Introduction

So why would it make any sense for a 64 year-old woman write her memoir?

I hope to answer that question by … writing it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for some time, but each time I’ve been held back because I was in doubt if it had a worthwhile purpose.

I’m not even sure there is a red thread in my life, much less anything interesting to report and learn from.

Perhaps that is the reason why I want to write it? It’s to help me find that red thread. It’s not something I already have, ready to share with the world.

So this introduction will necessarily be as poor as any introduction for a completely ordinary life that had its ups and downs, its adventures and its doldrums. And which, if all goes as it usually does, will end without any great impact or without anyone really remembering much about it. Like it does for 99 percent of all people, in the past, in the now and probably also in the future.

I’m not writing this out to be morbid or try to make you feel sorry for me.

I felt like writing it, and it actually helped.

Now, for some reason, I don’t feel so afraid of being forgotten, of having lived a chaotic life with no real impact or direction beyond what I could scrape together for myself and my family.

It’s odd how this fear of the unknown is so deep.

I shouldn’t be afraid. I believe in the angelic hierarchies as defined in the Kabbalah and in the visions of life beyond life as explained by Jane Roberts, Rauni-Leena Luukanen, Raymond Moody and many others. Some days I know they are true.

And yet, I fear the end of my days and that those days I had were wasted. And that feeling gets stronger year by year. I wonder if you feel the same way if you were a traditional Christian or Moslem?

So nothing you read in this introduction might come down on printed paper in the end. And yet, every word may be kept, if I find out that the journey is worth sharing.

The journey where I write about my fears and my regrets, mostly, but also the moments of light, as when I had my first and only child.

Contents

The book will be divided intro three parts and the first deals with my formative years in Utah and the Church of Latter Day Saints, my father’s (company’s) move to Paris that coincided with the 1968 riots, my escape to my aunt in Cleveland and breakup with my parents.

After that I will tell you about my years in New York in the 1970s working odd jobs, my experiments with drugs, meditation and that one time I almost got into an argument with John Lennon (and didn’t know who he was—which part is the most embarrassing I will leave to you).

Finally, but still in part I, I will take you with me on a tour around Europe that ended up near a NATO base in Italy where I met a handsome young Scottish soldier, stationed there. (Well, I met him at a bar in Genoa, but it’s all the same to me.)

I will try to make sense of how I thought I had found the man of my dreams, even if he was a soldier—or perhaps because he was a soldier, who appeared to have a heart.

And how we moved to his native Scotland, and how I became pregnant with Caroline in 1978 and … how the romantic dream evaporated as the highland mists in the mid-1980s after that damn war in the Falklands which changed my husband.

Or perhaps Calum was always like that, prone to feeling sorry for himself and being angry at everyone else, and it just came to the surface after the war?

There you have it. I am not even finished describing the first part of the memoir, and I’m already analyzing what happened, so many years ago—looking desperately for that thread.

But it feels more right than when I started. So I will continue. Even if this is never published and read by anyone else. Not even my current husband.

I hope you will stay with me on the journey.

– DEBORAH SAWYER-CHEN