Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (12 page)

His social life was a constant source of media fascination and every bit as active as expected for
People
magazine’s
1988
“Sexiest Man Alive.” He was romantically linked with Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Madonna, Brooke Shields, and Sarah Jessica Parker, to name a few, before he finally proposed to publicist Carolyn Bessette. They were married on September
21, 1996
, on Cumberland Island, Georgia, in a private ceremony that managed to elude the press and at which John’s sister, Caroline, served as the matron of honor.

On July 16, 1999, John, his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren
Bessette, were en route to Martha’s Vineyard in a private single-en
gine plane with John as its pilot, ultimately headed to the wedding of John’s cousin Rory in Hyannisport, Massachusetts. The plane failed to arrive as scheduled, massive search parties were dispatched, and finally, on July
21
, the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were recovered in the waters off Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Their ashes were scattered into the Atlantic from the USS
Briscoe,
and America mourned the loss of its handsome, magnetic prince of Camelot.

From Francine

John arrived Home in a heartbeat and immediately found himself in the arms of his mother; his grandparents, his Uncle Robert, and his father were waiting to greet him as well.
It was all he could do to let go of his mother, from whose death on earth he had never fully recovered, to embrace the others, and there was almost a shyness about him as he and John Sr. met. “I was three years old when my father died,” he says. “I never had a chance to know him.
I was much closer to my uncles, who did a great job of taking over for him while I was growing up.”

There was no sadness, confusion, or regret in him.
Instead, John was exhilarated to find himself here and had no need for Orientation or cocooning, nor did his wife and sister-in-law.
He left the Scanning Machine to resume his rich, busy life with Jackie—his soul mate—by his side.
Please let go of the fallacy that soul mates, on the extremely rare occasions when they both incarnate at the same time, are limited on earth to romantic relationships.
They can be family members.
They can be good friends.
They can have any connection they choose to construct for themselves, for their own purposes, during a shared incarnation.
Jackie and John chose to be mother and son in their one shared incarnation, so that they could be there for each other through the uniquely difficult charts they designed for themselves.
Now that they’re Home again, they of course maintain their own highly distinctive identities and pursue their own interests, but they also live and work together.

Their house is built, decorated, and situated identically to the house on Martha’s Vineyard, where they both felt safe and peaceful. “There was a gate at the road, at the entrance to our long driveway,” John says. “Even if it had been all over the media that my mother or I was at the house, we could leave that gate open, and often did, and never worry about anyone bothering us.
Everyone respected our privacy, and we respected theirs, and we loved it there.” They continue to balance their love of privacy and social lives in which they each have their own friends with whom they prefer to spend time in small groups.
Jackie loves gatherings at home with authors, artists, and classical musicians.
John prefers hiking with historians, athletes, political leaders, and above all his uncles and his father—they’re enjoying getting to know each other, and John Sr. has expressed his appreciation and respect for his son’s decision not to become a politician, which John says he would never have pursued.
His chosen life themes of Experiencer and Justice, he says, were incompatible with anything involving politics beyond studying and writing about them—as he puts it, he preferred getting things done to scheduling endless committee meetings to discuss getting things done.

John and Jackie work together with a vast research team focused on the prenatal detection, treatment, and cure of birth defects.
The team actively infuses scientists and medical researchers in North America, Japan, and Brazil, and they anticipate the announcement of a collaborative global breakthrough in or around
2026
in your years.
John is also part of a team of ecologists who are working toward solutions for restoring the earth’s ozone layer.

He and Jackie were among what seemed like scores of family members who gathered to welcome John’s Uncle Ted to the Other Side.
Like the rest of the “Kennedy men,” John will not be reincarnating.

Mattie Stepanek

T
he poet, the peacemaker, and the philosopher who played,” Mat
thew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek was born on July 17, 1990, in Rockville, Maryland. His mother, Jeni, with a Ph.D. in early childhood special education, had four children before she was diagnosed with the adult form of dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, a genetic disease that took the lives of her daughter, Katie, at the age of two, her son Stevie at the age of six months, and her son Jamie at the age of three. One of the miracles of Mattie was that he survived the same disease until he was thirteen and accomplished more in those years than many of us manage in a lifetime.

On one hand, Mattie led the life of a normal boy, loving trips to the beach, reading, and the Korean martial art hapkido, in which he earned a black belt at the age of eight before he became reliant on a wheelchair, his service dog Micah, and a ventilator. On the other hand, when he was three years old, he began writing poetry. His extraordinary gifts as a writer and poet led to six books of poetry and a collection of peace essays, all of which reached the
New York Times
bestseller list, and one of which,
Just Peace,
was awarded the Independent Publishing Gold Medal for “Peacemaker Book of the Year” in
2007
, three years after Mattie’s death.

His poetry and his charmingly transcendent presence attracted the attention of Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. His frequent appearances on their respective talk shows led to his appointment as the Muscular Dystrophy Association National Goodwill Ambassador in 2002, at the age of twelve.

Mattie’s disease required that he be home-schooled, a situation that allowed his astonishing intellect to thrive. He was also hospitalized several times and had a near-death experience that only deepened his profound faith in God and led him to tell Larry King in a 2002 interview on
Larry King Live,
when asked if he was afraid of death, “I’m afraid of dying, but I’m not afraid of death.”

On June 22, 2004, at the Washington, D.C., Children’s National Medical Center, Mattie Stepanek left this earth and went Home. His funeral six days later was attended by more than a thousand people. Former president Jimmy Carter remembered in his eulogy Mattie’s life philosophy: “Remember to play after every storm.” Mattie’s mother, Jeni, continues her beloved child’s work as a motivational speaker, peace advocate, and inspiration.

From Francine

Mattie is a Mystical Traveler, such a rare, highly advanced spirit that he seems lit from within by his and God’s complete sacred commitment to each other.
The crowd of spirits and animals who gathered to celebrate his Homecoming went on for as far as the eye could see.
Like most Mystical Travelers, he incarnated on earth once and only once, and he stayed just long enough to reignite the spark of faith in an incalculable number of people and inspire his mother to continue his work before briefly returning to the Other Side.
Then, after a private audience with the Council, he left again, into the stars and on to another planet as desperately in need of him as earth was.

This is not to imply that he and his mother are ever separate for any length of time.
He is with her at every appearance, large or small, and he sits beside her on her bed every night until she falls asleep, adoring her and thanking her for the blessed lifetime she gave him, exactly the lifetime he knew she would give him when he chose her to deliver him to earth and be his best friend, companion, and caretaker in the brief time he was there.

Walter Cronkite

The most trusted man in America,” world-class journalist Walter Leland Cronkite Jr., was born on November 4, 1916
, in St. Joseph, Missouri, the only child of dentist Dr. Walter Leland Cronkite and his wife, Helen. When Walter was ten years old, the family moved to Houston, Texas, pursuing his father’s opportunity for a position at the University of Texas Dental School. Walter, a Boy Scout, credited his early interest in journalism to an article in
American Boy
about the lives of reporters on assignment in other parts of the world, and he became editor of the school newspaper and yearbook during his time at San Jacinto High School.

After two years studying political science and journalism at the University of Texas in Austin, Walter left college in 1935 to accept a part-time job as a news and sports reporter for the
Houston Post
. His first official broadcasting job was for the radio station WKY in Oklahoma City, and from there it was on to sports reporting for KCMO in Kansas City, where he met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, called Betsy throughout her life, in 1936. In 1937 he joined United Press International (UPI), and he became one of the premier American reporters covering the North African and European fronts during World War II. He was then appointed chief correspondent at the war crimes trials in Nuremburg and head of the UPI office in Moscow.

His long career at CBS News began in
1952
, when he narrated a program called
You Are There,
which dramatized historical events. He also anchored CBS coverage of the
1952
Democratic and Republican presidential conventions and established himself as an articulate, uniquely appealing television newsman.

In 1962 Walter made his debut as anchor and editor of the
CBS Evening News,
a position he held until, at the age of sixty-five, he stepped down on March
6, 1981
. During his brilliant tenure there, he interviewed every president from Eisenhower to Reagan; was the first to break the news to America of the deaths of President Kennedy and President Johnson; traveled to Vietnam to report on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive; brought cohesive understanding and clarity as the long, complicated Watergate scandal unfolded; participated in the first live transatlantic news broadcast in
1962
; and was the live on-air reporter for the most historic of the NASA space program’s accomplishments, including the Apollo
11
moon landing on July
20, 1969
.

By his side every step of the way was his wife, Betsy, to whom he was married for sixty-five years until her death in 2005. Their three children, Nancy, Kathy, and Walter III, ultimately presented the Cronkites with four grandchildren.

Walter’s retirement from the
CBS Evening News
by no means indicated his retirement from broadcasting. To name just a handful of his post-
1981
accomplishments, he did narration and voice-overs in an IMAX film about the Space Shuttle called
The Dream Is Alive,
special material for the film
Apollo
13
,
Benjamin Franklin’s voice in the educational cartoon series
Liberty’s Kids,
a CBS documentary about Guglielmo Marconi called
WCC Chatham Radio,
and an eight-part television series for the Discovery Channel called
Cronkite Remembers.
He also chaired the Interfaith Alliance for the protection of American faith and freedom; supported the world hunger organization Heifer International; was a major fund-raiser for Citizens for Global Solutions; and was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, NASA’s Ambassador of Exploration Award, and four Peabody Excellence in Broadcasting awards. He was also inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

On July 17, 2009, Walter Cronkite died of cerebrovascular disease in his New York home at the age of ninety-two after a long, fulfilling life of unparalleled integrity.

From Francine

Walter is as happy and gratified to be Home as anyone we’ve ever seen, not because he was eager for his lifetime to end, but because he feels he used every minute of it the best he could and, he says, “made plenty of mistakes, but never one I didn’t learn from.” He emerged from the tunnel to find his wife, Betsy, a very small woman I believe was his grandmother, and a joyful pair of Springer spaniels waiting for him.
He was fascinated by his time at the Scanning Machine, cherishing the life he lived, but utterly enthralled by the historic events he covered throughout his career.
While reviewing his lifetime he also enjoyed remembering that his trademark newscast-ending phrase, “And that’s the way it is . . .” was his unconscious homage to a phrase used by his employer when he worked as a British newspaper editor in the mid-
1800
s—his employer ended every staff meeting with the words, “So there you have it,” and Walter loved the memory and the paraphrase he’d brought over from a previous lifetime.

Orientation wasn’t necessary.
Walter virtually sprinted away from the Scanning Machine, out of the Hall of Wisdom, and quickly found John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the seven crew members of the space shuttle
Challenger,
all of whose deaths affected him even more deeply than the many others he reported.
And then, as he describes it, he quietly returned to business as usual on the Other Side.
He’s great friends with several past presidents, particularly Jefferson, Lincoln, and Eisenhower, and they actively study current world events and infuse what solutions manage to penetrate the egos of those in positions of power.
He and Carl Sagan have resumed their passionate research into the infinite secrets of the universe and their lectures on future NASA explorations to those who will reincarnate and initiate many of those explorations.
But his two favorite recreational pursuits are sailing and playing tennis with his old pal from Home, Peter Jennings.