Reincarnation and Other Comforting (or not) Beliefs

The late Harriet Mann had a deep influence on our lives. Judith and I met her in Cambridge, Mass. in the early 1970s when we were newly married graduate students, and she was eking out a living by running a small boarding house while trying to write a book about psychological types. Not only did Harriet introduce us to several other people who have remained important to us (and who in fact shaped our lives in ways we could never have predicted then), members of Havurat Shalom, a counter-culture Jewish study commune and spiritual center, she also taught us about ourselves and helped us understand each other better - she was a Jungian clinical psychologist.
We remained in close touch with Harriet. She spent a few years in Israel with her baby daughter, and the two of them were a part of our family. After she returned to the US, where it was easier to earn a living and bring up her daughter, we remained in close touch, and even when a long time went by without any actual communication, we always felt in touch - strong love moving in both directions.
In the last twenty or so years of her life, Harriet became so deeply involved with Tibetan Buddhism that she eventually retired, sold her belongings, took vows, and joined a Buddhist monastery in northern India, where she died during a long retreat.
Harriet strongly believed in reincarnation. She thought that people keep being reborn in each other's company in generation after generation, sometimes as spouses, sometimes as parents and children, sometimes as friends - until they finish their karmic business with one another.
I can't say I believe that, but it does "explain" why it is that some people are drawn to one another, while others aren't, why it is that some people you've known for decades remain simply people you run into now and then while other people immediately become part of your life. Perhaps it even explains love at first sight.
Okay, maybe it doesn't explain that quality of relationships, but it does express their depth in symbolic faction. Harriet may not have been my mother or sister in an earlier incarnation, but the kind of closeness I felt for her is like the kind of closeness I would have felt for someone who had been close to me in another life.
Obviously this is connected with Asher's entry into our lives and his exit from them. He had some karmic function in the life of every person he touched, and he fulfilled that karmic function, in part by dying young and leaving us so bereft and sad.
Perhaps this thought is comforting. In my next life I will be with Asher again. I say "perhaps," because "I" won't know it then any more than I know now about lives that my soul my have lived in the past. The only evidence for such a belief that I am aware of is the strong wish for it to be true.
Ethically speaking, however, the idea is important, because it means that we have to take very seriously the people we encounter in life, because, if you think that way, nothing is casual or meaningless.