My wife's death and, later, a heartening incident

[Posts: 4182Joined: 20 Jan 2006, 11:28Location: The Ainsty of York]

I love Bamburgh and Seahouses, also Holy Island. I spent a few wonderful days there around 5 years ago.

A lovely area indeed. Did you visit Craster? Its kippers are famous though not a breakfast I'd choose

The ferry to the wildlife sanctuary of the Farne Islands sails from Seahouses. Vicious Terns and languid Seals

[Posts: 484Joined: 30 Oct 2011, 10:43Location: North Yorkshire]

Hi Drone,

Yes, visited Craster harbour and found it particularly smelly at that time. The kippers we brought home were very good, though. We took a boat trip out to the Farnes and actually managed to get onto one of the islands ( guide escorted though, and quite right). I agree about the terns, one swooped down and became in one elderly ladies hairnet - quite funny to watch but a little terrifying for her! Would love to go back before I get too immobile, though.

[Posts: 484Joined: 30 Oct 2011, 10:43Location: North Yorkshire]

Oops, sorry. Missed out the word 'entangled' in the ladies hairnet sentence. I'm sure I typed it, but it hasn't appeared.

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

My poor old mum was such a nervous wreck of a woman [not helped by having a much longed for only child reach adolescence just when the swinging sixties happened and, in this case a life of hippiedom called] so I would never have told her of my woes and expected support from her had she still been alive at the time. But, what the owl represented in a way was the love that my parents had had for me which, even though they were long since departed was never going to go away, because it isn't something that can ever be destroyed. On the subject of poetry a poetry loving friend died suddenly and I was left most of his poetry books. One poem in particual caught my eye [it had been bookmarked at some time; possibly years ago], and it was one of Emily Dickinsons.
You left me, sweet, two legacies,-
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea
Between eternity and time
Your consciousness and me.

Seemed to sum it up pretty well what I was feeling.He was an Edinburgh man. Good stuff, poetry! We're in Bamburgh for a couple of weeks in August, Grimes. Feel free to travel down for a day and walk on the beach with us.

That's a very kind invitation to a faceless, old geezer, moehat, but though I'm a mere 71 going on 72, I have to walk at the pace of a very, very old man. So, walking in company is, alas, a no-no. It's a respiration problem following a heart op. The angiogram they used to try and find the problem probe got stuck, so I asked them to turn it in. Gnough's gnough. Sad thing is, I feel like an olympic athlete in front of the computer.

I liked this poem of Emily Dickinson on the theme of Hope:

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I said to my wife, while she was in the semi-coma, when you have hope, you have the whole universe in the palm of your hand. I think she interpreted it preponderantly as referring to this life, but the other day, while reading the Divine Office (Psalms), when I came upon the word, 'hope', I saw a kind of brightness in my mind's eye, and her telling me, though without words, that I'd been spot on about that. this'll all be another lunatic flight of fancy to some folk (Hi Ginge!), I expect, but, well, we all have our own way to follow and reach our best goal, if we can?

Another item on hope, a brilliant anecdote, was that purported to have been told to Charles Colson by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

http://www.incommunion.org/2005/08/06/t ... the-cross/

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

Thank you for your kind condolences, Drone. Also, the poetry. Indeed, you have the soul of a poet. Are you Irish by any chance? .

I'm a part-Irish Quadroon actually My maternal grandmother came from Birr,Offaly and my paternal grandfather from Arima, Trinidad. This once-sceptred isle beckoned both in the 1920s

'Real men read poetry and listen to string quartets'. A truism if ever there were one

Pastoral, pantheistic, perhaps sometimes overly-romantic and cloying poetry is my thing

A pub in Tralee, a street table, a pint of perfect porter, a dog-eared and foxed Collected Poems Of WB Yeats: a somewhat ostentatious, but treasured memory.

You're never alone with a book

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

"You're never alone with a book" quod he*. Aaah, the "realms of gold..." Wasn't that how Keats described it? Strange how, when we read a book, usually our imagination is more richly evocative than any film could be.

*Love that phrase, in The Ancient Mariner.

Well, I think, ethnically, I can beat you in the exotica stakes, Drone: I believe I'm an octaroon. Maybe even a hexadecameroon!!! Part Indian, part French, part Portuguese, part Irish, quarter Scotch and half Welsh, plus Scandinavian and possibly Spanish, further back.

As far as that famous poem of Yeats goes, Drone, as with most pop songs I remember from the forties to the sixties - don't know any since then - gone downhill since the golden age - I tend to quote/sing a garbled version of just the first line or two. My version goes: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and there, a hut of clay and wattle make." Quite an abridged version and its only the intro.

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

I love the 'nutty' names of some of the Irish race courses:

Fairyhouse! Leopardstown! To a lesser extent, as we're familiar with it in other contexts, Cork. And perhaps one or two others.

I don't know if any of you have read Michael Lewis' books on the financial villainy initiated on Wall street, but he's a literary genius, as well as a very, very astute bond-market maven.

The introductory chapter of Liar's Poker reads like the showdown in High Noon - on steroids. But he's written a book called Boomerang, in which he visits various European countries to find out how they've been dealing with it all.

The bloke he employed to drive him around Ireland, pointed to a circle of stones, and told him that it was a fairy ring. Michael asked him if people really believed in fairies, to which he replied, 'Not really', or words to that effect. But he said they wouldn't move them, just the same, if they wanted to build there, for instance(!!!!)

As Michael put it, it seemed rational enough when you consider that there'd be no upside to not believing in them. But apparently it' not just the wild Irish who still harbour inklings of a fairy world around us.

In one of the Scandinavian countries, before selling a plot of land, again let's say, for building, the vendor must produce an affidavit to the effect that there are no trolls in current occupancy. They use some other circumlocution, not the actual word, 'troll'. And they're supposed to be a hard-headed lot, not prone to riotous fights of fancy.

[Posts: 19Joined: 16 Dec 2009, 16:46Location: Alicante, Spain.]

Grimes, I'm extremely sad to read of your wife passing away, it's difficult to know really what to say to be honest with.

We used to speak often you and I years ago (I'm Slippy Blue by the way) and we always had a bit of banter going on if you rememeber those days, when Gamble of course was holding court!

Anyway, I hardly ever pop in here now but read your terrible news and just wanted to send my best wishes to you and your family. You were always one of the good guys on here.

Slippy

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

Thank you for your condolences, Slippy. I feel Anthea's loss more heavily each day, but this and one or two other forums raise my spirits.

Great to see you're back in the fold, the craic was good, wasn't it? I'd been wondering lately what had happened to you. And you have a brother, too, I remember, whose girlfriend took a fancy to that cocky young West Ham goalkeeper - Mervyn something, I think, and used to launder his strip for him.

They all tend to look cocky though. I remember Arsenal's Jack Kelsey in the fifites, a little pip-squeak by 'goalie' standards - always chewing gum.

How've you been keeping? Still wheeling and dealing with real estate in Spain? Your marriage to the Scottish lass wasn't going too well, if I remember correctly, and your mention of the Brazilian girl in Tottenham Court road wouldn't have gone down too well. I fear the worst, I'm afraid.

[Posts: 5256Joined: 31 Aug 2007, 23:42Location: derby]

I'm wondering if that stuff about trolls was mentioned in the film Trollhunter [which was great fun, by the way]. It's good to get a bit of chat going in the lounge again, albeit for the saddest of reasons. I've got a 'little sadness' in my life at the moment and, I have to say it's internet chums that cheer me up more than anything.

[Posts: 484Joined: 30 Oct 2011, 10:43Location: North Yorkshire]

Sorry about your 'little sadness' Moe, hope it all works out to the good for you.
I agree about the lounge thing, if I'm a bit down I have a good go on the internet (not that I'm very good with it) but I do have a try.

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

Same, here, moehat. What reetlass said.

Sometimes, it's more difficult to keep a hold of the perspective of eternity, and the advice that 'Everything happens for the best' isn't so easy to take on board.

Re the harbinger, psychic, supernatural business, first, I was fascinated at some details my sister gave me concerning an incident that had happened to her. My mother had told me that my sister, who was very ill at the time, spending much of her time in bed, woke up at about 3.00 am and saw our older brother, Barry, standing by her bedside for a while, just looking at her.

Later, I asked Anna, my sister about it, and she confirmed it, without my remembering her giving any further details, except that he was looking at her as if to encourage her.

Then the other day, I was speaking to Anna on the phone - she and her family and my mother, have been living in Perth, Australia for a long time, now - and she opened up about it quite freely. I think she is very lacking in imagination. You couldn't meet a more stolid, phlegmatic person,and her religious beliefs are as enigmatic as are those of all the rest of my family.

Anyway, she said that Barry, aka Brother Bung, was so close to her, she could have reached across and touched him. And he was solid, not like a ghost. Then suddenly, he began to fade, so that she could see through him until he disappeared all together. He was smiling at her, encouragingly. He was very stolid, too, but not unimaginative.

Today I had another most encouraging kind of spirituo-psychic 'light'. I was praying for family and friends, as I always do, and when I came to Cecilia, my late uncle Derek's girl, who was the mother of a young family and died suddenly for no apparent reason, I sensed a gentle light in my mind's eye, and she seemed to be tugging gently at my mind, as if to say, "Hold on", since I don't dwell on the people I'm praying for. I never actually met her, so it's all the more understandable in Cecilia's case. Then I rumbled that she was trying to tell me that she was part of the gang who'd met Anthea. And they all loved her to bits and were having the time of Reilly!

I know this will all sound crazy to many of you, but it doesn't matter. "There are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio", quoth/quod the very Bard, himself.

[Posts: 484Joined: 30 Oct 2011, 10:43Location: North Yorkshire]

Not crazy at all Grimes. We all need to believe in something, surely that's what keeps us going. One persons belief might not be the same as someone elses, but what does it matter as long as it works for you.

[Posts: 2692Joined: 26 Nov 2002, 13:53]

Not crazy at all Grimes. We all need to believe in something, surely that's what keeps us going. One persons belief might not be the same as someone elses, but what does it matter as long as it works for you.

Oh, yes, reetlass. I was just saying, it will seem double dutch to many others, to forestall any derisive outcry.

The fuller context is that, I forgot to say that my young, grandniece died last week in South Australia of a wasting disease the doctors couldn't identify; unknown to the medical people. She had had it for a long time, and eventually died of an infection. I won't go into the details of how incapacitated she was by that time.

But, what struck me was that all the three people I have mentioned were female members of our extended family, who died prematurely in some degree. True Anthea was 73, but with her very strong constitution and perfect temperament, she would surely have reached beyond a hundred, God willing. Hence, perhaps a specially joyful meeting of the three I felt Cecilia was wanting to indicate to me.