth a dedicated pass to see whether the illness cable and the death letter are the same 1941 episode.
Reasoning
The lecture whose passage 543127 carries this telling has 2 delivery claims, both independently agreeing on 1968-07-17 at certain confidence (catalogue hist_event 461 title/date match and an independent chrome dateline harvest) - no conflict to resolve.