What are the types of situations that I have encountered? I had a life threatening illness at age 14 that left me with after effects that I addressed through dietary change and psychology because doctors didn’t have answers. I became a Bahá’í and met the love of my life at age 19. Being a Bahá’í inspired me to live the best life I possibly could, to listen to that still small voice within me and to value myself as a human being even when I had lost confidence and felt worthless. I married my husband, American actor, Philip O’Brien, once in 1965, divorced him in 1987, and married him again in 1998. I wouldn’t have married him once never mind twice if he hadn’t really been the love of my life! I had five children, four live births, and tragically one baby who died at four weeks, and one miscarriage. I raised three children to adulthood.

I inherited money from my mother and grandmother, first at age 21 and in various amounts for about 10 years after that. Then in 1979 I received approximately a million and a half dollars as a windfall from an investment that suddenly became much more valuable than it had been. Ten years later I was on a slippery slope of financial loss until I eventually lost my home. Shortly thereafter I experienced the deaths of three of the closest men in my life, my eldest son who committed suicide, my husband who died of cancer, and my father who died in his 91st year from pneumonia following Parkinson’s disease. I didn’t know how or if I would come back from all that or even if I cared that I did. I didn’t then. I do now. I studied health and healing, counselling and psychotherapy, and after not having ever needed to work for a living before, I trained as a counsellor and began to build a part-time private practice in counselling, showing that it can be done even later on in life. Later I got my Masters Degree as a psychotherapist. I have lived in four different cultures and six American states, which means that I don’t have a regional accent that people can identify. That adds to a sense of mystery about me that I enjoy.

That is just an appetiser, a kind of taster of what is ahead of you in my story. There is much, much more to it than that. I hope you enjoy and benefit from reading my story. I love both the highs and the lows of my life. I have learned so much, and have been privileged to experience such a wide variety of events and emotions that even the enormous pain and despair of some of the hard times have opened in me greater depth and understanding. Whatever we do, life passes by in an instant, and what then? Therefore I suggest that one of the most important things that we can ever do in our life is to decide how we are going to live, what we want to do, and how we would like to be remembered, so that despite our inevitable mistakes, we may make choices that reflect our values and make our life meaningful to us.

Jane O’Brien