Last night I dreamed of the beach in Haiti. The rolling waves, the smooth, warm sand, turned white beneath the light of a glistening silver moon.

The dream continues to haunt me because on that beach I said good-bye to everything I’d been and welcomed the woman I would become.

Once I was a stay-at-home mom with a big house in the Southern California suburbs. I drove an SUV

that was far too large for carting a five-year-old girl to ballet lessons; I was married to a man I thought was my soul mate.

Then, in the way of a picture-perfect life, everything went to hell and I became a voodoo priestess. When I change lives, I do it right.

I did have a little help from the witness protection program. Although they weren’t the ones who suggested I spend years studying an ancient African religion, travel to Haiti and be initiated, then style myself Priestess Cassandra, owner and operator of a voodoo shop in the French Quarter. No, that was all me.

I chose the name Cassandra because it means “prophet.” Voodoo priestesses are often called on to see the future, but I’d never been the least bit psychic. Despite the name, I still wasn’t.

Voodoo is a fluid religion, adaptive and inclusive. Practitioners believe in magic, zombies, and love charms. I like pretty much everything about it, except one thing.

Their stubborn insistence that there are no accidents.

Me, I have a hard time believing it, because if there are no accidents that means my daughter died for a reason, and I just can’t find one. Believe me, I’ve looked.

I’m not the first person to have trouble with certain tenets of their religion. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe.

In Haiti, on that beach, I committed myself to voodoo wholeheartedly. I had a very good reason.

I planned to raise my daughter from the dead.

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