one afternoon in the early spring of 2021, when Marie came to believe that there was something more to Nina. That day, Marie recalls, she and Aija were playing together in their living room, enacting little scenes with toy figurines.Then Aija suddenly turned to her mother and said, “Nina has numbers on her arm, and they make her sad.”
Nearly three years later, Marie tries to explain it: “There was just —” she pauses. “There was such deep pain there.” It seemed beyond what a toddler should know: “The look on her face, it was too old,” Marie says. “Does that make sense?”
What she knows: that her toddler had never heard anything about the Holocaust, and could not possibly recognize the significance of numbers on a forearm. Marie knows how this story might sound, and she is exceedingly careful about sharing it.
Marie also knows that she is not alone — that since the 1960s, more than 2,200 children from across the world have described apparent recollections from a previous life, all documented in a database maintained by the Division of Perceptual Studies within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Sometimes a child presents enough identifying information for relatives or researchers to pinpoint a deceased person, but that level of specificity is elusive; about a third of the cases in the database do not include such a match.www.washingtonpost.com/...
The phenomenon, with its aura of the paranormal, has long been fodder for books, academic studies, newspaper stories and dramatized documentaries. All of these explorations tend to orbit the same existential questions: Is reincarnation real? What happens after we die? How can this be explained?
But there is, of course, no scientific means to conclusively prove — or disprove — a mechanism that might explain how a person could recall living a past life.
Which leaves parents such as Marie and Ross to navigate an inexplicable, often isolating experience. Something is happening, that much they know, and so they find themselves facing different but equally daunting questions: What happens — what does it mean, what do you do — when, one day, your child tells you they remember being someone else? www.washingtonpost.com/...