Visitations from the dead -
It's a process, grieving the loss of a loved one. I don't know many people with more experience than I. I have lost my mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, in-laws, you name it!
No matter how experienced you are at grief, you still go through the stages. One of the stages is the potential visitation - that if you are lucky, you will remember or recognize.
But, there is also a period of letting the new reality sink in and it shows up often in dreams. First, you might dream about them as if they are alive and think nothing of it. Then, you might start dreaming that they are sick or they are dying and you are worried. Then, you might begin to dream that they are dying and you know it, but they don't seem to know it and you're worried about how to handle them or tell them. Then, you might dream that they show up and you know they are supposed to be dead, so you are confused. Around this time, you have assimilated the new reality and you may or may not ever dream of them again.
That's not good or bad, we tend to dream about things that are around us daily or we pull in characters from TV or our own pasts that represent archetypes for us, like Uncle Bob who was always an angry man will represent anger in your dream and he will show up to represent that aspect of you when you are angry. I pull up a long-term soap opera character when I am feeling take-charge and in control because she was a role model of a successful powerful woman to me when I was creating my archetypes in my psyche.
Signs of visitations can take many forms from scents to certain songs to favorite animals and feeling a sudden rush of comfort when you were very upset. You might be having a bad day and a butterfly lands on your arm. It's never happened before, but your mother adored butterflies, bought everything she could get her hands on with butterfly designs. You might be feeling lost when an obscure song comes on the radio that your father used to sing when he drove the car on family road trips when you were a kid.
The odd thing about communications with our loved ones once they pass on is that their experience is so very different than our mortal one and their sense of time and distance, grief and separation are not present for them for the simple reason that they are completely tapped into the universal collective. This means they are never without you - but not in the sense we know, meaning physically by our side, but in a unity that is like what a psychic experiences - an ability to be tapped into your experience without having to be there in that very spot.
We are too linear in our thinking. Our physicality makes us think - one person, one body, one soul, one place. But that's not so. Many loved ones are seen by multiple relatives around the world at the same time. It is not an experience we can conceive because we only know this physical existence, though we get glimpses in dreams and in those moments of meditation or utter joy watching a sunset or sharing an experience with a cheering crowd. We have it in us, but the mortal experience is always the driving factor for us. If it wasn't, we wouldn't seek shelter, eat, breed, or follow nature's call. We must first answer to our reality and our reality is reliant on physical forms.
Just know that we are always connected to everyone, family, loved ones, even people who will in the future meet us and become loved by us and important to us. You are bound even before you meet and after you are physically apart.