Francois’ death played out in Stephen’s mind like a movie on a silver screen. The vision had come to him almost instantly when I asked him about my father in the 1500s lifetime. Now, sitting at a restaurant table having dinner, tears sprang to his eyes as he recalled for me the entire scene in the workshop. The story of what happened to us in the 1500s revealed itself like petals opening on a flower. It came in pieces and very often, a simple question from me would open the door and another piece of our puzzle would come forth. It seemed, also, that the communal vibration and energy of a restaurant was the perfect atmosphere for Stephen to connect intuitively. As was the case often, connecting with a soul who has crossed over was conveyed with all the emotion that the soul had experienced.
“Your father in that lifetime,” he told me gently, somehow feeling every emotion Francois had felt, “was your dad in this lifetime. He adored you then as he did in this incarnation.” Welling up again, Stephen told me quietly, “He wanted to go inside the house that last night and hold you because he knew he would never have another chance but he was compelled to finish the armoire. It was to be his gift to you, a piece which, when sold, would give you enough money to live on for life.”
“The piece was so beautiful. He used so many exotic woods with detailed marquetry designs. The precision of each cut was exquisite. He was an artist, honey.” When Stephen described the precision and attention to minute detail in his work, I could see that this was in fact my dad. An electronics engineer in this incarnation, he was brilliant. The work that had satisfied him for so many years was spent in the design of fuel gauging systems for aircraft. This time around, his love of precision had translated to a gift for math – he got excited about geometry, seeing beauty and perfection in sine and cosines. It had all been lost on me. But he used math to create tangible products that solved problems. He was passionate about what he did for a living.
I had the honor of working in the same company with him for a few years and was grateful to have been able to see, for myself, the respect and admiration he earned from his coworkers. He was much loved by all who knew him. I witnessed for myself the slow trip each morning to the cafeteria to get coffee as he was stopped over and over again by coworkers with questions. Each question was met with a patient response from my dad and he took as much time as they needed. Some mornings would take hours for him to retrieve his coffee!
Then Stephen was taken with a scene where Francois walks to the town market with his young daughter, handing out handmade toys to youngsters along the way. As he described to me the heart of this man, again, I knew in my soul this was my dad. I have never met, to this day, anyone kinder and more sincere. I never heard him speak poorly of anyone. He was not quick to anger. He kept his pain guarded and never let it change the way he walked on the earth. Meeting him, you would never know how much heartache he suffered in the course of his life because he was not jaded by it or made cynical.
In the discovery of the life we shared in the 1500s, we realized that many people with whom we had shared this incarnation with were also in our lives then. We were finding that our personalities do not change that much from one incarnation to another. Lessons are to be learned from each of the physical situations with which we are faced. But our core, our essence, does not alter very much. We seem to carry most of the same personality traits, thought processes and approaches each time we return to the Earth School.
I adored my Dad then as I did in this incarnation. He was a gentle soul and not a day goes by that I don’t think of him with gratitude for the blessing of his Spirit.
I knew Dominique’s pain for it was truly my own.