The Afterlife Connection by Dr. Jane Greer

Author:Dr. Jane Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312306533
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2003-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

Callie’s Story

Take the case of Callie, an independent, vibrant, and extremely talented young woman whose home life has always been less than ideal. She’s the youngest of six children, her next older sibling having died at the age of three-and-a-half just a month before Callie was born. Needless to say, those circumstances created some very mixed feelings in the family surrounding her birth. She’s been told that when her youngest living brother, who’s five years older than she, first saw her in the bassinet, his only words were, “Where’s my brother?” All of her siblings, she says, have always been jealous of her and have treated her as a kind of interloper in the family. Even the family photograph that hung behind the sofa in the living room had been taken before she was born. There was a separate photo of her hanging next to it, as if to symbolize the fact that she was never quite part of the family. Those photos also show that while all the other children look very much alike, she resembles none of them.

Callie’s mother was her only and constant supporter, and told her, “You’re my special one, my angel from heaven. Without you I wouldn’t have survived your brother’s death.” Callie now thinks that because she was the “healthy replacement baby,” she was spoiled by her mother, who was, no doubt, also trying to compensate for the way she was treated by her brothers and sisters. It would be reasonable to assume that her mother’s special attention prompted further feelings of rivalry from her siblings, which then caused her mother to treat her even more specially—setting up a classic vicious cycle of cause and effect.

Sadly, Callie’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Callie was only thirteen. She lived ten more years and finally died when her daughter was twenty-three. Callie has told me that, a month after her mother’s death, a doctor from the hospital phoned her to say that her mother had asked him to call and tell her she was the favorite child.

Sometime later, Callie’s father remarried. If she thought her siblings had treated her badly, she now discovered that their jealousy was nothing compared to her stepmother’s behavior. On those few occasions when she returned to visit her father at the family home, she was verbally abused, screamed at, slapped, and actually thrown bodily out of the house by this woman. Her father, whom she describes as emotionally immature, not demonstrative, and nonconfrontational, simply ignored what was going on and never attempted to intervene. It’s at that point, Callie says, that she truly began to feel like Cinderella.

Possibly because of the tensions at home, Callie turned to alcohol at a very early age, and, after many years of sobriety, she still attends AA meetings. During a rare visit to the family’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, she told her father one evening that she was going to attend a local meeting and might go out for coffee afterward. It

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