So, previously - a few posts back, I wrote down my experiences with my first love Tawny and how I was able to feel her pain from 5500 miles away.
So, I had another experience that was equally as unusual.
After I returned from my mission to Brazil, I worked in Eastern WA making good summer wages at a vegetable processing plant. I actually worked three jobs knowing that the scholarships would cover everything but the dating dollars - and I wanted some spending cash to spend on the ladies I knew I would bump into at the happy hunting ground.... It was not to be that year, while at Moses Lake, my brother met and introduced me to Danielle. I initially fell in love with her family - they seemed to have it all together and like mother, like daughter, I was determined to marry a girl that had a good blueprint for how to make a happy well-balanced family happen. Danielle had 7 kids in her family and they lived what I thought to be the perfect existence. Our relationship went along pretty well - she at Ricks and I at BYU-Provo getting my engineering degree. If grades are any indication of how well a girl positively influences a guy, I was in good shape. I was pulling the curves in almost every class and managed straight A's all year in engineering weeder courses. Our relationship went well, but there were some maturity issues on both our parts - and her dad specifically told me she was too young to marry. The other thing that scared me was that Danielle took the whole family thing a little too seriously. She was going to bear me 12 children - and she was dead serious. I was more in the 5-7 range. I know my limits - and 12 was too many. Maybe she was just trying to scare me off - but I knew she might try and make good on her promise. I was falling for her and we had even kicked the M word around - but there were a few hurdles we could not clear and she decided she was to serve a mission (much to her dad's delight). In the meantime, I found a good friend who I swear knew every woman on campus and he took me on "the rounds" every Sunday where we would go to the women's apartments and forage for a free Sunday meal. We had an agreement: we cleaned the kitchen top to bottom after taking care of the Sunday leftovers - and we also took notice of all the cute girls we bumped into. We were praised for our cleaning details which was no big deal as we were engineers and used to detail - they were praised on their cooking skills. It was the perfect setup and ended in the marriage of me to my eternal companion. She passed all the necessary tests and cleared all the hurdles except she came from a broken home where a divorce was occurring just as we were coming together in our union. Truly sad.... It was so sad, that having heard some of the dysfunction from her family had me thinking I was going to have to let her down easy and move on to the girl behind door number three - but I actually heard a crystal clear voice in my mind say "It will be okay (stick with her)".... FREAKY stuff!! The only time that ever happened before or since.
My sweetie was born in September (I had known my sweetie would be a Sept girl since I was 16 years old and first pondered on the concept of being married). We were actually born 15 hours apart and my best man - that set me up with her was born on the same day as me - all of us in the same year. Pretty odd for three completely random people meeting up. My best man being a major player in every major thing in my life including the dream I had the night we lost our Dallin. He even found me my current job that has seen us through tough economic times. Which segues nicely into the point of this whole story.....
I had the previously posted anguishing dreams the week Tawny lost her brother in a tragic death, and in Nov 2001 I, for two weeks, had been having these anguishing tormented dreams again - but this time about Danielle. Every morning I would wake up and tell my wife and then another torturous night feeling gloom and doom over Danielle. I was convinced that something bad had happened to her - but could not ascertain what it possibly could be. My wife prodded me to call her - but I could not bring myself to do it - it would be awkward beyond words, and besides, I had no contact info and she had married a few years before that and I only knew that my brother had run into her in N. Utah at a crafts fair where her woodworking husband sold some of his works of art.
One of the problems also was that I only awoke with impressions of torment, but with no specific details of what the exact details were. My wife promised me that if I would wake her, she would record the details the next time this kind of thing happened. I was concerned enough, I agreed, but I was NOT going to make contact with Danielle. VERY awkward considering how our relationship just kind of petered out and died with a sigh.... Not very good closure, I must say.
Fast forward four and a half months. I had been given a weekly 5am Saturday morning temple assignment. I dreaded the early hours - but LOVED the chance to serve and start my weekend off right. My personal level of spirituality soared. Six weeks after serving in the temple, I had a most powerful and vivid dream. I rolled over and my wife and I woke up simultaneously. I was saying over and over "That was amazing, that was amazing...". My wife asked what it was and I told her I had just had the most incredible dream. She popped out of bed and disappeared into the office returning shortly with a tape. She popped it into the tape recorder that just happened to be next to our bed (we had just pulled it out of storage three days before to listen to some Cleon Skousen tapes the missionaries had given us - the only boom box we owned that could record). For 45 minutes I recorded the most incredible dream I had ever had - and our son had been laying dead in the next room for the past three hours. I believe he was there in the room - and the sweet spirit I was feeling was some of his presence - he is one of the greats of the Matheson line who needed only get a tabernacle of clay and move on to greater things without the need to be tried and tested in this fallen world. After recording this singular dream which we later foretold with incredible clarity three significant events that would define our lives in the future (one of which was Dallin's death), I turned off the tape and we rolled over and went to sleep until we woke up late that morning - the usual babe crying at 6am for his morning milk not having woken us as usual.....
Our little family converged on his room where we found his lifeless body - beginning the most unusual odyssey I could ever have contrived in my mind had I even scarcely believed it to be possible. One where I have a solid witness of God's interaction in our lives, where I know He lives and where I know there is life after this one and we are on a carefully guided plan to help us fill our greatest God-given potential - take my life if you must, but you cannot take that solid assurance away from me.
So - what does this have to do with Danielle? It finally (after I was able to digest the whole death of a child thing and that I wasn't just having random or coincidental dreams), I looked up her mom who still lived in the same place in Moses Lake and briefly told her of our tragedy and asked, "What happened to one of your daughters last November?". "Did something tragic or of significance happen the end of that month?" She paused - and then said that I must be referring to Danielle and I said yes, it was....
She then proceeded to tell me that around the time that my wife and I were married, Danielle (as a 21 year old woman - and on her mission in AZ) had gone through menopause and stopped ovulating completely. The woman who had wanted 12 kids became completely infertile and could no longer bear any. She gave Danielle our phone number and Danielle called a few nights later and we had a good cry together as we shared our losses - a truly surreal experience. She had met her husband and they started the treatment to kick her body out of the early onset menopause (much as they would one of these ladies who is 60 and decides she would like to have a baby). The doctors kept increasing the dosages of medicine until the doctor told her it would end up killing her before she could have a baby of her own. The levels were 5x what it would take to kick the 60 year old back into a fertile state. She was left with an empty minivan (she had bought with the idea she and her husband would fill it) - and no children. A tragedy as great as having and then losing one of her own - a true state of mourning. Once again, I had felt someone's pain from a great distance - that strange non-verbal soul to soul communication at work. I cannot explain it - but it is fascinating beyond words. I understand the communication with Danielle - we had professed our love to each other and I wonder what the long-term interactions between her and I will be. I found out after marrying my wife (who made the genealogical connections through a common friend), that all three girls who made the top of the list while I was at BYU were all descended from a common ancestor who was hanging out with my common ancestor on the Willey-Martin handcart company disaster. I truly was supposed to marry into that line - I am sure of it. I have only skimmed the surface on this topic - there is so much more weird stuff that I haven't got time for.
A whole other topic for a whole other day. Sufficeth to say - things are way too strange when you take a walk down the wild side in the Wood Zone. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't experienced it.
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