Will happen one day they'll be my we don't have any side effects victims of a shooting in Canada last year filed a class action lawsuit against Smith and Wesson the American maker of the pistol used in the rampage 2 people died and 13 were injured when a man opened fire in a busy street in Toronto the class action alleges that the gun maker should have had safety features such as fingerprint recognition to prevent it being used by an authorized users seeking $115000000.00 in damages. You're listening to the world news from the b.b.c. Japan's Foreign Ministry has demanded the early release of 5 fishermen detained by Russian authorities on Tuesday officials said the men and their boats were seized by Russian border guards and taken to the island of could not surely which is under Russian control Japanese media reported that the men had been fishing for octopuses under an accord between the 2 countries but were intercepted over alleged discrepancies between the volume of their catch and what they had recorded in their boats log books President Trump has described impeachment proceedings against him as an attempt to coupe by Democrats accusing them of declaring war on America's democracy in a 6 page letter to the Democratic Party's speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Mr Trump compared his treatment to that of the victims of the 17th century Salem Witch Trials Peter Bode has more the president has repeatedly refused to for example allow some of his senior aides in the White House to be witnesses and to be cross-examined to allow relevant documents to release from the White House so it has been very one sided so far but it seems by the president's choice and this letter really is quite angry in turn in fact a lot of people here Mike of described it as a letter on White House headed paper that simply reads like a collection of his angry tweets. A fight at a prison in Panama left at least 12 inmates dead and several others injured police said they had confiscated 8 guns when they managed to enter the jail and more evidence has been found off the Mexican coast that could confirm how the Spanish conquered Mexico 500 years ago after a 2 year search of the ocean floor off the coast of their crew state Mexican and u.s. Archaeologists have found 2 on ship anchors which they believe belong to Spanish ships. B.b.c. News. Hello I'm Gerri and this is Outlook the home of personal stories on the b.b.c. World Service a little later we'll be meeting a Costa Rican toucan who's become a celebrity because of his prosthetic beak and we'll hear from the man who cast than. You could feel that the animal understood what we were doing you could pick him up measure him and put on the prosthetic and he would start to sing. How do you interpret that I felt that the animal was saying thank you. Gracie and Ronald coming up a little later but 1st as when heading towards Christmas when Christians celebrate the birth of the American child we thought this story might intrigue you it concerns a Canadian family a Catholic family who suffered a terrible tragedy when they were involved in a car crash it was July 1955 the glance welcome to visit relatives some distance away in the car with mom dad and their 3 daughters the youngest of whom Gail was just 3 months old a drunk driver crashed into them everyone was injured Gail very badly and she died a few weeks later in hospital a mother's grief was unbearable and the doctor suggested having another child might ease the pain she embraced the idea completely she'd been so distraught almost in a kind of mad grief at the time my mother felt that this might be a way for God to answer her prayers she'd been praying and praying and praying for her baby to get better and her baby a died and this somehow opened up a new possibility which is that her baby could come back to her and she got pregnant very soon after completely convinced that this was how God had intend. Had all along to answer her prayers so your mom decided she would pray and not just pray but pray for the baby she'd last to be born again effectively it wasn't just that she wanted to be pregnant again have another baby she wanted Gail pack. Exactly right I don't think she was hankering after a new baby she was she just wanted that baby back again and she did get pregnant very very soon after she got pregnant very soon after and she was immediately passionately convinced that Gail was coming back that Gail was literally in her stomach growing again and this remarkable thing I mean the pregnancy I think she even sees a doctor during that pregnancy does she have things just so smooth uneasy a monk goes into labor and appears to soften no pain she in fact doesn't go into labor My mother was alone in the hospital checked in they checked her over and were shocked to find that she was fully dilated and according to her she hadn't experienced a twinge of discomfort or pain in fact she laughed when they said you're fully dilated. And a little go was I mean Mom was right it was going to be a go. And a little girl who looked a lot like Gail looked at dentical to Gail according to my mother the exact same birth weight dark haired all the things that my mother in fact told the doctor she was expecting the same face and she called a little go she called the little girl Dell it was it was Gail she already had a name and that baby. I was you that baby was me. When you was growing up what were you told about who us well from my earliest memory I knew about the accident in the family album there were pictures of the front of the smashed car there was a picture of my parents on crutches and casts and my mother had a terrible gash on her face and she still had the very prominent scar across her cheek I knew about that and there was also a photograph on top of the t.v. Set a lovely colorized photo of my father with a baby on his knee and on that photograph on the upper right side was Gail go land my earliest memory of my mother going through the story and telling me the story in a way that really sank into me and made sense to me I would say I was about 4 years old and I think it was the 1st time I understood that according to her my birth had been a miracle that I had died presumably spent you know 9 months in heaven and then had come back down. And this was a miracle that God had performed for my mother because she had prayed so fervently and when a story sank in when you were about 4 years old did you interpret it as thinking what if that was a miracle than I am a miracle child yes is the short answer my 1st real emotional response was a kind of euphoric sense of happiness and pride and a kind of humility as well that I had a sense that I had been chosen I felt incredibly lucky like wow this is so special so amazing and the most important person in my life was the one who saw me this way so this created a sort of a perfect bond between you and you'll you have miracle Yeah I mean 1st of all I I really cancelled out one of the most horrible things a person can go through I think which is to lose their child I think my birth took that pain away for a while and yeah I had 2 other sisters but I had the sense that I was her favorite I was the special one it was a kind of blessid feeling bless it in a purely religious sense as well as a sort of metaphorical sense no I don't think I was making much of a separation we had an in chance Lee Catholic childhood home I had braced the Magical Thinking of that form of Catholicism completely My mother had been educated in a residential convent school her mother had died young and she'd been raised by nuns. I believed passionately myself in the religion in God in the blessid Virgin Mary my favorite the angels and the Saints and everything but I believed in my mother every bit as much as I believed in religion certainly my mother telling me this was the gospel truth and you told her that you wanted to be a nun when you grew up it was watching an old movie called The Song of Bernadette on a Sunday afternoon we used to gather around the t.v. Set and it made a huge impression on me it was a young girl to whom the blessid Virgin Mary was appearing because she was somehow special she was somehow annoying to it by God she had some role that she was meant to play in life and of course as she got older Bernadette became a nun and so she was my 1st role model not only did I feel that I must be meant to be a nun in other words not to have a normal life but also you know if possible to do something that would impact the whole world for the better this sense that you had that you were destined to be important to the world in some way and also so special to you will. How did that go down with you older sisters. I don't think it went down that well on the one hand they also assumed that I was the other gale on the other hand they looked at me sideways I'm sure wondering why I didn't strike them as more special and certainly my 2nd sister just a couple of years older than me I felt from a very early age she just hated me we haven't mentioned jewel dad did he also write as though you were the author Gail that you were the baby reborn I have no memory of that because he was very distant he worked horribly long hours my mother ran the phone for the family she was the boss in the family and she kept us all you know on the straight and narrow after the age of 4 when you sort of really got to grips with this idea that you were you Gayle reborn What was your relationship with the other Gail Well I was the other Gail I was the other Gail after the accident she was Gail before the accident I was kill after the oxygen you feel yourself as being the other Gale I did initially and I felt I'd been in a car accident and it's it was seemed obvious to me that I obviously had been thrown against the dashboard of a car and spent you know weeks alone in a strange hospital and and and eventually died but it didn't last didn't last beyond when I did things don't change I think as I became increasingly aware that I wasn't perfect I became aware that I was socially anxious I didn't feel I was made of the right stuff to become famous and very important saint I somehow felt that I couldn't live up to the expectations that I thought were kind of reasonable to expect from someone who had been brought back from the dead there had to be some purpose in my. Life and I didn't I didn't feel up to it a worry if that size for a little cone must be quite enormous that somehow you feel you failing at your divine Tosk in bed at night in the dark I worried sick I mean other children might be afraid of the bogeyman or monsters under the bed or ghosts I was worried that the pleasant Virgin Mary was going to appear in the corner of my bedroom and ask me at the time it was early sixty's asked me to go and convert Russia from atheism you know to to convert Russia back to the Catholic Church somehow in my head that was probably job one at that time I had a terrible fear of apparitions that would change my life forever that I would have to become the person I was meant to be and to the other Gail fit into this sort of ghostly these apparitions she did eventually my strongest memory of beginning to see her as a ghost specifically it was around the time I was 12 years old through the summer I would go to mass daily by myself and hang on every word I was losing myself in that kind of religious reality and maybe you know it was because adult hood was looming and I knew there would be trouble but what was happening around that time as I began to imagine the other Gail as a ghost living under my bed and I began to imagine that she was my secret sister she was my kind of doppelganger but living in a parallel life in a different dimension she was a year older than me because that made sense to me she was an inch taller but she was needy she was under the bed she wanted to stay under the bed and only I knew she was there and I used to go through the store catalogs picking out clothes for her because she. Needed a wardrobe so I guess in some ways I was also treating her as a living Dall you know at that point it was obvious that there'd been a big rupture and I was no longer the continuation of the baby Gail was psychological impact at that haven't you do you think you can but I think in my bones I felt haunted and feeling haunted the idea that somebody is there but not there it's like you're seeking something out of the corner I that others aren't seeing and you're questioning yourself about whether you really saw it or not that feeling of self-doubt and feeling alone in the thought of that feeling and I know in that you felt different Yeah did you speak to him about this no not a word we slowly stopped talking openly by the time I was starting school no one really talked about the other Gail and I didn't you said it a bit earlier that you could sense that all what was looming and that there would be trouble and indeed people to hit and there was trouble and you got interested in boys which wasn't great if you want to be a nun and he got you fast boyfriend and your mum caught you casing in the car one day things didn't go well now that's when I realised even though we hadn't been talking that this had never gone away she could be heard and intimidating and terrifying anyway when she lost her temper she was pretty tough but the anger and I walked in the door and she was standing there waiting for me and the 1st thing that came out of her mouth was and we thought you were going to be a nun It was a horrible horrible moment it was like. Everything I could possibly have done to screw up my life and my destiny given to me after all by gawd I had ruined everything worse I had taken for granted this gift and I through a kind of a terrible weakness of the flesh sacrifice it Innes in a way I was angry at her because I knew my girl friends were all making out in cars and I knew on some level this was normal behavior but at at the same time when I went upstairs and was again crying in my room I also felt that this wasn't the way my life was supposed to go and I felt in that moment that irreparable damage had been done to my relationship with my mother that my mother didn't love me the way she had can and rolled at university where she studied theology and philosophy of religion and she began for the 1st time to really analyze the Bible I took a course that required me to read the 4 gospels side by side I mean one after the other it started off as surprising and intriguing the degree to which the 4 gospels had different styles and often had slightly different content but what really hit me and it unfortunately only hit me hard like you know a mallet on my head on Christmas Eve is that the nativity story only occurs in 2 of the 4 gospels and they their only overlap up to a point somehow it suddenly hit me that these 2 stories that Christmas is based on was probably based on a kind of mythology and probably wasn't actually true and I'm sure that this is something that's vaguely occurred to all kinds of people in a fairly relaxed way over the course of their life but in my case it was completely devastating and I think probably because if the miracle birth of Jesus wasn't really true. Why would my story be true. How did that then change your view of yourself and the other Gail you know I started thinking about the other Gail differently again I never questioned my mother saying that she hadn't had labor pain and that we looked identical I never really questioned those facts they seemed like facts to me it was what you did with those facts and once I started university I started slowly thinking that in fact I had just been reincarnated and I think that was in the 7 late seventy's where Hollywood was having some fun with films about reincarnation especially in horror movies you know I started thinking that I had been reincarnated from my sister I use this as my excuse to myself as to why it took me so long to get my driver's license because I was the reincarnation of a car accident victim and somehow that secularized my story in a way that took a lot of pressure off me it's not my fault I was reincarnated I felt at that point I was able to go back to a sense that there was a continuity between the 2 of us that we were the same person in a way but not in some heavy miraculous a way so it worked for me for a while and now you're able to go about life without being perfect you're able to break up with boyfriends and get married and well sadly you would think because you're right I did feel I could have a normal life which felt wonderful I mean getting engaged and eventually getting married felt amazing it felt normal in the most beautiful way but the problem was that I still was really pretty obsessed about how my mother felt about me how with that impacts on you and your behavior and you know your sense of self it's switched from feeling that I had to be a nun or had to be a saint to feeling that I had to excel. Academically and that's what happened I became sickly obsessed with my grades in university with my academic performance and she was so proud of me I felt she was so proud of me in fact for the 1st time in such a long time since I'd been a child I felt enormous approval as I brought home scholarships and you and you were to Greece and so on and you started on a doctorate but then things start to go so well in your marriage you have a somebody breaks down and you give up your doctorate and suddenly there you are again you are. In fact cause you failed in the eyes of your mum and had a very difficult conversation with her around that time I think yeah I was sitting at the kitchen table and she she finally said maybe I made a mistake naming you Gayle and I honestly it was like. It was like a stroke in my head the visceral panic that I felt when she said that because all I think I could feel was that I hadn't lived up to my name somehow that I'd let her down so profoundly and it was a nightmare it wasn't until much later that you thought well maybe. Maybe that's not exactly what she meant Yeah that was really in the days that she was near death and just after she died that I I noticed that the photograph of the other Gail as a baby on my father's knee was still up on the wall and I was staring at it and I saw in the upper right corner where it said Gail gland I saw this little line between the Gail and the Glanton I took it down from the wall and took the photograph out of it some frame and I saw something that I'd never seen before because it was hidden by the frame and what I saw was the middle name of the other Gail which was Marie mind middle name was Bernice I felt in that moment I felt that I was being ripped into. And it was an incredibly searing and beautiful kind of pain if felt amazing I felt for the 1st time in my life that my mother did see me as my own person and in her mind at some point in her life she was thinking of the other gale as Gail Marie when you say felt ripped into you why why Ripton to you what was so significant about your mom inserting the middle name when I saw Gail Marie I suddenly felt that she had renamed the other Gail it was like being Siamese twins separated for the 1st time it felt like somebody had finally cut us in 2 and let us be 2 separate genuinely 2 separate people suddenly I felt that my mother had actually loved me as well all along but this was just off the sheet die it was the day after she died well you have been able to to have some kind of reconciliation with your mum some coming together after this you know terrible fording out in the couple of years before she died especially when she was big had cancer we leaned foreheads to each other for the very 1st time I told her I loved her for the very 1st time she told me she loved me and the feeling of mutual acceptance was complete and then I went with her to all or chemo appointments and I became I became