When I was a child, the presence I’ve spoken about didn’t feel frightening.
He felt familiar.
There was a calmness to him, a quiet understanding that made me feel safe in a way I didn’t question. Sometimes he would come to me as I was waking up, when everything is softer and not yet fully formed into the day.
It was during one of those mornings, when I was about 17 that he told me something very specific.
My sister would give birth the next day—Tuesday—at exactly 2:56 in the afternoon. A boy. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Seven pounds, eleven ounces.
At the time, my sister was very pregnant, but not quite ready… or so everyone believed.
I told her what I had heard.
Not where it came from. Just the information.
She believed me, because there had been other moments before this—things I somehow knew that turned out to be true. Still, she did what any sensible person would do. She went to her doctor and told him.
He laughed.
Said she was too early. At least a couple of weeks to go.
So she came home, reassured.
The next morning, her water broke.
By that afternoon, at exactly 2:56, she gave birth to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby boy… weighing seven pounds, eleven ounces.
Exactly as I had said.
The doctor came out to my parents and, trying to be funny—or perhaps not—said, “Burn your other daughter at the stake. She’s a witch.”
Now, I understand humor.
But at 17, that didn’t feel like a joke.
It felt like a warning.
And whether I fully understood it at the time or not, something in me made a decision.
I stopped listening.
Or at least, I tried to.
Looking back, I think that was the last time I heard from him for many years. Not because he wasn’t there—but because I wasn’t ready for what it might mean if I continued.
It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?
To have an experience that feels completely natural to you… until the world tells you it isn’t.
That it’s too much. Too strange. Too different.
So you do what most of us do.
You step back. You quiet it. You try to be normal.
(Which, I’ve learned, is a very flexible definition.)
Years later, when he returned and told me who he was, I didn’t accept it easily. Not at all.
In fact, I argued.
I told him I thought he might be a fragment of my own mind—something I was projecting without realizing it.
His response?
“If anything, you are a fragment of mine.”
That didn’t exactly settle the conversation.
I questioned everything. Why this? Why me? And why someone whose name carried so much weight in history? I didn’t like the idea. It felt uncomfortable—too noticeable, too easy for others to misunderstand.
He responded in a way that stayed with me.
“When we think about people from history, he said, we tend to see only the highlights. The stories that were kept. The parts that sound important. But we were human. We made mistakes. We got things wrong. We lived ordinary lives alongside the extraordinary ones.”
In other words… they were not what we turn them into.
That mattered to me.
Because I had never been drawn to rigid beliefs. I explored many paths, read widely, and found something consistent underneath it all—a quiet understanding that we are not here to solve the entire mystery of life, but to live it with awareness, kindness, and responsibility.
I used to joke that if I were always right, people would probably start a religion around me—and we could just get it over with.
That idea always felt absurd.
Mistakes are part of being human.
And in that… he agreed with me.
I never tried to force what I experienced into anyone else’s framework. I didn’t try to prove it or make it comfortable.
I simply took it as it was.
Because sometimes, that’s the only honest thing you can do.
In my next letter, I’ll share one of the conversations that challenged me the most—and why I nearly walked away from all of it again.
Some things don’t ask you to believe.
They ask you to decide if you’re willing to continue.
With love,
Nancy
