I’ve followed these threads for a while now because I was born in Hull. The fact is, I sort of feel betrayed. The Hull I remember is a town where people would say come round to ours for tea, there’s fish pattie and chips with your name on it.
I don’t recognise a Hull of flashers, dildo thieves, CCTV and predatory stalkers, but hey, I’m 63. Get with the programme, granddad.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the random nature of life as well: If so and so hadn’t been in such and such a place, etc etc.
Anyway. Mods, please delete this if late night quasi-religious maunderings contravene TOS. I’ve been pondering on why people post on here and I think for me, it’s become a mixture of a desire for justice and a forlorn hope that I might just notice something everyone else has missed. Yes, I am sad.
2018 was a horrendous year, almost everyone I know lost a relative, a family member, and/or a pet, and I found myself writing two condolence letters per month.
I always said in those letters that modern physics tells us that there are multiple dimensions which we can’t access. One of those could be what religious people call heaven.
When my own mother died in 1986, someone sent me this extract from the sermon of Canon Henry Scott Holland in 1910:
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
When my mum died in 1986, I'm not describing this very well, but in April 1986 I was working and I did a conference at Loughborough University. They gave me a room half way up a tower block where if I wanted to, I could wave out of the window at the pilots in a holding pattern over East Midlands Airport. Anyway…
That weekend at one point I found myself looking out of the window and across the way, lower than my level, was another university building with a flat roof and it was completely covered with a shallow lake of rain water
And as I watched it, the sun came out and the wind rippled the puddle so that every single bit of it danced in the light for a minute or so. I looked at it and somehow I knew, from looking at the rippling lights, that my mum was OK and that she was trying to tell me she was OK
Two years later, when I found myself in Chartres, I went to light a candle for her and I got the same feeling again, but much, much stronger, to the extent that it almost incapacitated me. I have never been able to explain it, but ever since then I have felt that my mum is at peace and happy
I hope if any of Libby’s family are reading this, it might give them comfort. Or indeed, anyone who is reading this who has lost someone. That’s it, basically. I’m wrapping this up, here in the UK. The owls are hoo-hooing in the woods out the back, down towards the mills in the valley, telling me to go to bed. And who am I to disagree with owls. Good night America, wherever you are.
