Nellie Colebrook’s prayer for her mother’s peaceful death

During her mother’s final illness, Nellie Colebrook, who had lapsed from the Church and stopped praying for three years, knelt by her mother’s bedside and prayed for a testimony of God’s existence in the form of a painless and peaceful death for her mother. The prayer was answered instantly with a physical sensation of an electric thrill, and her mother passed away peacefully.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 2 no. 7 (April 1891), page 315):

When the conviction forced itself upon the mind of the daughter that nothing but death would relieve her mother from suffering, she knelt by that bedside, and in her anguish prayed that God would give to her a testimony of His existence. That that testimony should be for death to be painless and peaceful. Holding her mother’s hand, the prayer had scarcely left her lips until it was answered. There was a quick, warm pressure of the hand, an electric thrill through her entire being, and death came peacefully and painlessly as she had prayed. The daughter, Nellie Colebrook, had been a member of the Church, but for three years had been indifferent, and had not offered a prayer. She was living with a Mrs. Purce, who was a faithful Latter-day Saint, and who had been very kind to her and her mother. Mrs. Purce had often talked to her of the Gospel, but Nellie had turned a deaf ear to all her pleadings. But in that hour of sorrow, when the shadow of death was hovering over her, she turned to the God of her childhood, and He heard and answered her.