The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Cathy Byrd

  When Jeroen asked if my son had left a lot of money behind, I replied, “Yeah, but the wife took it. She likes Hollywood. She lives the rich lifestyle.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She might be in Hollywood,” I replied. My breathy laugh let Jeroen know I was joking. I then answered his question in a more serious manner by saying, “I don’t know, maybe New York City. I’m not a big fan of hers.” Jeroen asked how I support myself, and I said, “I get some money from the government, a little bit. I sold everything I had. I don’t have much left. I sold my house. That money didn’t last too long.”

  Shifting the conversation again, Jeroen asked me about the family I live with. I said affectionately of the woman in the kitchen, “I’m kind of like a mother to her though because she is younger. She kind of looks out for me.” Jeroen asked me to describe what she looks like, and I replied, “She’s pretty. Kind of heavier, like I am. She is cooking a lot, wearing kind of long dresses like I wear.” When he asked me about her hair, I said, “Kind of brown hair with curls. Wears it kind of off her face, but not up—kind of like a headband-type thing.” I added, “She doesn’t work outside of the house. Her husband works.”

  When he asked me the ages of the kids a second time, I responded, “The boys are like ten and eleven. The girl is maybe like seven . . . She has short, dark hair.” I felt proud and sounded very happy when saying, “My English is pretty good now too. The crossword puzzles help, and I still get The New York Times.”

  “What parts do you like reading?”

  “The sports, I still keep an eye on. And things on the community—like entertainment and stuff.” I said my son “Louie” had taught me a lot.

  “Were you with your son when he died?”

  “I remember being in the room, but I can’t remember if it was right when he died. I can remember seeing him kind of unconscious.” He asked if I was able to see him before he went, and I answered, “A little bit. She barely let us see him. She wanted to control it.” I fondly reminisced, “He was a good son. He was a good person.” Jeroen asked if Lou’s wife got in between us and I said, “Yeah. She just took charge. He kind of just fell right into it. He let her be the boss.” I expressed being sad that it had changed our relationship and added, “She was a little jealous of me, so she kind of wanted to cut him off.”

  Jeroen asked if I had any memorabilia to remember my son by, and I perked up when saying, “Very little. Just that one uniform, and then that coin from Japan. And then some jewelry that he bought me, like a bracelet and a necklace.”

  “A necklace?” Jeroen inquired.

  “A pendant with jade in it. I don’t have much family so I don’t know where it’ll—what to do with it. I don’t know who to give it to.”

  “Are you thinking about that?”

  “Yeah, when I die.”

  He followed up by asking, “What are you deciding about who to give it to?”

  Without hesitation, I replied, “I could give it to the little girl, I guess. Probably have to give it to her mother to hold on to.”

  Jeroen instructed me to leave the scene and to go to the next important day. I described myself as a mother of two young kids and told him we were all dressed up.

  “Is it a special day?”

  “Yeah. It’s like a Sunday, a church day . . . I feel like a baptism day.”

  I told him the baby girl was wearing a white dress and we were walking on a dusty dirt road. We were walking to church.

  “Is it big or small?”

  “It’s small. Just like a one room church, white, not fancy, a Lutheran church, not a lot of people—there’s a lot of German people there. We don’t go all the time, but we’re going today for the baby. She’s gonna be baptized.”

  Jeroen asked if anybody else was with us and I said, “Yeah. Henry and his mom . . . or sister, I think. Visiting maybe, just for the baptism.” I told Jeroen the boy’s name was Lou.

  “Has he been baptized yet?”

  “Yeah. We did it when he was a baby. Now he’s two. He’s got knickers on. He is big though. He is a big kid. He looks like he is about four. He’s got big hands, big feet, a big head. Not chubby, just big. He’s sweet with the baby. He likes to hold her on his lap.”

  “So how did you get to church?”

  “I think we walked, but I think the kids rode in the carriage for a little bit with the horses. That was fun they got to do that.”

  “You didn’t do that?”

  “No, it costs money.”

  “And you’ve got to be careful with money?”

  “Yeah.”

  In the final scene of this past-life regression session, I described my old, tired body lying in a hospital bed, exactly as I had seen in my first regression with Jeroen.

  “What do you look like lying in the bed?”

  “Just a little old, tired, a little thinner than I was.”

  Showing a wry sense of humor, I added with a laugh, “Not thin though.”

  Curious about the jewelry I had mentioned earlier in the regression, Jeroen asked, “What about the jewelry?”

  “I think I gave that to them.”

  “What kind of jewelry was it?”

  I could see the items perfectly in my mind while describing them to Jeroen. “A gold necklace with a jade pendant, and a bracelet, like a charm bracelet. A watch.”

  He asked where I had gotten the jewelry, and I gushingly said, “From Lou. He always brought me things.”

  Detecting the love in my voice, Jeroen said, “He was a sweet kid, huh?”

  I sighed, “Yeah.”

  Jeroen concluded the session by asking me to think about the lesson of this lifetime. I reflected for a moment and said, “Learning to accept loss.”

  “How did you do with that?”

  “I think I did pretty well. I kind of kept my eye on the ball,” I said with a laugh, showing Mom Gehrig’s playful sense of humor once again. “I kind of kept charging along. I didn’t get bitter.”

  “You didn’t get bitter?”

  “No. I think always being around kids always helped me.”

  Jeroen said, “They’ll probably miss you too?”

  I nodded and added, “Yeah. I might have been a little burden, but we had fun.”

  Jeroen gently eased me out of the trance and it was comforting to see his smiling face when I opened my eyes. I felt as if our journey into the life of Christina Gehrig was complete. We hugged good-bye and I made it back home with enough time to stop at our house before picking up Charlotte and Christian from school. I rushed to my home office and pulled out the photo of Lou and Sophie Gehrig I had discovered at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A wave of emotion swept over me as I stared at the photograph through new eyes. They were all dressed in white, what looked to be their Sunday’s finest. I now knew the story behind the photograph and had an even deeper understanding of Christina Gehrig’s love for her children.

  The difference between this past-life regression and my prior regressions was that the information coming through was not verifiable through research, but only by the very remote possibility of finding this family I had seen so clearly while under hypnosis—if they indeed existed and were still alive. Since Lou Gehrig’s mother died in 1954, exactly 60 years earlier, the children I described would now be in their 70s, which would mean the parents would most likely be in their 90s. Finding the three children I had seen so clearly while under hypnosis became my new obsession. Not only did I not know if such a family existed in real life, but I also had no clue about the surname of the family because Jeroen hadn’t asked me that during our session.

  After returning home from picking up the kids, I began my investigation. I sifted through the documents I had copied at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library and found a letter dated two weeks after Christina Gehrig’s death in 1954. The letter was written by an employee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame to a man named Mr. George Steigler, who appeared to be a friend of Mrs. Gehrig:

&nbs
p; Dear Mr. Steigler:

  The photographs, and negatives thereof, which you requested are being sent to you today.

  We hope you, your family and your friends will enjoy them.

  If the National Baseball Hall of Fame was going out of their way to send Christina Gehrig’s photographs to the Steigler family, I assumed they must have been important people in her life. My online search revealed an obituary for George K. Steigler’s wife, Laurel Steigler, who had passed away just five months earlier at the age of 95. The obituary listed her survivors as a daughter named Jill, who was a Realtor in Connecticut, and a son named Kenneth, who was a pastor in North Carolina. Could this be the 7-year-old little girl and 10-year-old little boy I had seen in my regression? I was still stumped about my description of three children in the home because only two children were listed in the obituary.

  Being a Realtor myself, and considering my horrible experience of talking about Christian’s past-life memories with our pastor, I decided to call Jill. When she answered on the first ring, I explained to her that I was doing research on Lou Gehrig and his family. Jill confirmed right away that Lou Gehrig’s mother did indeed live with her family when she was a child. Unfortunately, she didn’t recall any specific memories about Christina Gehrig, but she did remember her being a sweet and stoic woman.

  As Jill spoke, I pictured her as the little girl with short, brown hair from my regression. She said her brother, Ken, who was three years older than her, might remember more details about the time when Mom Gehrig lived with them. I nearly choked when Jill said her brother was three years older than her because that fit perfectly with the ages of the 7-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy I had seen and described to Jeroen. As our conversation came to a close, I resisted the urge to ask her if she had inherited a charm bracelet and jade necklace from Japan that had belonged to Christina Gehrig out of fear that I would scare her away forever. That question was far too personal for a first phone call, but I knew the time would come when I would get up the courage to ask about Lou Gehrig’s mother’s most cherished possessions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HEAVEN SENT

  “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature.

  And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves

  are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

  MAX PLANCK

  Two months passed before I garnered the courage to track down Reverend Kenneth Steigler. As curious as I was to find out if he had any memory of Christina Gehrig living with his family in the early 1950s, my fears about how he might react to our story kept me immobilized. Rather than asking Reverend Kenneth’s sister for his contact information, I decided to track him down via the Internet. My search for Reverend Kenneth Steigler led me to an article in Christianity Today entitled “Good News for Witches,” chronicling his outreach to witches as the head pastor of the Wesley United Methodist Church in Salem, Massachusetts.

  According to the article, Reverend Kenneth and his congregation of 265 members went out of their way to welcome witches with open arms, particularly in the month of October—a time of year when the city is flooded with tourists, partygoers, dabblers in witchcraft, and committed witches who regard Halloween as their sacred day. Reverend Steigler was quoted as saying, “If 10 people go away from Salem thinking, ‘There is a church that welcomed me, that loved me, even with all my amulets and all my stuff,’ then all of it is worth our while.” I also located a bio for Reverend Kenneth that said he had worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his early 20s while he was a seminary student, and had recently led numerous tours to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, where he was currently working on a doctoral studies degree in Biblical Theology. This sounded like a man who had seen just about everything, and it gave me hope that he wouldn’t be too shocked by our story.

  The next item on my supersleuth agenda was checking out the Salem Wesley United Methodist Church website. I struck gold when I found a trailer for Reverend Kenneth’s short film, Praying for Salem, about his outreach to witches. My intuitive feeling after seeing him speak in the video was that this man of the cloth was a very loving person with a sincere commitment to serve others. After my call to the church was greeted by an answering machine, I decided to reach out to a man by the name of Dimitris, who was listed as contact person for the Praying for Salem video. When I told Dimitris the purpose of my call was to locate a phone number for Reverend Kenneth, he jubilantly exclaimed, “Pastor Ken is the most wonderful man on the planet, and I wouldn’t be alive to answer this phone today without him!”

  Dimitris went on to explain how Pastor Ken’s comforting words gave him the will to live at a difficult time in his life, 12 years earlier, when he had lost his son and contemplated suicide. According to Dimitris, Ken was still a pastor emeritus for the church in Salem where he had been the head pastor for 16 years. Dimitris told me that Pastor Ken and his wife, Marilyn, now lived in North Carolina. He described his dear friend as a man who was never without a smile on his face, a man who was loved and revered by his congregation. He said the pastor was notorious for making himself available by cell phone to anybody who needed him, at any time of the day or night. Dimitris willingly provided me with Pastor Ken’s cell phone number and his last words before ending our call were, “I hope when I meet God in Heaven, he looks a lot like Pastor Ken.”

  Just as Dimitris had predicted, Reverend Ken answered my call on the first ring. Not wanting to scare him off right away, I eased into the conversation by telling him I was researching the life of Christina Gehrig for a book I was writing. As much as I wanted to share the true purpose of my call, telling a pastor that your son thinks he was Lou Gehrig in a previous lifetime and you’re wondering if his family inherited jewelry from Lou Gehrig’s mother isn’t something that flows easily off of the tongue. It was soon obvious that talking about “Mom Gehrig,” as Ken called her, was one of his favorite pastimes. I was in awe of the wonderful memories he enthusiastically shared with me of this woman who he said was, “like a grandmother” to him. It almost felt as if he was describing scenes directly from my past-life regressions as he rattled off details that were shockingly consistent with what I had seen and described while in trance.

  Pastor Ken gleefully reminisced about being a passenger in Mom Gehrig’s big, black car—which he said she drove like a tank—when she took him to Yankees games as a young boy. He guessed the car was nearly 20 years old at the time. Ken fondly recalled entering the private back entrance to the stadium and being in awe when the fans who spotted her yelled, “Here comes Mom Gehrig!” With the hidden agenda of exploring the historical accuracy of the things I had seen and said under hypnosis, I asked Pastor Ken if he had ever played Little League as a kid. He laughed and said, “I did! Even though I was far from the best player on the team, Mom Gehrig was always there in the stands rooting for me.”

  A couple of seconds later, he had me in stitches as he shared stories about Mom Gehrig’s pet bird, Polly. Ken said that before Mom Gehrig moved in with his family, she had her own home not too far away, and he would ride his bike there weekly to mow her lawn. One day he knocked on the door to let her know he was there and heard, “I’ll be right there!” in a voice that sounded exactly like Mom Gehrig’s. After waiting a few minutes for her to open the door, he realized that it was Polly playing a trick on him. He said Mom Gehrig always had to cover Polly’s cage at night to get him to sleep because the bird was an expert at repeating conversations he had overheard in the exact voice of the person talking.

  Pastor Ken recalled hearing stories of how covering the bird was especially important back in the days when Lou played for the Yankees because Polly was an expert at picking up foul language from Lou’s fellow teammates, who were frequent visitors to the Gehrig home. I asked Ken if the bird also lived at his house, and he said Mom Gehrig kept Polly’s cage on a drum table in their living room.

  “Only Mom Gehrig was brave enough to stick her hand in the cage, tho
ugh, because Polly was a biter,” he said.

  I was dying to tell Ken about seeing the bird in a cage in his childhood living room during my past-life regression, but it didn’t feel like the appropriate time yet. We were both having too much fun reminiscing about Mom Gehrig.

  He then told me about Mom Gehrig’s dachshund by the name of Monkey, which had also taken up residence with his family. Ken recalled Mom Gehrig being a warm, loving woman, but unfortunately her dog, Monkey, wasn’t quite as friendly. According to Ken, the dog would growl at anyone who tried to go near her.

  “Maybe that’s why people thought Mom Gehrig was stern, but I don’t recall her being stern at all.” Although Ken recalled Mom Gehrig speaking English well, he said she used her native German language to speak to her geriatric dachshund. He laughed with childlike exuberance when imitating how she would say, “Essen Sie” to get the dog to eat and “Machen Sie schnell” to get the dog to come.

  It was as if Pastor Ken was reciting the transcripts of my past-life regression when he told me that Mom Gehrig was like a mother to his own mother, Laurel, who was 36 years her junior. Ken told me that the deep bond between the two women had been forged through their shared experience of being discriminated against by shopkeepers for their German heritage back in the days when they were neighbors and friends in New York City.

  In Ken’s memory, Mom Gehrig lived with his family for the last two or three years of her life. I asked Ken how old he and his sister were at the time, and he replied, “I must have been about ten when she moved in with us, which meant my sister would have been seven at the time.” These were the exact ages I had reported while under hypnosis. How could this accurate and detailed information about the children, right down to their exact ages, have possibly come through to me during my past-life regression? Ken probably thought it was a little strange when I asked him to describe what his sister’s hair looked like as a child, but I thought it was even stranger when he revealed that she had short, brown hair, just as I had described and seen so clearly in my regression.