"I couldn't kill my brother yesterday. That's why there wasn't enough food. After all, I was supposed to be a preacher man."
A quote from a movie? Or a book? A heartrending admission from a man wracked with guilt and grief? No. It came from the mouth of babes. Specifically that of my three-year-old daughter. The words were spoken, softly, sadly, dreamily, as she gently held her favorite stuffed animal, the bunny's face to her cheek.
A precocious child (who taught herself to read before she could talk), she was what was what's often called "an old soul"--and soon I'd start to wonder exactly how metaphorical (or not) that phrase actually was. And, although it's been nearly 20 years since, the memory of this and other incidents during that bizarre and otherworldly year are seared into my brain as sharp and clear as the moment they happened.
As a person who lives by facts and evidence--and without belief in gods, demons, ghosts, or other paranormal entities--I, of course, cast about for explanations. It was certainly in no books she'd ever been read. I looked in vain for television or movie quotes she could have overheard. As non-religious northeasterners, "preacher man" was a phrase that had never been uttered in our house (except through a possible hearing of the Motown song, "Son of a Preacher Man" -- which, even if so, wouldn't explain the rest of the sentences.) And it seemed beyond unlikely that she'd have heard that quote during her few hours a week at preschool.
But it far from the only oddity that very strange year. Although she was never spanked or hit, or even yelled at, anytime she was spoken to at all sternly, she would screech and run from the room in apparent terror--one time screaming, "You want to kick me in the head until I'm deaf" (I thought at first that she was saying death, meaning dead, but, in retrospect, she never misused words.) And then, crying, she choked out something about a stone floor, a thing she had never seen and I sincerely doubt knew even existed. Possibly relevant (if you ascribe to the belief that we are born with marks of past deaths), she was born with a large red birthmark above and to the right of her eyebrow, a birthmark that disappeared when she was about four.)
Far less disturbing, except in the existential way of its happening at all, was the time I was stroking her hair as she lay on the couch with her head on my lap and she said, "It's kind of weird having different parents." She said no more, and I didn't ask.
The last of these events that I personally experienced was the one that most-directly suggested to my skeptical mind that maybe, just maybe, reincarnation, or something like it, actually does exist.
She was sitting in her room when she saw me in the doorway. She looked up, holding a pink silk flower to her cheek and sighed, "A rose. Just like the one Starting Over gave me." (And yes, she did literally say Starting Over. And yes, it was a rose although I don't remember ever telling her that.) This time I had the presence of mind to gently ask who that was. She looked up and said, "He's 11 years old now." But then she suddenly looked uncomfortable and said, "I don't want to talk about it anymore." And didn't. (Although I will confess that I've kept half an eye out to see if someone about seven or eight years older than her ends up playing any role in her life.)
One possible further incident, which only my mother-in-law witnessed, was when she was showing old photos to my daughter of herself, her then-husband, and her son (my daughter's father) as a baby. She was telling my daughter something about the picture when my daughter, with a withering look, turned to her and said, "Yes, Betty, I remember." And, yes, despite my best efforts (and though she would call my mother by her grandmother nickname) she stubbornly refused to ever call my mother-in-law by anything but her first name.
And then there was the game of Soldier. I was never quite sure if this was past-life adjacent or just an element of the generalized weirdness of that year. (One argument for its being a memory is that her paternal grandfather, mentioned above (who died about five years before she was born and whom I'd never met until he was in a coma) had been in the Cuban military alongside Castro during the Revolution.)
Soldier started as a game to help deal with her digestive "tummy troubles" and to give her a little regular exercise time. I'd sit at one end of the hallway and call out specific ways for her to come to me--walking, hopping, spinning, jumping, etc. She then insisted I make them military-like orders: e.g., "Run, soldier; Spin, soldier." We knew no one in the military then, but, OK. Once, I hesitated, having trouble coming up with a new command when she crossed her arms over her chest, corpse-fashion, and walked towards me saying, "Dead soldier." Very creepy.
That otherworldly year also brought Denne into our lives, an (imaginary?) friend who apparently came home from preschool with her (which building had, possibly coincidentally been a renovated, centuries-old barn.) Oddly, she didn't just tell me his name but instead pecked the letters out on a keyboard and asked me how to say it. She later questioned whether it's normal for people to have no eyes, because Denne's parents didn't.
The very last oddness was when she turned to me as we were playing and said calmly, "You're going to die in 14 days." (I can't remember for certain but I believe she told me that Denne told her.) I will admit to being especially careful in the days following! The really weird part (keeping in mind that, at three, she knew numbers but not necessarily the concept of counting, especially that high) is that literally on the evening of the 13th day after that pronouncement (to which I hadn't referred at all, or mentioned to anyone) she suddenly turned to me in the kitchen and said, "I shouldn't have said you were going to die. You're not."
Interestingly, these experiences, although odd and disturbing, are not unique. There are entire collections of such stories--and even university studies on the topic. Many of the memories are even more detailed and fact-verifiable than the ones my daughter shared. They are generally far too complex or difficult to explain to just dismiss as overactive imaginations.
A common thread in these accounts is the age; three seems to be the magic number. It's far from clear though whether it's that three-year-olds reach some threshold, some psychic sweet spot or some point of brain development that they can suddenly tune into these memories or some universal consciousness--or if three is just the earliest that most children can clearly communicate what has been going on in their heads, perhaps since birth.
It's very possible that, rather than three's being the threshold of a place or state of mind they are entering, it is the threshold of one they are leaving. Maybe it's the last moment before their brains are so filled up with new information that they can no longer access past lives, either theirs or those of others.
There's a saying that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Maybe similar corollaries hold true, such as "Any sufficiently advanced understanding of science is indistinguishable from the paranormal." I still hold fast to my belief that facts matter and that gods, demons, ghosts, and the paranormal don't exist the way some may think they do--it's just that we haven't yet discovered the science that explains them.
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