Life After Life and The Porcelain Doll
Grandma made a porcelain doll for my 12th birthday. She sewed and stuffed its body and then attached a white porcelain baby doll head to it. A lady named Mary who lived on the corner of our street, helped Grandma make a red and white necklace for it. Mary had strung the small beads with arthritic hands. They made a lacey white christening dress for it, and placed the colored beads around the neck.
Mary had a weak heart and Grandma worried about her living alone. She looked in on Mary everyday and sometimes stayed the night. She helped Mary with her housework and attended to her small garden.
One day while handing cherry tomatoes up to Mary through her bathroom window, Mary’s outstretched hand disappeared and everything became quiet. Grandma set the tomato basket down and went in through the back door to find her on the bathroom floor dead. She’d suffered a fatal heart attack and she wasn’t alone when it happened, something Grandma was grateful for.
On my 16th birthday I was in Buffalo New York visiting mom. She was at a workshop for the day so I decided to read an entire book called Life after Life by Dr. Raymond Moody. It was loaded with convincing and fascinating near death case histories and interviews with people who had temporarily died and had come back to life.
There were out of body stories, journeys to the 'white light', and various spirit communications. I finished the book inspired to learn more about the topic of what happens after we die. I remembered a Spiritualist Church I’d visited before moving to Michigan then later to Kentucky.
That afternoon I took a city bus down Elmwood Street to a Wednesday night service. It was much like I remembered the building but the people were all different. I recognized no one. I sat in the back of the chapel and waited for my favorite part to begin: Spirit messages!
We sang about Christ from a hymnal book and listened to a Bible based sermon. People sat down in chairs at the front to receive energy faith healings, and finally three ordained ministers took the stage and began channeling messages from ‘spirit’.
"This message is for the girl in the purple blouse" She pointed at me in the back by a ceiling post.
"There is a woman here who passed recently, not so long ago. She wants to wish you, "Happy Birthday" and says you know her. She and your mother made a doll for you on another birthday".
For a brief moment I felt confused because my mother had never given me a doll for my birthday. Then it dawned on me that Mary always referred to grandma as my mother! The spirit had to be Mary.
The minister wasn't done with me, yet. She said, “A new man spirit steps forward who you don't know to say “There IS life after life”.
You never know when a spirit is watching!
So I told Grandma about Mary and the porcelain baby doll during our last conversation. Coincidently my doll at that time lay packed inside a shoe box in her bedroom closet because my three year old second born had broken its head. Grandma told me she'd call a friend who would fix it.
Years earlier my daughter had broken its original head on our cement porch, when she was only three. Grandma had replaced the original doll head with a matching replica, it looked exactly like the day I received it. Now the second head was broken and we were on our third one!
When she died I forgot all about my doll, but a few weeks later I received a phone call from grandma’s friend who fixed the baby doll using an exact replica of its original porcelain head.
The first Christmas without grandma came around, she'd been gone since last February and I struggled to remember her last gift to me. On that day while looking for a misplaced book, I reached on to a shelf in our storage closet and grabbed a shoe box with my porcelain doll inside, and realized that having this doll fixed for a third time had been her last gift to me.
I placed it among the branches of our Christmas tree to honor grandma that year, and I’ve had her on an alter in my home ever since.