It was my mom who started noticing signs after my grandpa died. The time on the clock reading his birthday. The scent of him passing through on the breeze, like a hug you smelled instead of felt.
She shared these things, almost shyly, with my aunt and me. They were precious talismans; there was a fierceness in her reticence, a stern look warning that we must not laugh. A fear, I suppose, that we would dismiss or diminish what she experienced. An uncertainty of whether or not she truly wanted to share something so personal. She didn’t want it to become a game, to be trivialized.
Of course, my aunt and I were delighted. It was as though my mom gave us the permission we needed to see and experience, too. We both started spotting Grandpa’s birthdate everywhere. On license plates, in email time stamps, on boxes of my books. It was silly and it made us smile and it made our hearts warm. I found a dog for my aunt—or perhaps Grandpa whispered in my ear—born on his birthday. More soberly, but no less importantly, our old dog passed away on his birthday some years later.
I know those who have passed on communicate with us. The grandparents have rung the doorbell and turned on lights when our “adopted” family is together. (The punchline? We didn’t have a working doorbell. And the light had been burnt out for years.)
And it’s not just our birth families who form our communities of beloved dead. People who have passed on pop into my thoughts on a regular basis—the spiritual seeker who departed in the cold waters of the river; the best friend from kindergarten who I never saw again and later learned died in the same years I had cancer; the library board member who used to bring the mail and those thick, too-sweet, individually wrapped lifesavers that no one ever wanted but could never say no to.
They are all there, no more than a breath—or a thought—away. They flash into stories I am writing. I name characters after them and knead the truth of their lives into little bits of fiction.
And yet there is something else. In the same way that they are present, some of them—most of them—perhaps all of them—have been born again. Into whatever happens between our lives, yes, and then onward—into the next incarnation.
I recently finished the utterly fascinating book Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker, a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies. A reprint of two previously published books, Before presents, in a factual manner, the scientific study of children who have expressed memories of what can only be previous lifetimes.
It would be easy to dismiss this work with the throwaway line “Kids say the darnedest things,” but in about 2500 of these studies, the cases have been “solved.” As in, the researchers have identified the child’s previous personality. The kid might have a birthmark where their previous identity was shot, or recognize themselves from an old photo. They might have nightmares about being shot down over the Pacific or have phobias about the way they died in their last lifetime. Some of them remember their previous names, or the names of family and friends; some of them beg their parents to let them go home…to their other parents.
It’s easy to get lost in the jaw-dropping accounts of these cases (and I highly recommend the book), but I find myself pondering one piece of analysis—the time between lives. The researchers have found that there is no set timeframe between death and rebirth. Some children appear to be reborn in a matter of days; others return remembering lifetimes that ended decades before.
You know where I’m going with this. If our loved ones have left us, and yet are still with us to leave us signs, if we can still call upon them, and yet they have been reborn in new bodies… Well, I’m left ineffectually wondering, how does it work? I find myself trying to explain through quantum mechanics—not something I understand at all, as I am a novelist and emphatically not a scientist—but if all times are happening at once and our consciousness is selecting the current reality, then perhaps it makes sense. Our beloved dead have died, and yet they are still right here, in spirit, and always will be, because time is intertwined. Perhaps our lives and afterlives are like a dense ball of golden threads, winding in and around each other, all existing together, touching, and yet seemingly separate.
I don’t need to explain or understand this, though—and perhaps I’m not meant to. If I knew that my grandfather was reborn as a child in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, perhaps I’d be more loathe to call on him for help, wondering instead where the division is between the spirit of my grandpa and the identity of this new person.
Instead, sometimes I feel like a child marveling at the mystery of all of this. When I was a kid, I often wondered what I was doing here, in this life, in this body, at this time. And how weird is it that time moves forward?! I still have moments when I seem to step outside myself, where I look at my life and mutter, How weird is THIS lifetime! Sometimes I feel as if I have a benevolent amnesia, as if a memory or understanding is scratching at the edges of my thoughts.
One thing I will promise you: when I’m gone, I’ll still be here. And so will you. I will come back—and so will you. Unless, as one of the children in Before says, so wisely, you don’t want to.1
P.S. I’ve taken a bit of an unannounced (and not really planned) hiatus from The Tangled Path as I’ve been busy with a new job. Going forward, I anticipate sending posts more regularly—so if you’ve been wondering, that’s what’s up.
P.P.S. There are a few new faces here, so FYI in these parts we talk about creativity, spirituality (this post may be super-woo), nature and whatever else hops into my head. I try to keep most posts free to read because I can currently afford to and I grow tired of paywalls everywhere, although I also understand the financial necessity of being fairly paid for our work. If you choose to become a paid subscriber (thank you!), about 85% of your subscription goes directly to me, after Substack and Stripe take their fees.
I am no theologian and recognize that the topic of reincarnation can be uncomfortable for those who believe we live just once. And perhaps some of us do—we pop in for a quick lifetime, have a stroll around, then depart for Other Shores. What do I know? Actually, I do know one thing—anybody who says they do know or can explain any of this absolutely cannot.
Thank you for sharing this, Callie. I too believe that everyone is here, somehow and in ways we cannot comprehend. We’re in the soup of life and it’s all miraculous. You don’t have to understand it or explain it to know that it just Is.
Thanks Callie for allowing me to touch passed loved ones and entertainment that those since past may possibly be present. I so want to find a healthy way to have a relationship with so many loved ones including my dog Lucinda that have moved on or possibly found new forms in the universe. My sisters touchstone is 11:11 where whenever she would come across this sequence she would kiss her knee. I do this also now as it makes me smile and connect with my wonderfully irreverent sister. Snowfall is a trigger to think of my father, the smell of pot roast my mother and a cardinal's song makes me think of a dear friend Jim. Young children makes me think of my wife.
Again thanks for giving me pause to commune and feel.