Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (13 page)

He wants his children and grandchildren to know that he and their mother are still taking good care of each other and watching over them together and that he considers them his greatest accomplishments.

Abraham Lincoln

A
braham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, was born in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809. His father, Thomas, was a farmer. His mother, Nancy, had a total of three children—Sarah, the eldest, Abraham, and Thomas, who died as an infant. The family moved to southern Indiana when Abraham was seven, and he was nine years old when his mother died. A year later Thomas married Sarah Bush Johnston, who brought three children of her own into the family. Abraham’s stepmother was a loving, positive influence in his life, encouraging him to read and study, which quickly became two of his passions, and he more than made up for the fact that he had no more than about a year of formal education.

By the time he reached adulthood, he was a stately figure at almost six foot four and
180
pounds, impressing the residents of his new home in New Salem, Illinois, with his integrity, honesty, and strength of character in a succession of jobs that ranged from surveying to managing a store to serving as the local postmaster, appointed by President Andrew Jackson.

Lincoln enlisted for service in the Black Hawk War in 1832, and after his brief military career he was elected to the Illinois legislature from 1834 to 1842. In the meantime, he studied law, and in 1836 he was admitted to the bar. In 1846 he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where his opposition to slavery became widely known in Washington. His national recognition grew with a series of debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, when the two men competed for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Douglas won that seat, but when they ran against each other for public office two years later, Lincoln defeated Douglas and, in 1860, was elected president of the United States.

Accompanying Abraham Lincoln to his new home in the White House were his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and their three surviving sons, Robert, William (Willie), and Thomas (Tad). (Their second son, Edward, died in 1850, at the age of four, from tuberculosis.) Mary Todd, who’d had a privileged upbringing in Lexington, Kentucky, was introduced to the rising legal and political star named Abraham Lincoln in 1839, and they were married on November 4, 1842. She tirelessly campaigned for her husband and was a loving, devoted mother to their children, but when she acquired the title of First Lady, she took it upon herself to refurbish the White House to her own extravagant tastes, lavishly ignoring the budget Congress allocated to her for the project.

On February 20, 1862, less than a year after Lincoln was sworn in as president, Willie Lincoln, age eleven, died of typhoid fever, a tragedy from which Mary Todd never fully recovered. Lincoln, also grief-stricken, was in the midst of a national crisis. Shortly after his election, eleven southern states seceded from the Union, rejecting Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ control over the government. Lincoln’s determination to save the Union led to the four-year Civil War, the most costly conflict in American history. In the end, he successfully reunited the North and South and, with his famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, began the process of freeing the slaves as well.

He was reelected in 1864, continuing his record of historic accomplishments that have inspired many to consider him the greatest president in U.S. history. He passed the Homestead Act, which allowed impoverished Easterners to obtain land in the West, helping to populate the Great Plains. His legislation created the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, protected American manufacturing, and initiated a network of national banks. And he gave some of the most brilliant speeches ever written, including the Gettysburg Address, dedicating that battlefield to the soldiers who died there, and his second inaugural address, which ended with the beautiful passage: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

He accomplished all of this and much more against a backdrop of deep personal difficulties—the loss of two of his sons during their childhoods, the increasing instability of his wife, and his own pervasive, lifelong battle with what was then called “profound melancholy,” but what would now be diagnosed as clinical depression, which manifested itself in occasional talk of suicide, weeping in public, and a need for solitude.

On April 14, 1865, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater to see a play called
Our American Cousin
. During the play an actor named John Wilkes Booth, a racist and sympathizer with the Confederacy, made his way into the president’s box and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln died the next day at
7
:
22
a.m.
, the first U.S. president to be assassinated. The nation mourned a brilliant, courageous, compassionate leader as Lincoln’s body was taken by train to be buried in the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

From Francine

Like so many Mission Life Entities whose lifetimes end abruptly, Abra
ham arrived Home deeply depressed and disoriented, a combination of the shock of death and an exquisitely sensitive spirit who felt personally responsible for elevating the integrity of a harsh world. His life themes of Justice and Rescuer were ideal for the profound work he charted for himself. But his empathetic spirit, the same spirit that made it impossible for him to walk away from those who needed him, never knew the comfort of being able to emotionally separate itself from the pain, oppression, and injustice being inflicted on innocents in a country he loved. He couldn’t end his own suffering until he ended theirs, which only escalated both his resolve and his pervasive sadness. He also talks about a time in his life when he was given medication for a stomach or intestinal problem, and until he became alarmed enough to stop taking it, it dramatically exacerbated his emotional fragility, for reasons he never understood. “My poor wife was having enough difficulties of her own without my adding to them,” he says. “I will always regret the tension I caused in our household for her and for our sons, and I’m eternally grateful for the loyalty they afforded me in spite of myself.”

A throng that extended as far as the eye could see gathered to meet Abraham when he arrived, and it’s worth adding that he was already on the Other Side before his body had even been carried from the theater. With the exception of his sons Edward and Willie (his mother had already reincarnated), the crowd was populated exclusively with loved ones from Home—this incarnation was Abraham’s first, and it will be his last. His Spirit Guide, Kabir, took him from his sons’ arms to the cocooning chambers, where he stayed to heal for nearly a decade in your years.

Abraham has always been one of our most brilliant scholars and orators, and he immediately resumed his quietly joyful work when he emerged, thriving and at peace, from the Hall of Wisdom. He’s a constant presence in the Hall of Records, expanding his expertise in world history and politics, and his lectures on those subjects are treasured events throughout the Other Side. And he’s returned to his seat on an esteemed panel of political, spiritual, environmental, and scientific experts who regularly confer with our Council on ways to achieve healing and future health on your planet and then infuse their insights to those on earth who are dedicated and open-minded enough to enact them. Your President Obama is a frequent recipient of the panel’s suggestions, and of Abraham’s personal wisdom as well—it’s impossible to put into human words the awe with which Abraham viewed the inauguration of an African American president of the United States.

He lives alone, as he always has, but it’s interesting that he’s chosen a spot for his small lean-to that precisely corresponds to his birthplace on earth. He’s a devout Christian who regularly attends a magnificent church whose massive stained-glass windows were designed by Leonardo da Vinci. And while he never socializes, it makes us all smile that he and his four sons have become avid, enthusiastic baseball fans and never miss a game in which Joe DiMaggio is playing.

George Harrison

G
eorge Harrison was the “quiet Beatle,” a historically gifted musician, singer, and songwriter, the youngest member of the Liverpool band that became one of the most influential musical phenomena of the twentieth century. He was born in Liverpool, England, on February 24, 1943, the fourth and last child of bus conductor Harold Harrison and his shopkeeper wife, Louise. After an early education at Dovedale Primary School, he headed on to the Liverpool Institute, where he was a disinterested, introverted student. After his mother scraped together the money to buy her fourteen-year-old son the acoustic guitar he’d wanted for so long, he promptly formed a skiffle band (improvisational, with a heavy use of such homemade instruments as washboards, spoons, and comb-and-tissue-paper “harmonicas”) and began exploring his natural talent on the guitar. Somewhere along the line he happened to meet a fellow Institute student and bus mate named Paul McCartney, who had a skiffle band called the Quarrymen with his friend John Lennon, and despite John’s concern that he was too young to join the group, George became the Quarrymen’s guitarist.

The Quarrymen evolved into the Beatles and headed to Hamburg, Germany, for a series of appearances at the Kaiserkeller in
1960
, a trip that was abbreviated by George’s deportation for being underage. And then, in November
1961
, a record shop owner named Brian Epstein came to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool; he became their manager, and the magic of Beatlemania took root and lasted through the
1960
s with a body of work that had an unprecedented impact on music and the youth of the world. George’s contributions as a songwriter were often overshadowed by those of his fellow Beatles John and Paul, but such distinctively “George” songs as “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” have become undeniable classics.

In the mid-1960s George was introduced to the sitar and one of its masters, Ravi Shankar. As George’s passion for East Indian music and culture grew, so did his interest in Hinduism and transcendental meditation. His fellow Beatles accompanied him to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he and John Lennon returned in 1969 to explore the Hare Krishna tradition, a sect of Hinduism that George embraced and practiced for the rest of his life.

Beginning in 1970 with the breakup of the Beatles, George launched a string of albums whose success diminished as the 1970s progressed. Without a doubt one of his most notable accomplishments of that decade occurred in August 1971, when he became one of the musicians to organize a charity concert, the massively successful Concert for Bangladesh, at which George and fellow superstars
Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Rus
sell, and Ringo Starr, among others, raised more than $
15
million for UNICEF efforts in that country and around the world.

George was wonderfully creative and diverse throughout the 1980s and 1990s, once he recovered from the shock of losing John Lennon in 1980 and wrote “All Those Years Ago” in his memory. He recorded albums with his friends Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison as an almost spontaneously formed group who called themselves the Traveling Wilburys. His film company, HandMade Films, produced twenty-three movies, including Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
. He recorded with one of his idols, rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins. He toured Japan with his old friend Eric Clapton, whom George also referred to as his “husband-in-law”—George’s first wife, Patti Boyd, to whom he was married from
1966
until
1977
, was subsequently married to Eric Clapton from
1979
until
1988
. He performed at charity concerts at Royal Albert Hall and Madison Square Garden. He appeared in Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” music video, was a guest musician on friends’ albums, and continued producing albums of his own. And last but certainly not least among his post-Beatles accomplishments, he married Olivia Arias in
1978
, a marriage that lasted until his death. Their son, Dhani, also born in
1978
, is a successful musician today, with a look and a voice that are eerily reminiscent of those of his father.

In the late 1990s George began a series of battles with cancer, starting with throat cancer in 1997 and progressing to lung cancer, for which he underwent surgery at the Mayo Clinic in 2001. In the summer of that same year he began receiving radiation treatments for a brain tumor. He’d already curtailed public appearances at the end of 1999, after a crazed fan who believed George’s spirit had possessed him broke into his home in England and attacked him, stabbing him seven times. By the time cancer overtook him, he was rarely seen outside his Hollywood Hills mansion, where he quietly passed away on November 29, 2001. According to Hindu tradition, his closest family members gathered for a private ceremony to scatter George’s ashes in the sacred Ganges River.

From Francine

How appropriate that George’s family followed Hindu tradition in his honor—he was a devout East Indian Hindu in the only other incarnation he lived on earth, which is why India, transcendental meditation, yogis, and the sitar struck such responsive, familiar chords in his soul.
His previous life in India was a quiet, modest one, devoted to farming and raising his eight children with his wife, Marathi, whom he married again in this life in her current incarnation as Olivia Arias.
He inherited his love of gardening and landscaping from that lifetime, giving thanks as he did every day in India to the generous earth, which provided nourishment to his family, and he’s one of our most esteemed, creative horticulturists and teachers on that subject.