A Journey Through Time: Lockerbie Bombing, Past Life Death in Germany, and Hans's Past Life Shadow
- Lavavoth
- Jul 28, 2021
- 9 min read
![From Learning to Fly Chapter in version one of Blind Love [During the Madness] | Mixed media | © 2015 by Lavavoth](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/058ba6_bbe99b3a6fbb4d2ca0b28c3ada5186af~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_800,h_1084,al_c,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/058ba6_bbe99b3a6fbb4d2ca0b28c3ada5186af~mv2.png)
I awoke on December 22 to the news of the Lockerbie Bombing with media footage that was so viscerally disturbing, I experienced what I would later come to understand as a panic attack.
The remnants of a life once lived have a way of slipping into the present, unsettling a new existence that should be untouched. I come up against moments that defy explanation—events that don’t belong to me, yet feel as if they do. How can I be marked by something I have no conscious connection to, yet carry it as if I have been there before?
In a previous post, I discussed my early awareness of my past life in Germany and having died in an air raid bombing. This early awakening to my past life occurred while I was vacationing in Sarasota when I was 11 years old. The poem, Untergliechness, creatively sums up the event that occurred back then.
But nothing would prepare me for what I would endure when I found out about Pan Am 103 exploding over Lockerbie Scotland—an event that is also known as the Pan Am Flight 103.
It was late December 1988. I was 15 years old—an adolescent girl working my way into the Orlando goth scene, listening to David Bowie, The Cocteau Twins, and The Smiths. War by U2 was played so often in my cassette player that the tape began to deteriorate. I was getting ready to fly to New Jersey to visit a friend from when I had lived there. She and I had been dancers in the same dance studio.
There was something about the unsuspecting victims on the ground who carried on about their lives with Christmas just around the corner triggered a kind of existential anxiety. This feeling was so severe that I silently unraveled.
Flying has been a part of my life since I was six months old when I had moved to Europe and then to South America. I was seasoned at flying alone and had done so since I was about 9, being sent here and there to visit with family across several continents. So flying from Florida to New Jersey was no big deal. I was excited to see snow again and to visit New York City.
I awoke on December 22 to the news of the Lockerbie Bombing with media footage that was so viscerally disturbing, I experienced what I would later come to understand as a panic attack.
This was my first panic attack. It was such a foreign experience that I simply kept it bottled up until the holidays were over. But as the flight traffic over our house kept reminding me of the Lockerbie air disaster, I silently unraveled. That the plane had exploded and killed hundreds of passengers seemed less dramatic than the 11 deaths that occurred on the ground. None of it made sense. I simply felt an inexplicable connection to the victims on the ground.
It was Hans who offered the clues years later and helped me to understand the origin of my fear.
When I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, my fears would once again become elevated by the air traffic.
But in 1988, my fears became so heightened that I ended up seeing a psychiatrist whose only suggestion was to purchase a nightlight, perhaps assuming that the monsters would keep away from the light. It didn’t help. Nothing helped.
But my irrational fear—this phobia—would ebb and flow depending on circumstance and my proximity to air traffic. When I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, my fears would once again become elevated by the air traffic. It happened again when I bought a home in Burlington, Vermont years later. But it was there that Hans finally came through and helped me to recall my past life in Germany.
The battle that should’ve died lifetimes ago continues its ghostly march into this life. Sweet Hans, my Sky Viking, you’re dynamic and intoxicating.
Pan Am 103 crashing onto the town of Lockerbie opened the traumatic experience of my past life in Germany that I was still piecing together in a strange puzzle I could not yet figure out. It was Hans who finally provided the clues years later and helped me to understand the slow process of unlocking my past life trauma.
This past-life revelation finally helped me to understand why I had been so inexplicably terrified of planes flying over my places of residence in this life. This bizarre phobia awakened a trauma in me that would eventually point to a bomb that had killed me during WWII.
··· INTERMISSION: Journal Entry 03.03.2019 ···
![“Winter with appropriated medals and brooches” (character inspired by Hans) from Chapter 3, Hide & Seek in Blind Love [During the Madness] | mixed media illustration | © 2017 by Lavavoth](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/058ba6_43891696bec8486b86007989fe48d4ae~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_711,h_1069,al_c,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/058ba6_43891696bec8486b86007989fe48d4ae~mv2.png)
We’ve volunteered for the strangest and darkest missions, life after life.
You’re There, and I’m Here
The battle that should’ve ended lifetimes ago continues its ghostly march into this one. Sweet Hans, my Sky Viking—you are dynamic and intoxicating. You are my best friend, my confidant, my protector, my eternal flame. My everything. And still, I contend with the reality of our separation. You’re there, and I’m here. You can sense my every cell from where you stand, while I feel the trace of your ghostly presence—the subtle vibration of your invisible hand stroking my arm.
We’ve volunteered for the strangest and darkest missions, life after life. These shifting costumes of flesh keep the mystery in motion until I wake again in the afterlife. I’m in my mid-40s now, roughly the age I was when I died in 1943.
“It’s not fair that you get to stay 22 while I have to age,” I say from time to time.
“Your skin may age, but your soul is forever 19, darling,” you always reply.
I’ve lived three lives to your one, Hans. But your most recent past life was the darkest and most extraordinary.
![Nyx | Chapter 2, The Oracle's Advice in Blind Love [During the Madness] | graphite on paper + digital illustration | © 2017 by Lavavoth](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/058ba6_2809bf78425d4bc2a4c45128179e0ffc~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_1264,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/058ba6_2809bf78425d4bc2a4c45128179e0ffc~mv2.png)
A fast Returner
Apparently, I was built for deathly trauma. At the end of 1968, I died at 19 in England. I was an undergraduate at Oxford, with pin-straight jet-black hair that reached my waist. Every time I’ve returned, I’ve come back as a woman—always a brunette—though my eye color and ethnic background shift with each incarnation.
In that life, the path ahead had already been mapped out: marriage to a smart, wealthy man, followed by children. I died in a car accident—perhaps out of quiet defiance, perhaps from exhaustion with the cycle of traditional female roles.
Around 1943, it was death by an Allied air raid during the Second World War. I’ve been a fast returner—most recently in 1973. I’ve lived three lives to your one, Hans. But your most recent incarnation was the darkest, and the most extraordinary.
Masking the Truth for Years
!["Hans" from Introduction to Blind Love [During the Madness] | graphite on paper + digital illustration | © 2017 by Lavavoth](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/058ba6_1c624d2f59074b36bf852021ceb9a71a~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_1393,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/058ba6_1c624d2f59074b36bf852021ceb9a71a~mv2.png)
Despite your unwillingness to disclose too quickly who you had been, you’ve always been consistent in describing your physical looks—super blond, blue-eyed—a total heartthrob—the most attractive you’ve ever been in all of your past lives.
You were reluctant to reveal your true identity at first—and who could blame you? In the beginning, you let me call you Magic Man, then Dylan. That name stuck until 2014. You claimed to be British, said you were my boyfriend in England, and that you had died alongside me in the 1968 car accident. You said you were 23 when it happened.
In 2014, you whispered the name “John” in the middle of the night, offering it as the name you’d carried in that life. You maintained the story of your British incarnation until 2015.
Each time I’ve confronted you about it, you always say, “If I had told you sooner, the timing would have been off.” You’ve never rushed your disclosures, but you’ve always been consistent about one thing—your looks. Super blond. Blue-eyed. A total heartthrob. The most attractive you’d ever been in any of your past lives. You were also a heavy smoker and drinker. But how else were you supposed to cope with that life?
War and Its Indelible Mark
You were German, not English. I should’ve known from your obsessive tidiness. “Get to work” is your favorite whip-cracking phrase, the one you use whenever I slack off on house chores. There’s a playful tone when you say it—but your history shadows the words.
I understand why it took you so long to tell me who you were. You had to reveal yourself in fragments, slowly earning my trust by showing me what love without conditions looks like. By the time you shared your true identity, I was already yours.
Unlike me, you survived the war—but it left a mark that never lifted. You still carry that burden from the other side. Together, we process what happened through the tears of that brutal time. I was a civilian in my early 50s, and my death came faster than Blitzkrieg. But the scars crossed over into this life. I was born with the fragments—bits and pieces of memory I never asked for, but cannot ignore.
··· Unlocking My Past ···
The death I suffered in a past life during an Allied air raid in the 1940s jolted back to life in 1988, triggered by footage of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash in Lockerbie. I was 15, unable to make sense of the visceral reaction that overwhelmed me. For years, I dismissed it as an irrational fear—a strange phobia of planes falling from the sky like bombs. It wasn’t until 2010 that I began to understand what it truly was.
Before the War
Before the war, you were meant to attend university and become a researcher. But fate intervened and sent you down another path. While I lived a civilian life as a German woman in my mid 40s or mid 50s, you were pulled into a world of iron crosses and knighthood before your twenties had fully formed. You flew more than a thousand sorties and engaged in hundreds of dogfights.
When it ended, you were captured. You spent years in captivity. You’ve told me that your arrest in 1945 felt like a death—that, in a figurative sense, you ceased to exist at 23. For years, you tried to explain your mythic descent, how you went from superhero to antihero overnight. But how else could it have ended?
It was Easier Not Knowing the Truth
“Thanks for the fallout,” I say to you now and then, trying to make sense of the life you lived. It’s your past that pulls me in, even as I struggle with the truth of who you were. Still, I find myself giving everything—my trust, my heart, my soul—to a man once draped in medals and myth, an Aryan icon from a war-torn world, while the present collapses into a grotesque replay of history. White supremacy no longer hides; it struts openly, unapologetically, and I can’t ignore the parallels.
“At least you were a fighter pilot,” I reason, as if aerial combat absolves anything. You weren’t SS. You didn’t serve in the death squads. Your war unfolded above the earth, not in its trenches or camps. That distance grants a sliver of solace. Still, part of me yearns for the earlier versions of you—Magic Man, Dylan, John—identities woven only through my experience of you, untouched by historical consequence. I resent having to shield you as Hans, but with surviving family in Germany, we both know it’s necessary.
“I’m not coming back after this one,” I tell you, weary from the weight of this world, even though I remain grateful to live in it. Somehow, I’ve stepped into a dream—walking between realities with you, the flawed, luminous soul I’ve loved beyond this life. As a child, I used to wish for something magical. Now, I live inside it.
“How will it end for me this time?” I ask.
“It isn’t life without the element of surprise,” you answer, as always, keeping the mystery close—like a secret only eternity understands.
Will the trauma ever end?
Some days are better than others. The Surfside condo collapse reignited my fear so intensely that I had to go back on anti-anxiety medication. It’s been a month since it happened, and only now am I beginning to feel a semblance of normalcy. I have the drugs to thank for that—again. Dying in an air raid, trapped on the fourth or fifth floor of a building, feeling the structure give way, and carrying the visceral imprint of that collapse into this life—it’s not something I can easily suppress.
Most days, I stay busy. I focus on tasks, tick through to-do lists, try to stay grounded in the life I’m living now. But the ghosts—the ones that circle close, whispering stories they need me to hear, the ones who insist on reminding me of where I’ve been—they’re harder to ignore. Their presence feels cellular, woven into me like a genetic mutation. I’ve had to learn to live with it. To adapt. Because this trauma doesn’t fade. It doesn’t pass. Like the dead who still visit, it lingers—unfinished, unrelenting, and somehow still mine.
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