Friends we choose, and family is what we are given, or so the 'realistic' view goes. In my view on reality however, we choose all interactions in our physical life before coming here, because it is part of the plan we make about wanting to experience a certain set of situations in this mortal life. Does this life have a beginning and ending? From our point of view in physical reality most certainly! But once you delve into the concept of reincarnation, things become pretty awesome all of a sudden. And is it real? Canadian psychiatrist Ian Stevenson devoted about 50 years of his life to studying it, documenting some 2500 cases of young children having clear memories of past lives, and in many cases finding the deceased persons they claimed to have been, and matching stuff like known and documented aspects of the deceased person's life, and birthmarks that apparently made comparison possible as well.
But reincarnation guides us into another concept: Dolores Cannon also performed many deep hypnosis sessions with thousands of subjects, guiding them to past and even future lives. From it, the concept of time was totally unraveled, in that separate reincarnations of a given soul can overlap in time, since time is only a human defined concept.