PAST LIVES

Is it possible to remember past lives? I certainly think it is – especially after recently re-reading Jenny Cockell’s account of a life she once lived in Malahide, near Dublin.

Right from early childhood Jenny had had ‘memories’ of being an Irishwoman named Mary Sutton, who died in the 1930s.  And she was haunted by a recurring dream of dying after giving birth to her eighth child, plus the guilt of leaving them behind.

As an adult she travelled from her home in Northamptonshire to Malahide, where she finally found the ruins of Mary’s cottage and her children’s baptism records.

Jenny’s bestselling book Yesterday’s Children describes how over the next two years she not only tracked down the five surviving children – who, though much older than Jenny, accepted her as their ‘mother’ – but also reunited the scattered siblings for the first time since Mary’s death.

Seth Linder, writing back in 1996 in the Daily Mail, described himself as one of the many sceptics who – after investigating the evidence and questioning Jenny’s ‘children’ – was forced to admit that her bizarre explanation seemed to be the only possible one.  She really had been Mary Sutton!

If you find this surprising (or even unbelievable) then you might be still more surprised when in my next post I move on from remembering past lives to ‘remembering’ future lives …