Grace

 

My step-grandmother Grace was a strange one.  I didn't know how to place her in my family at age five. We didn't see her often as she lived in another town not nearby.  At home I had my Nan whom lived with us.  All warmth and love.  Grace, well she was a bit stand-offish as well as having a brooding way about her.

One visit she came with a cassette player and while I can't remember how it came to be of me listening to her talk on the tape she played, it had a lasting impact in my memory.  She was convinced that she had been reincarnated as well as being involved in channeling her previous lives.  I must have been near 10 years of age by this time and listening to the cassette of whom she had been had me terribly confused.  I wasn't brought up to believe in reincarnation but I'm pretty sure this was the first time this concept had been tossed at me.  Grace seemed a bit self-centered without regards to how her words and thoughts might have an effect on a child.  

What did I think?  What did my parents think?  It seemed like they were all polite in listening to her speak of this and to listen to the cassette, but they didn't react either.  More politeness.  I'm sure my Nan was holed up in her room crocheting or some other handwork. I don't think they hit it off those too and this surely didn't bond them.  

For me it opened up a kettle of worms in my brain.  It confused me as then I wondered if I too had lived before.  What other time might I have come from?  I began having vivid nightmares of people dying, especially of my Nan dying.  I would wake up and sit outside my parents bedroom door, rocking myself quietly.  Why I didn't knock to be let in or why I didn't go to my Nan's room I don't know but perhaps leaving my room, listening to the quiet of the house knowing they were in their beds and alive settled me enough to climb back in my bed with a light on and fall back to sleep.  

By the time I was near fourteen I was fascinated with the idea of reincarnation and how that would mean to me, that I would not die but return in some other form.  Certainly far from my Presbyterian church upbringing.  I was still having the death nightmares occasionally and slept with my radio on to go to sleep,  often leaving my light on at night after a disturbing dream.  Death, such a mystery, that I felt I needed some explanation to settle me into knowing my loved ones would be okay and not in some creepy, spooky, graveyard.  The thought that they and I could come back and somehow channel ones memory into the future life, well, that sounded more comforting to me than the line that I would go to hell if I didn't read the bible everyday or if I didn't follow the Christian rules.  

My parents divorced shortly after and I never saw Grace or my step-father again.  If the idea of reincarnation was a comfort to her, I hope she found what she was seeking.