Synchronicity SIGNS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: PROJECTION, OR SHEER COINCIDENCE?

Many of us have moments, especially around an intense experience like losing someone we love, when events converge in a way that seems too significant to be chance. But what does the science say?

- GLYNIS HORNING

Writer Joan Didion dubbed the year her husband died ‘the year of magical thinking’. Many who grieve will identify with that – with her reluctance to give away his suits and shoes, because he would need them, surely, when he came back?

But beyond understandable denial, researchers have reported an upsurge during grief of incidents of synchronicity – of ‘meaningful coincidence’. Incidents we may previously have dismissed as chance but that seem, from where we suddenly stand, to ‘represent a bridge between matter and mind’, as late British quantum physicist and writer F. David Peat put it. Or, as I did when our son died, to ‘rip the fabric of the material world, revealing a hint of something beyond’.

A song starts playing on random select from 6000 on the memory stick a friend sent months earlier, the lyrics speaking directly to an aching need at that specific moment. A minibus taxi cuts in ahead, the comforting mantra a close friend messaged two days earlier decalled above the rear window: ‘All Is Well’. A stranger calls my name as we pass on airport escalators – she knows me from byline pics; I immediately know her, when she shouts her name, as the author of a book about losing her brother to suicide. She doesn’t yet know I’ve just lost my son the same way.

When a loved one is ripped forever from reach, when you’ve watched them buried in a box, or slid, as our boy was, into the roaring maw of a crematorium furnace, and carried them home as a small bag of bone-shell sand, you are primed for signs, any signs, of their continuation.