I have had many experiences in my life that I have never been able to explain. Some of these have been in the terrain of death and dying.
It was late November 2019. The weather had turned chilly. One morning I received a phone call from a friend of Marta, a close friend of my wife. Even when she told me her name and where we had met the previous Summer, over supper in a place on a beach in Catalunya I still could not remember who she was. It was only when she mentioned her job as a Spanish female dubbing voice for English speaking movies that it clicked. The conversation, I recalled, was about her work and mine. It had always fascinated me that the dubbed voices ended up sounding remarkably similar in all the films. Now I had met the person responsible, Sarah.
Over the phone she told me that her mother, Clarisse was in the terminal phase of her cancer, and being cared for in the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona. She had asked Sarah to get in touch with me because she wanted to see me. She went on to explain that when she got home the day that we met on the beach and had our conversation, during which I had talked briefly about what I did, being more interested in her work, she had recounted our meeting to her mother. She added that they had jokingly referred to me as the ‘extraterrestre’, the alien, presumably because of the work I did with the dying.
Of course, I asked her why her mother wanted to see me. Was it to be accompanied in this phase of her illness? I was no substitute for a priest if that was what she needed. But Sarah assured me that her mother was not a religious person. In fact, the opposite. She just needed to tell me something important. I was intrigued. Still, I asked: Was there no one else she could speak to? Her own daughter, for example? No. Clarisse insisted on speaking to me, although until that morning I was not even aware of her existence.
I could have said no and referred her to one of my colleagues working in the same field and living in Barcelona. But it happened that I was going to Barcelona that same evening to give a talk and it would only mean setting off from home a little earlier to be able to fit in a visit. I took it to be yet another case of synchronicity, so I accepted to go.
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