The Thousands of Conversations

People did not come only with questions. Above all, they came with a longing to be heard.

IF — What if…?

Listening Before Speaking

My search never remained mine alone. Over the years, thousands of people told me about their questions, sorrow, dreams and the coincidences they could not forget. Often, they did not come for a grand answer. They wanted someone who would listen first.

I discovered that attention is sometimes more important than explanation. When a person can tell their story without immediate judgement, they sometimes hear for themselves what lives deep inside. My numerological calculations often opened a conversation, but the person behind the figures always remained the most important thing. Books and other people’s testimonies also helped me examine my own path.

I read about Edgar Cayce, Jozef Rulof, Robbert van den Broeke, Giorgio Dibitonto and Pier Giorgio Caria. I did not accept everything without question. I listened to what their stories awakened within me, while keeping my own experience as my starting point. IF wants to offer that same attitude to the reader.

A story does not have to become yours to touch something within you. You may take one thought with you, let another rest and return to it later. Free thinking also means that each person keeps their own pace. Looking back today, I realise there were not merely a few hundred conversations.

Over the years, there must have been thousands. Conversations about numerology. About spirituality.

The Person Behind the Number

About the strange combinations of circumstances we sometimes call coincidence. About loss. About grief. About love.

And very often about Marco. Those conversations almost never took place in our home. Dorina did not want people coming to the house for spiritual conversations or numerology. She herself does not believe in spirituality.

She also preferred not to speak openly about Marco. I do not fully know why that was so difficult for her. And because I do not know, I do not want to attribute reasons or feelings to her that she never expressed herself. Two parents can lose the same child and yet deal with their grief in completely different ways.

I needed to speak. To share memories. To try to understand what had happened. Dorina did not seek that public openness.

Where I needed words, she preferred silence. Where I sought contact with people asking similar questions, she kept her feelings to herself. Neither way makes the loss any smaller. But the difference between us was sometimes difficult.

For me, speaking about Marco was not an attempt to remain in the past. It was a way to keep him close. Marco and I had shared so much. Our interest in technology.

Our work together. Our dreams. Our endless conversations and discussions.

Grief Searching for Words

We could disagree wholeheartedly. But it was often precisely those discussions that gave rise to our best ideas. After his death, all of that suddenly fell away. There was no longer anyone I could talk to in quite the same way.

No one who understood exactly which dreams we had cherished together and how many years of our lives had become woven into them. Perhaps that is why I kept seeking contact in other ways. Because these conversations could not take place at home, I had them elsewhere. During spiritual activities.

At gatherings. In cafés. On walks. On the telephone.

And later, increasingly, through the internet. WhatsApp became an important way to communicate with people. Some conversations began with a single short message. Before I knew it, however, people were telling me their entire life story.

Sometimes someone wrote in the middle of the night. Someone in pain. Someone feeling alone. Or someone who did not dare say anywhere else what was truly troubling them.

Many contacts also arose through a website where I spoke about Marco. I told of his life. Our work together. His dreams.

But also his death and the questions I was left with as a father. Over the years, I also shared hundreds of photographs and videos of Marco and our family on different social media platforms.

The Experiences of Others

To some people, perhaps they were simply images. To me, they were fragments of a life. A smile. A journey.

A celebration. A moment at work. A memory of who Marco really was. I did it for one very simple reason:

I did not want him to be forgotten. I did not want his whole life reduced to its final day. Knowing only how Marco died does not yet mean knowing who he was. He was a son.

A father. A brother. A friend. An entrepreneur.

A person full of ideas and enthusiasm. Someone who could laugh, dream, argue and inspire others. By sharing his photographs, videos and story, I tried to keep all those sides of him alive. The digital world therefore became far more than a technical tool to me.

It became a place of remembrance. A place where I could keep telling people about Marco. And at the same time, a place where people from everywhere came to me with their own stories. Many of those conversations began with numerology.

Someone sent me a date of birth. Someone else spoke of numbers that kept recurring in their life. Another person tried to find meaning in an event they could not explain. Over the years, I made numerological calculations or analyses for hundreds of people.

I never asked for any payment.

Edgar Cayce

Not once. I did it because I wanted to help people think about their lives. The figures were often only the beginning. They opened a door.

But behind that door there was always a person. A person with questions. With sorrow. With hope.

With fears. And with a story that wanted to be heard. Alongside those personal conversations, I took part in hundreds of spiritual activities over the years and organised many myself. Through them, I met people from very different backgrounds and beliefs.

Some were deeply religious. Others doubted everything. Others were mainly curious. I never thought it necessary for someone to believe the same things as I did.

I did not want to convince anyone. I wanted to understand. And I wanted to make room for questions that often find little space in everyday life. What moved me again and again was the trust people placed in me.

Sometimes they told me things they had never shared with anyone before. Grief that had remained hidden for years. Fears they did not dare voice to their own families. Experiences for which they feared being judged or laughed at.

I have always regarded that trust as a special privilege. The personal stories people entrusted to me are not mine to tell others. Their names. Their secrets.

Their pain. Those remain with me.

Jozef Rulof and Other Voices

What I may share are the lessons all those encounters taught me. I never claimed to hold the truth. On the contrary. I saw myself as someone walking beside another person for a short distance.

And, thinking of Dorina, I am not writing because she should experience things the same way I do. I write because I hope she may understand more clearly what has been going on inside me all these years. Why I kept speaking about Marco. Why I kept sharing his photographs and videos.

Why I sought contact with so many people. Why numerology and spirituality became so important to me. And why I felt that Marco’s story had to keep being told. Perhaps this book can reach her in a way that a website, a WhatsApp message or a social media post never could.

Perhaps between these lines she will recognise something again of the bond Marco and I shared. Of our common interests. Our collaboration. Our discussions.

Our dreams. And the enormous silence left within me after his death. The thousands of conversations I later had with others could not fill that silence. But they meant I did not remain entirely alone within it.

They taught me to be humbler. More patient. More careful in my judgement.

Keeping My Own Path

And more sensitive to the invisible struggle each person may carry. Above all, they confirmed a truth in which I have always believed: every person needs someone at least once in their life who listens not only with their ears… but above all with their heart. The page on Edgar Cayce opens a reading path around his readings and the spiritual subjects associated with them. For this book, what matters most is the opportunity to compare: how do different traditions speak of consciousness, dreams and the meaning of a life?

The material on Cayce does not establish what caused my own experiences. In Jozef Rulof’s work, questions of the afterlife, the soul, and cause and effect come together. Our page also contains the necessary critical context for his work. My own starting point remains the equal worth of all people.

I do not accept, as an explanation of their suffering, an account that makes victims guilty of the injustice done to them. The page on Robbert van den Broeke places his own story alongside critical sources. Its connection with this book lies in the questions testimonies can raise. Learning about a story is a different step from independently establishing a supernatural explanation.

For Giorgio Dibitonto, the story Angeli in astronave takes centre stage. It offers a reading path in which a contact account acquires religious and spiritual meaning.

Freedom for Every Reader

Alongside my memory of Liège, this creates a comparison between experiences and the language narrators use to try to understand them. The pages on Pier Giorgio Caria and the Amicizia case collect contributions about ufology, contact accounts and spirituality. They can help us read different testimonies side by side. None of those accounts determines, after the fact, what I saw above Liège.

Even when an explanation remains open, we can pay attention to the people telling their stories. I want to give the reader the same room I need myself. A thought may be explored, valued, doubted or set aside. Wonder obliges no one to agree.

Critical questions need not diminish a narrator’s human dignity. My own measure remains how a thought works in life. Does it help me listen more carefully? Does it make me more sensitive to another person’s pain?

Does it leave room for freedom and responsibility? At that point, the different reading paths meet the personal journey I describe in this book. A personal search can make room for the stories and beliefs of others. That is why different authors, speakers and witnesses have received their own pages on the website.

They form a collection to explore further. That does not mean that each of them explains my experience or that I adopt every statement they make. Their relationship to my own story is mainly thematic. Questions about consciousness and survival connect with my memories and my longing for Marco.

Testimonies about unknown phenomena offer another setting in which to think about Liège. But my memory remains my memory, and another author’s conclusion remains their conclusion.