Across Time and Death

I just finished this book yesterday, after having wanted to read it for quite a few years.  Across Time And Death, A Mother’s Search For Her Past Life Children, and which was written by Jenny Cockell. Later, in 2000, a made-for-TV movie was made, based on the book, called Yesterday’s Children.

I came across the topic years ago while watching one of those shows that talked about reincarnation. Then, while writing one of my manuscripts, I incorporated Jenny and Mary’s mention. Jenny grew up with memories of another life, a hard life, and one in which she’d died young and had an intense concern about the continued welfare of her children. This person Jenny Cockell was (in that early 1900s life), was Mary Sutton (née Hand). As Jenny grew into an adult, she retained those memories…of dying in a hospital, her life in Ireland, waiting for someone at a wooden jetty, memory of fear and love and angst. Those memories—dreams, even—also wreaked havoc on her current life’s body and mind. Curiously (and not at all surprising), she mentioned how her current life’s fits of depressions departed, once she found all her dreams and memories to be true: that she had lived another life, remembered the home, roads, and other events…and had actually tracked down most of her children from that life!

That is perhaps the one thing that makes this so unique from many other discussions of people relating previous lives.

Something I don’t recall a lot talked about in the shows was Jenny’s psychic abilities and her elevated intellect (she’s a member of Mensa). I think I’d heard them mentioned in passing, but the book mentions more about them, well, mainly her psychic abilities.

I also wondered about how her current-life’s family felt about all this, and, later in the book, she did discuss this. That they’d all talked discussed it and came to an understanding that Jenny didn’t love or care about her current family any less than her previous life’s family—just that this was something she simply had to do. It was a sustaining drive within her, something she simply could not ignore any more than, say, breathing. And if all that Jenny says is true (which I do believe to be true), it was and is that very same drive that—literally—gave her life in this existence.

Perhaps there’s a reason why we don’t all recall our other lives, hmmm?

I don’t read a lot of “reincarnation books,” because I already believe in it. But I’d heard so much about this story over the years, and Jenny’s proof so compelling, it just grabbed my interest—much like the later telling of James Leininger’s lives (see my blog). Jenny Cockell has written several other books, of which she talks about future lives, and that I find particularly interesting. I’m always on the look out for any “thinking outside the box,” and with most reincarnation documentation it is concerned with “past” lives (I believe in “simultaneous lives”) I like it when someone puts an entirely different spin on things.

And, as I discussed in my Soul Survivor blog, it’s simply hard to ignore the evidence presented, though (like I again previously posted) there will always be detractors of one kind of another.

Which is more farfetched?  That reincarnation exists…or that the mind can “make stuff up,” and do so, in so troublingly accurate a manner?