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    Finding Laurie
    Finding Laurie
    Finding Laurie
    Ebook137 pages2 hours

    Finding Laurie

    By Michael Schwed

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    About this ebook

    In 1977 my beautiful five year old daughter died suddenly. There were signs signalling the coming tragedy, signs I failed to recognize. Following her death there were other signs telling me she was not gone forever but would somehow return. This book spans the thirty three years it took for me to find her. Some might call this a book about reincarnation, but, I call it finding Laurie

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Schwed
    Release dateJul 4, 2011
    ISBN9781452498232
    Finding Laurie
    Author

    Michael Schwed

    69 year old criminal defense attorney. Author of "How to Get Away With Murder in New York, available on the Kindle.

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      Best book I ever read. It moves my heart and soul

    Book preview

    Finding Laurie - Michael Schwed

    Finding Laurie

    By

    Michael J. Schwed

    SMASHWORDS EDITION

    * * * * *

    PUBLISHED BY:

    Michael J. Schwed on Smashwords

    Finding Laurie

    Copyright © 2011 by Michael J. Schwed

    Smashwords Edition License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

    * * * * *

    FINDING LAURIE

    I have thought long and hard on how to begin this book. I could just write that on September 15 1977 my beautiful 5 year old daughter died. Her name, as the title of this book might suggest, was Laurie. In truth, the story begins on October 13, 1971, the day she was born. She was my first child, and my wife, Sandy, and I marveled at what we had created.

    She was born in the early evening. I wasn’t at the hospital at the time, having gone home for a break at the suggestion of my wife’s doctor. I lived 3 minutes from the hospital and it appeared my wife would not give birth for several more hours. I had only been home less than fifteen minutes when the phone rang.

    Congratulations, your wife has given birth to a beautiful baby girl the nurse told me. I rushed back to the hospital, heart pounding, somewhat angry at myself for not being there when my baby was born. The past few months had been difficult for me. I had suffered through a series of anxiety attacks that led to a trip to the emergency room two months before Laurie’s birth. I thought at the time I was having a heart attack. I experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. There was nothing wrong with me, I was 26 years old and in perfect health, yet I could not shake the feeling of impending doom that continued to shadow me for the next five years.

    I remember looking at Laurie as she lay contently in her receiving blanket. She was among twenty other babies who were recently born who were ushered into a large room in the maternity ward. I did not need to see her name on the nursery crib to know she was mine. I felt an immediate connection. As I left the hospital after visiting with my wife, I had the crazy fear that I might die before she would get to know me. I stood outside facing the hospital as the cool night air sent shivers through my body. I just could not get the thought out of my head. Would I live long enough for her to remember me?

    As the days passed, that morbid thought slowly faded as the happiness of watching my child develop overtook my fears. I was a young lawyer working as an assistant district attorney in Queens, New York, trying to grow my family and career. Things couldn’t be better and yet, something was wrong. I could not shake the anxiety and fear that was my constant companion.

    I forced myself to cope with my anxiety. Although I felt much safer at home, I went out socially with my wife. I tried not to let her know I was still plagued with anxiety, with the fear that I

    would die. She would often catch me checking my pulse and say it’s happening again isn’t it? I would deny it but she knew I was lying.

    Having taken many courses in psychology during my undergraduate years in college, and having honed an interest in the works of Freud, I tried endlessly to psychoanalyze myself. I sought the reason for my condition. I convinced myself it was rooted in stress. Up until I began working in the D.A’s office I had lived with my wife in the basement of my parent’s home. We both worked for the New York Public Library as part-time clerks while we completed our education. I was in law school and my wife Sandy was finishing her four year undergraduate studies. We had very little responsibility other than to have fun, and we did. Not being much of a student, I never over burdened myself with studying. I was fortunate to be able to glide through school with little effort though my grades suffered as a result. But, as the saying goes,

    What do they call a med student that finishes in the bottom of his class? The answer is a doctor. Well, in my case it’s a lawyer, and I was a damn good prosecutor if I don’t say so myself.

    Well, all that fun was coming to an end. Sandy was pregnant with our first child, and I was working in a very responsible job and we were about to move into our first home, a small apartment not far from the courthouse where I worked. I assumed that the stress from these events created my first anxiety attack, the one that sent me to the emergency room thinking I was having a coronary.

    Knowing the cause of one’s fears is supposed to help alleviate them, so the theory goes. While my self diagnosing did produce some relief, it failed to remove the problem entirely. I then considered the possibility that my father’s heart condition might also be a factor. He had suffered a serious heart attack about two years before Sandy and I were married, and a second heart attack a year before Laurie was born. While I was very close to him, his condition did not cause me any personal anxiety at the time. I initially dismissed this as a cause but I decided to re-examine it when my stress theory seemed to fall short of success.

    I loved my father very much. He was a high school graduate that had educated himself well beyond the college level. Having lived through the depression and having served in the military in World War II, there was little opportunity for him to obtain a degree and at the same time help support my grandparents and later my mother, brother, and me. He was my foundation, my source of knowledge whenever life offered up questions for which I had no answers. While I was concerned about his health, I never really consciously entertained the thought that he might die. However, perhaps on a subconscious level I feared for his life and mimicked his symptoms. It seemed plausible, but, again, the results of my psychoanalysis did not produce a cure. Nevertheless my self examination did manage to reduce the severity and frequency of my attacks to the point where, one year following Laurie’s birth, they were simply an annoyance.

    Synchronistic events

    As I delved into the world of psychoanalysis my desire to understand the workings of the human mind lead me to the works of Carl Jung. It was among his writings that I found a theory of his concerning synchronistic events. These events are coincidences that are so improbable that the likelihood that they would occur is remote. As an example, suppose at this moment you stopped reading this book and decided to watch the TV. You pick up the remote control and turn the set on. You then accidentally drop the remote and the TV channel changes. You see two men discussing Jung’s theory of synchronicity on a channel you seldom watch. Coincidence? What is the probability that at the exact moment you are reading a chapter in my book about synchronicity you would accidentally turn your TV to a channel where a discussion of the same subject matter is going on? I don’t know the mathematical odds but you probably have a better chance at winning the top prize in a lottery.

    So, what does all this have to do with my story? Well, my life became filled with these events as the day of my daughter’s death drew near. I began to take note of them as a result of having read Jung’s thesis, which in and of itself, might be considered a coincidence.

    In my case, these events, in retrospect, where either a warning or a foreshadowing of what was to happen.

    The first time I remember experiencing such an event was when I was nine years old. I had dreamt that I was walking with my Grandfather when he suddenly took my hand and lead me into a cemetery. Why are we here? I asked him. I have to meet someone. He explained. I then awoke very upset. It was four thirty in the morning and I could not fall back to sleep. I had never been to a cemetery before. I could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. Two hours later, my mother came into my room to tell me that my Grandfather had died earlier in the morning. Coincidently, his death occurred at 4:30 A.M.

    I told my parents about my dream. My father, who was a very logical person, explained that my grandfather was ill and my dream simply reflected my fears that he might die. The fact that he died at the time I had my dream was just a coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time, but in reality there are more non-coincidences than coincidences every day of your life, explained my father. The mere fact that coincidences are rare occurrences is enough of a reason not to attach much meaning to them, he concluded. It all sounded very logical and I really never thought much about it again until March 8, 1973.

    At that time I had been working as an assistant district attorney for almost two years. After a year on the job, I was promoted to the misdemeanor trial section. There I tried defendants charged with offenses ranging from petty larceny to driving intoxicated. On March 8, I was finishing an intox driver case. During the morning court session I noticed that the defense attorney in the case seemed a little under the weather. He was an elderly man, probably in his mid to late seventies. I had joked with him about retirement and he observed that most lawyers never retire, they just drop dead in court.

    At the start of the afternoon session he appeared more stressed. His color was pale and he was sweating. I suggested that he ask the judge for a continuance. He heeded my counsel but the judge, who was a workaholic, pushed him to continue. The case was finally adjourned at 4:15 and he hurried out of the courthouse. I stayed behind, for about 10 minutes, talking to several police witnesses I would be calling to testify when the case resumed. As I left the courthouse I saw a small crowd gathered on the lawn. There were several court officers kneeling down next to a motionless body lying on its back. As I pushed my way closer I saw that it was the lawyer I was trying the case with.

    What happen? I asked one of the court officers.

    He just collapsed. He’s not responding. The officer told me.

    Just then I heard the sirens of an ambulance at it approached. Within seconds paramedics were working on him. I stared at his face. It was ashen. It was the first time I had looked into the face of death. I stood there hoping he could be revived, but, unfortunately his remark that lawyers never retire, they just drop dead in court, seemed prophetic now. After about twenty minutes the paramedics gave up and pronounced him dead. Although I did not know him well, I was shaken by the experience. I imagined the grief his family would feel upon learning what happened. I thought about the case we were trying and the effect his death would have. You could not continue the trial, I thought, the defendant’s unrepresented. The judge would likely grant a mistrial and give the defendant time to get a new lawyer. What did all this matter. The man was dead. His life was over and the world continued, at least the world as seen through my eyes went on.

    When I got home, I told my wife what had happened.

    That must have been horrible she said. But horrible was not the right word, I thought. Unsettling seemed better. It was disturbing, and it made me uneasy. It brought back fears of my own death and

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