A little while ago I was checking up on people in my email archives with whom I'd lost contact and noticed that I had apparently not corresponded with a dearly liked intellectual friend for a long time. He had been a close work colleague towards the end of the twentieth century and since then I had sent him emails every few years just to keep up to date on our respective very different lives. He had even read and made constructive comments about several chapters of my draft novel. With his remarkably varied interests and occupations he had led an erratic life and I usually had to try several of his past email addresses and search the internet for his latest exploits just to regain contact. I found out that there was an apparent gap in my email archives and discovered that the indexes to them had become corrupted so that many messages didn’t appear in them although the original contents were still present in the detailed files, so eventually I found my last message to him from September 2022, to which he had not replied. This would not have troubled me much at the time as he may simply not have been actively using that email account then and apparently I hadn’t made any further attempt to contact him having been busy with my own life.
Taking my usual approach to this often elusive man I searched the internet for his activities and discovered that, being an accomplished wordsmith, mathematician and webmaster, he had gained a substantial reputation in establishing online facilities for Scrabble players. However, during my search I also found an item on the site of the Manx Scrabble League mentioning that sadly he had died, probably early in 2022 from the date of the item. I was surprised at this as I estimated that he could only have been in his sixties then, so I searched the official records for a more formal record of his death and found this in the probate records, which stated that he had died intestate and administration of his estate had been assigned to his daughter. I was distraught at confirmation of this much belated news but at the same time I noticed a peculiar coincidence, that I had sent my last message to him on the day in 2022 immediately after the one when administration had been granted according to the register. Also in that message I had mentioned several times that I didn’t know why I was writing to him unless I was being prompted by some future thought. My exact words from the message in my email archive are worth repeating here below.
“Of course I have no idea why I suddenly took it into mind to Google your latest activities and then contact you but there is the possibility that a future thought in some mind somewhere, not even necessarily mine, sparked off my whim. . . .
. . . I find it reassuring that my future self apparently acts as my present guardian angel, forever (or at least as long as I actually have a future of course) pointing me unwittingly towards making right decisions, but why then am I writing to you? . . .
. . . So, why did I write to you? I still have no idea. . . .”
I was clearly concerned about my compulsion at that time but in my current grief arising from first reading the truth in that register entry I realised just how prophetic those past remarks appeared. I never mentioned his Scrabble activities in my email so my online searches mentioned at the time in the quote above had presumably been quite cursory and it seems that I hadn't found that small item from the Manx Scrabble League then as it had only materialised in my more recent search for additional information specifically about his Scrabble activities. Also, as is often the case, insufficient information had crossed the time barrier from present times, if that was what had actually happened, and I had been meant to have written to his daughter then rather than to him but it seems that I hadn’t even known of his death then and didn't know the whereabouts of any of his family either, so had done the wrong thing. Despite several years having passed I resolved to write to his daughter but first checked whether she had changed her address from that in the probate register in the meantime and discovered from an internet search that she had. This raised another peculiar coincidence, that I had in my last message to him also mentioned for no specific reason that it would be my birthday a month later and it appeared from my current internet search that she had moved to her new address precisely on that birthday a month after receiving the grant.
My mind was awash with both grief and amazement about these coincidences combined with the fact that in my last message to him I had also gone into considerable detail about my exploration of similar coincidences now documented on this site. If emotions are the motivation of these communications backwards in time then it seems clear to me that my intense grief about this untimely loss of a good friend far younger than myself had driven me to write that entire email to him over three years earlier. That entry in the probate register was clearly the synchronicity that had set the relevant point in time that I would most likely receive the no doubt immensely strong influence within my unconscious mind and respond in the only conscious way that would have occurred to me at the time by writing to him. There is however a more optimistic sequel to this story in the next item.