After reading “Old Souls,” Derek Askey’s interview with Jim Tucker on children’s memories of past lives [December 2024], I awoke in the middle of the night with these comforting thoughts: If I were to die tomorrow and be reincarnated within a year, then my deceased partner Stephen—assuming he took the average five years for his reincarnation—will be six years older than me, exactly how much older I was than him when we met in 1998. Reincarnate Dennis will be twenty-eight, which was his age when we met in 1979. Jeff will be twenty-five, my age when we met in 1982. Ben, who was seventeen when he was killed instantly in an automobile collision in 1974, will be in his forties. I served as a pallbearer at his funeral, which took place on my seventeenth birthday, and I served as the primary caregiver and executor for the other three.
I’m content to muse that these four beautiful souls—with whom I once committed to share the entirety of my life—may still, somehow and somewhere, be bringing joy into the world.
I can certainly handle metaphor and the figurative in the poetry and photographs you publish, even in some stories. But if I want to read about life after death and ghosts and angels and “past lives,” I’ll seek out magazines that entertain metaphysics and other such speculation.
You say in your email newsletter that “The Sun has a long history of publishing work about the mystery of what might await us after our lives on earth have ended.” Is referencing that so-called history—a scant few articles per year—a justification for running the interview? Are you hoping it will expand your readership? I get it; you run a business. But I’d rather you start accepting advertisements instead.
The data mentioned in the interview with Jim Tucker was new to me, a clinical psychologist with a decades-long career. It called to mind my own tentative efforts to explain a more mundane and widespread phenomenon: “horse girls.” These are girls who from an early age display not just an affinity, but a passion for horses, even though they may never have seen any. I know because I was one.
Horse girls practically fall out the car window shouting, “Horses!” should we happen to pass a field with horses in it. We play with plastic horses rather than dolls. We dream of someday having a horse of our own. We’re often the only one in our family who feels this way, so we think we must have been born with it. It goes back as far as we can remember.
For an obsession shared by so many girls, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that we were deeply involved with horses in a previous life. The still-unanswered question: Why is the obsession overwhelmingly present in girls but not boys?
The interview with Jim Tucker skirts on the ridiculous. It’s magical thinking to suggest dead people find new bodies and remember their former ones. As for the parents who interpret their toddlers’ words to mean the child knew about events occurring decades earlier: Kids mumble all sorts of things. Parents can hear what they want to hear.
Pseudoscientific discoveries don’t belong in a magazine that wants to be taken seriously. Clean it up, please.
I was blown away by Derek Askey’s interview with Jim Tucker. Many times in my early childhood I remembered events from my previous life. These have stayed with me as an adult and strengthened my belief in reincarnation, but anytime I’ve been brave enough to tell someone about them, they’ve tried to convince me I made it up or am misremembering it.
Tucker’s well-researched and science-backed approach—in which researchers have substantiated the children’s memories—gave me an immense sense of relief. If a major publication like The Sun is willing to publish this interview, as well as the incredible quotes in the Sunbeams section of that issue, reincarnation may be shedding its stigma of wishful thinking.
Faith Shearin’s “My Ghost Fleet” has a quality I don’t always find in The Sun. The essay was provocative, heartfelt, and intelligently experienced, and the author has reached a high level of emotional maturity. Paired with the interview on children’s memories of past lives, it made your December 2024 issue an extraordinary one.
Heather Sellers’s beautiful essay “Greenie” [December 2024] reminded me of my own grandmother, who stood outside my bedroom door, stamping her foot and shouting, “This is not right!” while my father whipped me. I didn’t believe him when he said the whipping was for my own good because I had at least one adult letting me know that what was happening was downright wrong. God bless the Greenies of the world.
Though I never had a Greenie, I could hear Heather Sellers’s grandmother shuffling cards at the kitchen table and see clearly the integral role she played in her granddaughter’s life. I felt a profound sense of loss when Greenie left their home and later when she died. It was as if I had lost her too.
Susan Neville’s “The Wind Phone” [December 2024] is a most remarkable piece of writing. Not a poem; not quite a story. Every phrase was evocative and layered, yet minimally done: no word out of place, no excess. It was lovely, exciting, and touching. It made me think about the many ways people experience the world.
Readers Write has always been my favorite section of The Sun. In my many years of subscribing, I don’t believe I’ve ever read a contribution I didn’t relate to in one way or another. It’s a glimpse into the lives of strangers who divulge their fears, desires, failings, and triumphs—each one a master class in the challenging art of the short essay.
I just finished “Luxuries” [December 2024] and feel compelled to share a little luxury of my own: Once a month I make a cup of tea and take thirty minutes out of my often-stressful, guilt-ridden, and disconnected existence to sit quietly and savor Readers Write. My anxiety and loneliness subside, and I’m reminded that I am a real human being after all.
I was at home on a dreary Saturday afternoon the week before Thanksgiving, reading the Readers Write on “Luxuries,” when my phone rang. I answered, and a woman said she was calling from the local rescue mission to thank me for a donation I’d made a couple of weeks prior to provide Thanksgiving dinners to those in need.
She wasn’t soliciting an additional contribution, she said. Rather, the mission also maintained a prayer chain, and she wanted to know if there was anything they could pray for on my behalf, or for anyone in need of “uplifting.” With appreciation I asked for prayers for the health and happiness of my family. What a call to receive in the midst of reading about luxuries.
I related to Elizabeth Miki Brina’s essay about receiving financial support from her mother [“The Work We Do,” December 2024]. After I got divorced in my late twenties, my mother often sent checks to help me out. I was thankful and accepted them until I turned forty, at which point I was ashamed not to be able to support myself and my daughter, and uncomfortable because I felt the money was the only way I received my mother’s love. So I asked her to stop. Soon I had racked up $20,000 in credit card debt. A few years later my mother passed away, and I inherited some of her estate. I’ve never been in debt again, and I learned to accept that the checks were how she expressed her love.
