The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Cathy Byrd

  “So when you say ‘funny lady,’ do you not like her?”

  “She likes things her way.”

  I admitted to Jeroen that my son loved her, but added, “There were better ones.” When Jeroen asked if they ever had kids, I replied, “Nope,” and further explained, “I don’t think she could have kids.”

  “At least they’re happy together.”

  “Yeah, he’s a good boy.”

  When Jeroen complimented me on the job I did raising my son, I happily accepted the compliment and said thank you. I was coherent enough to realize that our conversation was getting stranger by the second. I said my son’s wife “didn’t like too many people,” but that my son liked all people. Except . . .

  “He doesn’t like Babe Ruth,” I said.

  “Why not? What happened?”

  “It was bad. He was bad to Lou’s wife. He tried to make moves to his wife.”

  This information didn’t come as a complete surprise because I had prior knowledge of the feud between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but it felt quite strange to be experiencing the emotions firsthand from the perspective of Lou Gehrig’s mother. Most remarkable was the roller coaster of emotions I felt while describing each scene. My emotions ran the gamut of sadness, excitement, pride, humor, joy, disbelief, and despair.

  Jeroen then prompted me to move forward to the next significant day in the life of this woman, and I was propelled into a scene many years later.

  “Now it’s just me. No husband and no son,” I said.

  When Jeroen asked me how my son had died, the sadness I felt was gut-wrenching. I expressed having been very surprised by Lou’s death.

  “Was he seen by doctors?”

  “Yeah, they couldn’t do anything.”

  “Do they know what it was?”

  “They think he had a problem with his nervous system. I don’t know.”

  “Did you know it was coming or was it unexpected?”

  “It was pretty quick. It’s too bad he didn’t have any kids,” I said with a heavy heart.

  I said my husband had a tough time after our son’s death and drank a lot. I reported my husband’s death to be the result of a heart attack.

  Jeroen then guided me to go to the next significant scene in this lifetime. I immediately found myself lying on a hospital table.

  “I think, like the doctors are working on my body.”

  “How old are you?”

  I blurted, “Sixty-two.” I said my body was going to be cremated and told him my memorial service was attended by “no family, mostly strangers.” I then described feeling my soul slip out of a tired and worn-out body to be reunited with my family and a little dog in Heaven. Jeroen asked how my husband looked. I chuckled and made Jeroen laugh when I replied, “Better.”

  “Is Lou there?”

  I nodded and my voice quivered as I described Lou coming toward me to give me a hug.

  “Ask Lou, ask him why he needed to leave this lifetime so early.”

  I replied, “Why did you have to leave so early? Why did you leave me? He said, ‘I chose this.’”

  “Why did he choose it?”

  “Better to have lived.”

  “What else do you want to ask him?”

  I asked, “Will I see you again?”

  “What does he say?”

  “I will find you,” I said as tears started to roll down my cheeks.

  “So what do you feel now?”

  Smiling through the tears, I replied, “I feel like he did find me. In Christian, he did.”

  “He is Christian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he kept his word?”

  “Yeah,” I replied now laughing through my tears, “Now what? What are we going to do?”

  “It’s okay, we’ll find out.”

  Jeroen then asked for permission to talk to the subconscious of Cathy and began asking questions of my higher self. This is when our conversation shifted from the bizarre experience of me speaking in the first person as Lou Gehrig’s mother to the even stranger phenomenon of speaking about myself in the third person.

  “What was the purpose of this lifetime?”

  “To heal, to feel complete,” I responded with my eyes still closed.

  “What was the purpose of Cathy and Lou being reunited in this lifetime?”

  “Just completion . . . to relive the good times too,” I said as a feeling of peace filled my entire body.

  When I opened my eyes and saw Jeroen’s face, it felt as if only minutes had passed. My first clue that a significant amount of time had gone by was that I already had an urgent need to go to the bathroom again. Before heading back home, I gave Jeroen a great, big hug; I felt a special bond with this man I had met only three hours earlier. In the hours and days that followed, I wondered, Could the purpose of life on Earth really be that simple? Is it possible that we chose this life, as Christian had told Dr. Tucker, with the ultimate purpose of enjoying the good times together?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A MOTHER’S LOVE

  “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes

  all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

  I CORINTIANS 13: 7-8

  When I arrived home from my three-hour session with Jeroen, I was still digesting what had just occurred and not in the mood to discuss it with anybody. However, while putting Christian to bed that night, I felt my eyes fill with tears. I had to tell him something for the first time.

  “I believe you. I was your mother when you were Lou Gehrig.”

  Christian’s eyes lit up, and I could tell he wanted to hear more about my change of heart. When I told him about my journey to the past and my peek into life as Lou Gehrig’s mother, he enthusiastically inquired, “Was it a machine? Can I do it too?” I asked Christian if he remembered being married when he was Lou Gehrig, and his response was not what you would expect to hear from a five-year-old.

  “She drank alcohol, and there was a lot of yelling, like Babe Ruth.” The last words out of his mouth before falling asleep were, “Lou should have never married that dumb lady. She was drunk.” This was the last time I ever brought up the subject of Lou Gehrig’s wife with Christian because it was obviously a sore subject.

  Jeroen sent me the audio recording of our session the following day via e-mail, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it because I was still coming to terms with the very strange feeling of literally walking in someone else’s shoes and body. Besides, I didn’t feel a need to listen to the recording because I could recall everything I had said under hypnosis perfectly. The vivid imagery of the scenes I had experienced were as fresh in my mind as if I had been there in person or seen them in a movie. I did, however, have a strong urge to scour the Internet for historical facts about Christina Gehrig’s life to see if the details I had revealed during our session had any basis in reality.

  When I discovered photographs that were eerily similar to the images I had seen in my imaginary movie, I excitedly texted them to Jeroen with captions such as, “Those are the shoes!” I sent him a photo of the old Yankee Stadium scoreboard from the 1920s and wrote, “The scoreboard really was manually operated!” Most shocking was my discovery that Lou Gehrig was 22 years old when he played his first season in the Major Leagues, just as I had reported while under hypnosis. Although Lou Gehrig was first signed by the Yankees a few days before his twentieth birthday, he did not make the Yankees’ major league roster until replacing Wally Pipp as the starting first baseman two years later. This timeline is something I absolutely did not know prior to my session with Jeroen.

  Ironically the old Yankee Stadium that I had seen so clearly during my past-life regression was torn down in 2008, the same year of Christian’s birth, to make way for the ultramodern new Yankee Stadium. My fact-finding mission also led me to discover a home at 9 Meadow Lane in New Rochelle, New York, that Lou Gehrig bought for his parents in 1927. The modern-day photograph I found of 9 Meadow Lane looked very much like t
he home on top of a hill I had described living in at the time of Lou’s retirement.

  To my astonishment every statement from my past-life regression that was verifiable turned out to be historically accurate, with the exception of three key facts. I had erroneously reported that Christina Gehrig died at the age of 62, rather than 72, and I was three years off when I said Lou Gehrig’s retirement speech took place when he was 39 years old. The third and most unsettling discrepancy of my past-life regression was my comment about being extremely surprised by my son’s death. It wasn’t just the comment but the feeling of certainty I had when saying he would be okay and the confusion I felt after he had died.

  It appeared from my research that Lou Gehrig was aware of his imminent death prior to delivering his “Luckiest Man” speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. If documented history was right, it would make sense that Lou Gehrig’s parents also knew that he had very little time left to live. If this was in fact true, my comment under hypnosis about being surprised by Lou Gehrig’s death must have been wrong. This inconsistency is what fueled my desire to take a deeper look into Christina Gehrig’s life and death.

  When my online search for the details surrounding Christina Gehrig’s death came up empty, I ordered a copy of her death certificate from the Connecticut Public Health Department to see if my description of her dying in a hospital and being cremated was accurate. When I received the death certificate in the mail a couple of weeks later, I was blown away to read that she had indeed died in a hospital and her body was cremated, just as I had reported. I was finally convinced there was something greater than pure coincidence going on.

  I became obsessed with researching the unique relationship between Lou Gehrig, his mother, and his wife. In the midst of busy work days, I would find my mind drifting to the topic of the Gehrig family. In between calls to my real estate clients or while waiting for a home inspection to be completed, I used my cell phone to search the Internet for clues. In an article written by Lou Gehrig shortly before his marriage in 1933, he wrote, “My mother is my inspiration, my sweetheart, my manager, my all. Around her revolve all of my activities.” At 30 years old, Lou was still living with his parents, and it was reported that his mother could always be found in the stands at his games, both at Yankee Stadium and on the road.

  All of that changed when Lou fell in love and married Eleanor Twitchell. A close Gehrig family friend, Fred Lieb, wrote about their tempestuous relationship in his book Baseball As I Have Known It. Fred’s exact words were, “It would be nice to report that things thereafter were harmonious between Mom and her daughter-in-law. But from the start there were clashes whenever the elder and younger Gehrigs got together.” Fred reported that the hostility between the two women remained unabated long after Lou’s death. Considering the depth of animosity between Christina and Eleanor, I was intrigued by the subtle choice of words I had used to describe Eleanor while under hypnosis. I described Lou’s wife as a “funny lady” who liked to control things. Reflecting upon this understated comment led me to believe that Lou’s mother had a kind heart and was not one to speak ill of people—even people she wasn’t fond of.

  The greatest revelations about the Gehrig family feud came from a book co-authored by Lou’s wife, Eleanor, entitled, My Luke and I. Eleanor wrote that Lou would sometimes get upset with her drinking because he wasn’t a big drinker himself. She wrote about a particular incident that had occurred on a ship during a 1934 tour of the Orient with an all-star baseball team that had completely enraged Lou. According to Eleanor’s own account, she went “missing” on the ship for two hours. Lou was livid when he found her in Babe Ruth’s cabin, drinking champagne with Babe and his wife. This event cemented the feud between Lou and Babe that had started two years prior. What struck me most about this story was how it seemed consistent with Christian’s comments about the drinking and yelling when I’d asked him if he remembered being married. I wondered if this could have also been the episode of Babe Ruth trying to “make moves” on Lou’s wife that I spoke about during my past-life regression.

  As I continued to unearth evidence consistent with the facts I had revealed under hypnosis, the chains of my skepticism were further loosened. I was convinced that something very real, beyond my understanding, had occurred while I was in a state of hypnotic trance, yet I wasn’t sure why or what it all meant. Was the information being channeled from some other dimension, or was it actually buried deep within the layers of my soul?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LOVE NEVER DIES

  “In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf,

  in an act of kindness . . . I see what

  people call God in all these things.”

  PABLO CASALS

  I now questioned the beliefs I had clung to for the past 40 years. I felt as if I was cheating on Jesus as I searched for answers, exploring different religions and examining the ancient scriptures they were founded upon. I was shocked to learn that even though only 25 to 30 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation, it is a majority belief among the collective population of the world. I found myself inspired by passages in the Jewish Talmud, the Christian Gnostic Gospels, the Islamic Quran, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, and the Kabbalah, that explicitly express a belief in reincarnation. According to the Gnostic Scriptures, even Jesus spoke of “rebirth.” My greatest discovery of all was the realization that at the root of all religions is a respect for a universal power greater than ourselves and a dictate to love one another.

  My search into the history of reincarnation also led me to many prominent philosophers, poets, scientists, and thought leaders who accept the concept of reincarnation as an indisputable truth. I discovered through my research that the concept of reincarnation has been a recurring theme in literature, science, and religion since the beginning of recorded history. I was intrigued to learn that Plato, Socrates, Rumi, Voltaire, Carl Jung, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, W. B. Yeats, General George Patton, and Henry Ford were among the long list of believers in past lives and the probability of living more than one lifetime.

  Goethe remarked at a friend’s funeral, “I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.” Henry David Thoreau believed reincarnation to be a deeply rooted instinct of the human race and was among the many who have had a very strong sense of the déjà vu, the experience of “having been there before.” Albert Einstein had this to say after the passing of his dear friend, “Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

  I was especially moved by the teachings of the Dalai Lama, who preaches that inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion for ourselves and others. Tibetan Buddhism is a religion of kindness based upon the fundamental principle that caring for the happiness of others releases our fears and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. The Dalai Lama’s teaching that the purpose of life is to pursue happiness and relieve suffering resonated with me more than ever after receiving the message during my past-life regression that Christian and I had chosen to come back for the simple purpose of reliving the good times. Is it possible that the simple pleasures of life on Earth, like watching a baseball game, eating an ice-cream cone, swimming in the ocean, a warm embrace, or watching a sunset could be some of the reasons why we choose to come back? Integrating this philosophy into my belief system made me treasure the “doing” a little more and treasure the “getting it done” a little less.

  I believed the Dalai Lama when he said, “where there is true compassion, anger and hatred cannot exist.” This tenet was not far from the biblical teachings I was raised with. However, when it comes to the topic of reincarnation, Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism do not see eye to eye. When I learned that that the concept of “rebirth” was prevalent
in Christian scriptures and widely accepted by early church leaders, I gave myself permission to be a practicing Christian and believe in the possibility of living more than one lifetime.

  Although believing in reincarnation is no longer a crime punishable by death, it is still a polarizing concept. When I looked into how and why the concept of “rebirth” was shunned by church leaders in the 4th century, it appeared to be a means of keeping the faithful obedient and loyal to the church and state. After experiencing the bizarre events that had recently transpired in my life, I could no longer deny the mysterious forces of the universe that connect us all. It became clear to me that the primary purpose of life on Earth is to learn how to love and honor one another in good times and in bad. Surrendering to the fact that no human being will ever have definitive answers to the mystery of life is what ultimately gave me peace of mind on the subject of reincarnation.

  Then came the challenge of integrating the concepts of love and compassion into my daily life. After undergoing the past-life regression, I felt a palpable shift in my perspective. As I started to look at every human being as a soul with a body that could be taken off like an old shoe, I felt more compassion toward people in all walks of life. My heart began to open up like a flower in bloom, and as my armor was stripped away. I found myself being less judgmental of myself and others. Practicing yoga and meditation taught me that inner peace is a state of mind, which can only be achieved by going within. Michael was less than thrilled when I began going to a 4 A.M. Sadhana Meditation class, but I explained to him that meditation quieted my mind and allowed me to hear the whispers of my soul, much like prayer. Through a daily practice of prayer and meditation, I discovered that the subconscious mind is a gateway to the Divine.

  However, I still found it challenging to practice the principles of love and compassion when it came to Little League baseball. In the spring of 2014, an opposing coach got wind of Christian’s past-life stories from a mutual friend and began using this information to ridicule our son. In front of a group of Little League parents, he said, “That kid is crazy. He thinks he was Lou Gehrig.” The moment I heard about this, my feelings toward this man were far from compassionate. I actually wanted to take him down—like a mother bear protecting her cub. Moments like this made me realize that I was far from being the enlightened Zen master I felt like during my morning mediation class.