I recently went back to Auvergne for about a month to help my mother transition into a new nursing care facility. It was a time of genuine sharing with friends, family members, neighbors, and trusted community members. It was a time of reminiscence, sadness, but also joy. It was a time of accounting for the treasures or lack thereof gathered on the journey of life. It was a time for surveying how such treasures were shared and how such sharing or lack thereof impacted us and those in our environment. 

 It was also a time of wondering why on earth I had left as I do love my native Auvergne. I knew, already – I had left shortly after my maternal grandfather Marius’ death on the heels of my sixteenth birthday. Without him as my safety net, I did not think that I could survive life. Even though I never tried to commit suicide, my body shut down as Marius was in the process of dying. I wouldn’t have minded dying, too, but a near-death experience showed me what would happen if I let go of the will to live. That’s the subject of another story (my next story, perhaps). The practical consequence of that near-death experience was that I would have to find a way to remain alive. In my young mind, the idea that America and Americans could save me because they had saved Marius during the war, started to take form.

As I walked down the streets of Tauves, the wonderful village in which my grandparents owned a tailoring shop they had jointly named Le Style Modern’, I started pondering the reasons why the loss of my grandfather had so profoundly affected the course of my life. I often stopped in front of the house that is no longer Le Style Modern’ – the shop is now owned by someone else who transformed it into a vacation home. During my stay, the brown shades on what used to be the shop windows were rolled down. I could not see through, but I stared through the brown metal anyway. And when I got back to the USA, I wrote On the Edge of My Mother Tongue, which was published in the July 2024 issue of the gorgeous magazine The Write Launch.

My grandfather Marius and the dog Marco Polo, Marius’ sidekick, lay treasures in my heart that thieves cannot steal. It has been my goal to pass them forward to my son, and it will be my most treasured achievement if I succeed.

“Just Say No – Unsquared,” my short memoir about the positively transformative power of remembering lessons learned in a past life as an opium addict, is now published in Issue X of The Closed Eye.

Now is a good time to reflect a bit on how I managed to write about such a subject. I arrived at near-fluency in American English in the early nineties, a time when New Age conferences were plentiful and where authors like Dannion Brinkley, a former Marine, cracked jokes about his near-death experiences. Philosopher and psychiatrist Raymond Moody had already coined and popularized the term “Near Death Experience.” Additionally, the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, had already founded the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and popularized the idea that reincarnation could perhaps be proven.  At the time, I counted my blessings and told myself that, had I remained in France, I would have withered away from lack of exposure to content about what was crucial for me to be able to start living the truths embedded in my own unusual life experiences. The odd thing is that I had never heard of the groundbreaking work of French authors and researchers Evelyne-Sarah Mercier and Jean-Pierre Jourdan of IANDS France, among other French trailblazers!

Now, three decades later, I am becoming part of the conversations aiming to redefine our presuppositions about consciousness.

In gratitude to all the people who have paved the way and continue to do so!