Six years ago today was one of the most precious days of my life. The next morning, after our wedding, Laura rolled over in bed and grabbed me; ‘Now you are mine!’ she grinned. She was so covered in tumors, every movement was hard, so it felt like a small miracle. Six years later she…
Category: LOVE
Magnificent Beings
Five months have passed since I slipped and fell on rocks in Provincetown. I’ve been off work all that time and I will be for a couple months more. It’s been an extraordinary adventure. Not one you’d wish on anyone. But one which has taught me so much. Not least how magnificent and exquisitely calibrated…
Momentum
Kindness abounds. Friends invite me on holiday to Palm Beach. The neighbors keep a watchful eye on my 92-year-old dad. And after nearly nine months of flat lining emotionally or worse feeling desolate and sometimes lost since mum’s passing, it’s as if the power is beginning to flicker back on inside. And more than that….
Learning to Walk in the Dark
One of my most treasured books, Learning To Walk In The Dark is a series of essays by Barbara Brown Taylor about the revelations that come from confronting fear, loss, pain and suffering. Take the story of Jacques Lusseyran, a young Frenchman who at age seven became permanently blind. A little over a week later he discovered…
Comfort Clothes
My dad wore one of my mum’s sweaters out to dinner last week. He’s not alone. We’ve all been delving into mum’s wardrobe since she passed. An old pair of mum’s black leather gloves is one of my most cherished possessions. ‘They’re falling apart,’ Dad said quizzically when I said I wanted to take them….
Being There
‘Being there is everything in love, in life and in dying,’ – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (founder of the US hospice movement)
Janette Young, 19 November 1931 to 22 May 2018
My dear mum, who surrounded me and my family with unconditional love all her life, has gone. She was the kindest person I’ve ever met and like Laura had a beautiful open smile. Her cousin Isabella recalled: ‘She brought the sunshine into the room with her.’ I was blessed to be with her at the…
Patchwork Heart
Sometimes my patchwork heart aches so. So many pieces missing. So many scars and repairs. How do we go on? Sometimes, like last Friday, joy evaporates and is replaced with a rush of pain and then the ooze of black bilious anger that seeps out of every pore when I feel dread fear combined with…
The Alchemy of Love
Sir Anthony Seldon, a British schoolmaster and political author, recently described the beautiful alchemy that transforms love at the end of life. His wife Joanna died of cancer in December 2016. ” The illness might have withered her body, but it strengthened our love and faith. Never had we known such profound physical intimacy and romance…
Presence
‘My father was in a coma for six weeks before he died,’ a man told me recently. This man also described how he sat with his father until the end. ‘It was the best thing I ever did,’ he said. He felt there was some intelligence that passed between them wordlessly as they spent time…
Be Love
Be in the world as a representation of love rather than hate. – Abraham Hicks
Three Years Ago
In a couple of hours, it will be exactly three years since Laura passed. Three years. It seems impossible she has been gone so long. But there is a beautiful symmetry at work. We were together, as a couple, for three years. And now after another three years the pain of her loss has ebbed…
Our Super Power
People say trust your gut. But I think we also ought to be trusting our hearts too. They emit a signal which is more powerful than anything else in the body. Recent research has found that ‘the heart has the ability to generate an electromagnetic field (EMF) that is 5,000 times the EMF of…
Laura’s Gift
My dear heart, Laura, was born 62 years ago today. She has been ‘gone’ nearly 3 years, almost the same amount of time that we were together. And still I feel her presence so sweetly and vividly. I used to think that she was reaching out from ‘the other side’ (wherever that is), but now I…
I heart you
Saturday is Laura’s birthday. This month she has been deluging me with hearts. I find them everywhere, usually several a day; a heart shaped piece of breakfast eggshell, a wet patch by the bath, 3 heart shaped pieces of gum on the pavement, a tiny heart shaped red leaf, a line of a dozen hearts…
Soul Love Forever 