She stared out at me from her antique frame on the shelf in the eclectic little store that we drive out of our way to far too often. We mostly go there to buy the handmade incense they stock. Today was the first time I’ve seen picture lady there. 

In one photo, she’s sitting casually on the riverbank, her dog at her side, begging her to play. And in the other, she’s posed for what looks like a church photo or maybe a teacher’s yearbook photo. She’s wearing a crazy good brooch in that one.

As I’m standing there, lost in my thoughts, making up a story in my head about why I find her so intriguing and maybe what she was doing on that sunny afternoon, from behind me Charlene says: “Don’t you ever wonder if the people you’re drawn to in vintage photos are actually just you or someone you know – when you were alive in another life?”

I think a whole novel wrote itself in my head in that instant.

Once, when my daughter was three or four, she was playing with the dog on the kitchen floor while we did the dishes and, out of the blue, she looked up and said: “Dad, remember when I was the dad and you were the kid?” We stood there in stunned silence. 

Another time, when my son was around the same age, we were waiting in the dentist office in my hometown. While we waited, we were looking at vintage scenes of the town on the wall behind us. When we came to one of the old train station, he proceeded to tell me a story about how he and his friend once died in a railway accident involving one of those pump cart contraptions. He was in his 20s then. 

I’ve long thought that, for a short time, kids are given dreams of past lives — journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons — and then the past is erased. After that, for most of us, memories of past lives are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped. 

Of course, there is no definitive proof of life after death or reincarnation. But there is no definitive proof of their impossibility either. Whatever we believe about it while we’re alive, each of us will only ever find out the truth alone — when we die. We’ll either fade to black with no consciousness of anything. Or it’ll be that moment when leaving becomes arriving. When our souls will migrate from one place to another, only to come to back to the planet again one day in a new form.

I hold on to faith that there are future lives for us. That there’s truly no need to cram everything in this one into such a short time. And I hope that we leave things behind — like yellowing old photos that seem weirdly familiar — for our future selves to find and be mysteriously drawn to. I hope we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. And that our children are just our ancestors coming back through us to heal what’s been left unresolved. 

I hope that genius and wisdom have nothing to do with the gifts or talents we’re lucky enough to have in this life, and instead are the fruit of the long experience achieved in many lives. And I kind of hope that there is no love at first sight here on the earthly plane. Instead, it’s just us recognizing another soul from a past lifetime and falling in love with them again. 

I hope that the souls of those we love – those whose earthly lives are deeply intertwined with ours — truly know that the separation when we die is only temporary. Even if our human minds make us second guess it most of the time. I hold out hope that we’ll inevitably be drawn back to our kids — and everyone we love — in other future lives, with the force of a magnet. 

I hope I find Charlene again in every lifetime and get to love her there, too.

Thank you mysterious, familiar picture lady on a shelf in the coolest little store in Paris, Ontario – for taking me on this journey.

We’ve never met. But my soul remembers you.