Afterlives of the Rich and Famous

Introduction
This book is about current events in the lives of celebrities who’ve passed away, as reported by a “resident expert” on the Other Side whose name is Francine. Two obvious questions probably leap to mind: “Who’s Francine?” and “Since these celebrities are dead, doesn’t that pretty much mean they’re doing nothing?” Believe me, if I didn’t have good answers to those questions, this book wouldn’t exist.
As for the first question, Francine is my Spirit Guide. Like your Spirit Guide and everyone else’s, she’s been with me all my life. You’ll find a complete definition of Spirit Guides and what they do for us in the glossary, so for now I’ll just tell you about her.
I was born psychic, with an inherited ability to “tune in” to the spirit world of the Other Side. At first, starting when I was five years old, I was only clairvoyant—that is, able to see spirits (and I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, believe me). But then one night when I was eight, I discovered with an equal lack of glee that I was also clairaudient, or able to hear spirits, as well, when a chirpy, high-pitched voice came crashing into my bedroom and announced, “Don’t be afraid, Sylvia. I come from God.”
My beloved, brilliantly psychic Grandmother Ada explained, after prying her terrified granddaughter from around her legs, that the voice was simply my Spirit Guide introducing herself, that we all have Spirit Guides, and that they’re around to gently help us navigate our way through these brief trips away from Home. And so, tentatively at first, I began communicating with Francine. Throughout our sixty-five years together she’s never lied to me, never betrayed me, and never steered me wrong (I took care of that on my own). She’s also been a fascinating, invaluable source of volumes of information about the afterlife.
It’s a requirement of all Spirit Guides that they’ve incarnated— otherwise, our problems, worries, and missteps on earth would be incomprehensibly trivial to them, living as they do in the blissful perfection of the Other Side and seeing everything that happens through the perspective of eternity. Francine (who introduced herself as Ilena, which I apparently didn’t like and promptly changed to Francine) only chose to incarnate once, as an Aztec-Incan woman who died at the age of nineteen, in 1520, saving her infant daughter from a spear during the Spanish invasion of Colombia. She’s accompanying me through this lifetime as a result of a mutual agreement we made at Home, before I decided to come to earth again for the fifty-secondth and last time.
From the book AFTERLIVES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS by Sylvia Browne. Copyright © 2011 by Sylvia Browne. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.