Love's Deja Vu: Married again 125 years later

May 24, 2007

Love's Deja Vu: Visions, reincarnation led to second marriage 125 years later, couple say

By Kim Underwood

JOURNAL REPORTER

Second Life: Joe and Doralice Myers say they believe they are the reincarnation of Edward Bellamy, a 19th-century writer, and his wife, Emma, who were married in 1882.

Joe and Doralice Myers say that this is the second time they have been married.

The first time was 125 years ago.

Joe Myers, 85, is a structural engineer who has lived in Tyro in Davidson County for many years. He has long believed that he is the reincarnation of 19th-century writer Edward Bellamy (1850-1898). In this lifetime, he wrote a book called Edward Bellamy Writes Again.

Doralice Santana Myers, 39, is from Brazil. Two years ago, she had no idea that Myers existed. Nor did she have any idea who Bellamy was. And, certainly, it never occurred to her that she might be the reincarnation of Bellamy’s wife, Emma Augusta Sanderson, whom he married in 1882.

Today, they believe that they have re-established a relationship started in the 19th century.

In December, the couple married. They plan to live in Brazil. For the moment, though, they’re living in Lexington.

Here’s the story:

During a session with a hypnotist in September 2005, Doralice Myers had a vision - as she walked down a path flanked by trees, she came upon a stranger. The man had a heavy, dark mustache and was dressed in 19th-century fashion with a coat, wide tie and hat.

Although her native language is Portuguese, she knows English well enough to have taught it at the university level. And that is the language the stranger spoke to her in.

“He said he had been with me all my life,” she said. “He said that I should find an author that wrote like him.”

When she asked the man who he was, he said, “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Edward.”

She came out of the trance crying and feeling as if she had lost someone she loved. That night, she went to the “Images” search on Google and began looking for someone named Edward who looked like the man she had seen in her vision.

“His face was very clear to me,” she said. “I wanted to confirm whether that experience was real.”

Seven or eight hours later, she came upon a picture of Edward Bellamy. That was the man.

She read about his novel Looking Backward, which is about a man who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find a utopian world. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies at a time when 50,000 copies was considered a great success and became the third best-selling novel of 19th-century America - after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.

Doralice Myers went out and bought Looking Backward. “At the third or fourth chapter, I thought I had read the book before,” she said.

That was pretty much that for a while. When she began poking around on the Internet a bit more later, she came upon Edward Bellamy Writes Again and Joe Myers’ Web site - reincarnation2002.com. On it, she found out about his belief that he is the reincarnation of Bellamy.

Although she found all that unsettling, she forged ahead. She sent her first e-mail to him in January 2006. They began corresponding by e-mail.

At the time, neither one was married. Doralice Myers had been married and divorced twice. Myers had been married for 40 years to Mary S. Myers, who died in November 2004 at the age of 86.

“It was terribly difficult for me for a while after Mary passed on,” he said.

He had no thoughts of doing anything other than continuing to live the life that he had built for himself here.

And then that e-mail arrived. After they began corresponding, Joe Myers had his own vision. While he was asleep one night, he met a spiritual being “of overpowering beauty” that he believed was Doralice. He woke up believing that she was the reincarnation of Bellamy’s wife and feeling as if he were in love with her. After that, their e-mails became more emotional.

Within two months of their initial contact, Joe Myers proposed to her.

“I couldn’t say, ‘no,’” Doralice Myers said.

“We had never seen each other - not even a picture,” he said.

They freely acknowledge that, from the outside, all this can seem, to put it mildly, unusual. Her two sons - Adonay, 20, and Lucas, 17 - certainly thought so.

“My sons, they said that was not normal,” she said. “They thought I had gone too far with this kind of experience.”

No matter what anyone else thought, Joe and Doralice Myers were comfortable with what they were doing. In June, Joe Myers, who does not speak Portuguese, flew to Brazil on a 180-day tourist visa so they could meet in person.

They decided to get married in the United States and return to Brazil to live. With that in mind, they bought a house in Recife, the city in northeastern Brazil where Doralice Myers has been living. In December, the couple flew to the United States. They married on Dec. 9.

Barbara Lister-Sink, who has been friends with Joe Myers for years, was at the wedding. Lister-Sink is a classical pianist. Joe and Mary Myers regularly came to her concerts and had her to their house for meals.

“I don’t think there was ever a kinder man,” Lister-Sink said.

Once you accept the concept of reincarnation and the idea that many things happen on a spiritual level, there’s nothing preposterous about how he and Doralice got together, she said.

“To me, it was just an extension of everything I knew about Joe and Mary,” Lister-Sink said. “I just wish these people well.”

Peter Perret, a former director of the Winston-Salem Symphony, is also a long-time friend.

“Joe is a very interesting man,” Perret said. “He is passionate about reincarnation - Christian reincarnation - and has a broad following and a vast correspondence. I played my oboe at the funeral of his devoted and devout wife, Mary, a couple of years ago. So I was astonished and delighted when he called me from Recife to ask my help in arranging the music for his remarriage, which I did.”

In addition to the unusual way in which they met, there is the age difference of 45 years. Joe Myers said he thinks that he is in better shape than many men 30 years younger. Partly, that’s because he has taken good care of himself. He exercises regularly, and he and Mary Myers were eating organic foods when few people thought in those terms.

More important, though, is his positive attitude, he said. “Your attitude toward other people has a tremendous amount to do with the health you maintain. Being able to free yourself from criticism and fault-finding and judgment frees your body from dealing with those sorts of things.”

A snag appeared when they returned to Brazil in January. Before he left, one set of officials had told him that he could return on another tourist visa in the new calendar year. But, when they arrived, other officials told him that he couldn’t be issued a new visa until a year after his first one had been issued. They sent him back the same day.

Because he thought he was moving to Brazil, he had essentially closed up his life here. That included donating 600 copies of Mary Myers’ book of poems Interior Dialogue to the Forsyth County Library, which is giving it away at branches.

So he had nowhere in particular to stay. A friend provided him with a travel trailer to live in and a truck to drive. Doralice Myers soon took a six-month sabbatical from her job as an administrator with the city of Recife and joined her husband in Lexington. They plan to go back to Brazil in June.

Joe Myers says he thinks that Brazil will provide more fertile ground for his thoughts about reincarnation and such other topics as Christian socialism.

“For me, it is this fabulous opportunity,” he said.

While they’re here, in his capacity as an engineer he has been overseeing a building project in Lexington. She is writing a book that tells the story of how they came to be together.

Again.