Audrey Reincarnated?
©2006 Gail Grenier Sweet
Someone once explained reincarnation theory to me this way:
We are reincarnated in the same groups, over and over, as we work through our karma. In a past life, your husband might have been your mother. You son might have been your grand-daughter, and so on.
I’ve also heard that people don’t become reincarnated until they’ve been dead for seven years.
Now, obviously, no one can prove any of these theories – but they’re interesting.
My mother, Audrey Mary Hoerig Grenier, died on August 12, 1978. My daughter Anna Rose was born on December 2, 1984.
So Mum had been dead for six years and four months when Anna was born – pretty close to that seven-year mark.
It wasn’t long into Anna’s life when I started noticing things about her that could be most easily explained if I thought of her as Audrey Junior:
- When she was probably younger than two years old, but able to talk, she woke from a nightmare, crying. I went to her crib. She was crying loud and hard, saying over and over: “A truck! A truck!” She had this nightmare again one or two more times after that. (My mother died in a head-on crash with a semi.)
- When Anna was about three years old, she asked for cheese on her toast. I had never introduced her to cheese toast, but it was one of Mum’s favorites.
- When Anna was about five years old and I was throwing away some shirt that was unredeemably stained, Anna told me to save the buttons. Why would a five-year-old think of that? Mum always saved buttons and zippers; she was a Depression Era kid. (“Save them for the grose nod,” she’d say, using the German words for “great need.”) (I don’t know how to spell German words.)
- One July when Anna was about nine, she and I spent a lot of time picking wild raspberries on our land and along the Bugline bike trail down the road. I picked like I’ve always picked – one in the basket, one in the mouth. Anna scolded me for this habit and demonstrated how picking is done: they all go in the basket, for later. Exactly like Mum.
- When Anna was a teenager and she was dissatisfied with how she looked in a pair of jeans, she exclaimed with great dismay, “I look like a sausage in these pants!” This was one of Mum’s sayings, and I swear I never used it in front of Anna. Not only has Anna not been raised on sausage so as to know what it looks like, but she’s a vegetarian, so she hasn’t seen a lot of sausage in her life.
- Anna is 21 now, and yesterday she was eating a submarine sandwich. She tore off some extra bread from one end of the bun and handed it to me in case I wanted to eat it. Mum could never stand all that extra bread on subs.
Sometimes I call Anna “Little Audrey.” Sometimes I tell her, “When you were my mother,….” And then I’ll go on to tell her a story about Mum. Sometimes I wonder what Mum’s Karma might be that Anna has to work out in this life.
But mostly I just love them both, Audrey and Anna, or shall I say Audrey and Audrey Junior.
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