Part Four: Grief – personal and collective (i)

Part Four : Grief – personal and collective

“Perhaps the wind
Wails so in winter for the summers dead,
And all sad sounds are nature’s funeral cries
For what has been – and is not.”

George Eliot

*****

On holiday in my native town, in the company of my sister Marina, we visited our paternal grandparents’ grave for the first time. There, I had a  powerful, unexpected, personal and also collective experience of extreme grief.

I am not sure whether it qualifies as paranormal! But it was very highly charged and disturbing, generating as it did a powerful sense that my individual experience was opening a channel to something much, much larger. I wrote the episode up at the time, and found it among some old papers nearly 30 years later, following which it was published in several journals in the UK, the USA and Australia.

( Reflecting on all the paranormal experiences, after writing them down, made me realise that this was the first – the one that “opened the gate”, as it were…. )

July 1970, the Outer Hebrides.

“…….Marina and I decided to take the dog and walk from our house, just outside the  town, to a beach very exposed to the sea, well beyond the harbour. It would be a long walk, but it was a beautiful briskly windy sunny day – snatched from the usual bleak incessant rains of  a Hebridean July.

We took a curving route through the town, then via an outlying district overlooking the navigation beacon. This landmark had winked its electric eye reassuringly at the mouth of the harbour for as long as I could remember. Approaching the district cemetery, my sister walked on by, but I slowed down, never having passed through its gates. Only men attended funerals in the Outer Hebrides when I was growing up.

“The sun is shining on the dead today!” I called to my sister. “Let’s go and pay our respects.” She wasn’t too keen. “Have you ever visited Granddad and Granny’s grave?” I asked.

“No,” she said. ” I suppose we could do that.”
We pushed open the heavy creaking gate. The graveyard, beautifully tended, sloped gently down to within a few hundred yards of the sea. I realised that I did not know where my father’s parents lay.

” I remember where Daddy said it was,” Marina said. “Follow me. With our English name, it shouldn’t be difficult to find.”

Island Burial Ground

Our  paternal grandfather had been posted to the Outer Hebrides before the First World War, meeting our grandmother on his first trip ashore. English gentlemen were a great rarity in these parts; very desirable “catches” to aspiring island girls like Granny, who had by all accounts been a handsome, strong and wilful young woman. He was well and truly caught; apart from a period of war service he remained in that remote part of Scotland for the rest of his long life.
His death devastated my grandmother. They had been married for fifty two years.

I remember sitting with her in her bedroom, she who had always turned herself out so elegantly propped up in bed, an old singlet of my grandfather’s failing to conceal her droopy, withered breasts from my young eyes. Up to then I had never known the desolation of not being able to console another human being – or that old people ever cried. She wept and wailed and moaned, repeating:
“I don’t want to live any more. What’s the use, what’s the use now he’s away? “

Live on she did, doggedly, for nine years, lightened only by a late addition to the family. I was fifteen when my brother was born. Granny was eighty two, and half way senile. The child was called after Granddad; as the novelty wore off Granny slipped into senility, a querulous fractious husk, and finally just a husk, and a medical miracle, carried off at eighty six with her fourth bout of pneumonia.

I was at university when she died, having become so distant from her by then that  I felt nothing but a vague sense of relief ….

“I’ve found it !”
I had fallen behind Marina in my reverie. She was standing about twenty yards away; I hurried to the spot. It was a plain, simple grave. A low railing ran round it. The headstone was in sandstone, with only the facts of their births and deaths etched on it in gold lettering. Noting with satisfaction, which my grandmother would have shared, the absence of ‘fancy versification’, I stood and looked at the grave.

Without any warning, for I had felt quiet and composed, there was a rush and a roar in a deep silent centre of my being; a torrent of desolation and grief swept through me. I wept and wept and wept, quite uncontrolled.

There they were, half my being. Where had it all gone: the passion of their early love; the conception of their children; her sweat and blood and pain as she thrust my father into the world; their quarrels, silences, love, laughter, loneliness and grief; their shared and separate lives? And this was it. On a hot beautiful day with the sea lapping on the shore and the seabirds wheeling and diving, a few bits of cloth and bone under the earth, an iron railing and a stone above.

I was not weeping just for them. Overwhelmed by  total awareness of my own mortality and that of all human beings before and after me, I had never felt so stricken, so vulnerable, so alone.”

900 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

Coming up next:

Calais, France, Summer 1990

Sharing the house! Ghosts(ii)

Home, Glasgow, Scotland, Autumn 1985.

In the eight years from moving to Glasgow in 1977 to do social work training, my life completely changed.

By the autumn of 1985 I had acquired my husband Ian – along with his ex wife who lived round the corner, a part share in the upbringing of his two children, and his old cat – and had given up social work to set up a freelance career: counselling, assertiveness training, and practising as a professional astrologer and astrology teacher.

We had moved in the spring of that year, to provide a work space for me and their own rooms for the children. Our new home was a spacious apartment in a red sandstone tenement. The youngsters were given their choice: Alex chose the small bedroom at the back of the flat, whilst Lisa preferred the large, polished wood floored room looking out over the river at the front.

This room was divided into two halves with a tall wooden antique screen. The half by the windows was my workroom and library, where I saw astrology clients, taught astrology classes, and kept most of my books. The other half, just inside the door, was Lisa’s bedroom, which was often shared at weekends by her friend Judy.

We usually had an assortment of Alex and Lisa’s friends to visit, and often to stay, at weekends. I still remember Judy getting into bed one night with a glass of Ribena, and pouring it all over some brand new light coloured bedding! Despite these occasional mishaps, Ian and I enjoyed having kids around and had a lot of fun with them.

One Saturday morning, however, some months after our move into the new house, Lisa and Judy were unusually subdued over breakfast. It took me some time to get them to tell me what was wrong. They were hesitant to tell their story, fearing that I might not believe them. Eventually, it came out.

In their bedroom, my pine desk was placed flush to the wall at right angles to the window in the “workroom” area. Lisa and Judy had woken up in the early hours, around three or four in the morning. They had both seen a dark haired young man, his hair falling over his face, sitting at my desk. Unable to speak or move, they had watched until he simply faded away and vanished.

Their whole demeanour was such that I saw no reason to disbelieve them. They had nothing to gain by making up such a tale. Given my own history, I was more open than most adults would probably have been to stories of that kind, and tried to reassure them as best I could that the young man’s ghostly presence was in no way harmful.

“People have lived in this house for nearly a century,” I said. “It’s not really surprising that there should be some traces left behind.” Lisa, however, had her own theory. “It’s your books, Annie,” she remarked. “They’re full of spooky stuff….”

For the first spell of our living at our new abode, as will be seen from later sections of this book, there were a variety of odd episodes which we could not explain. However, after a few years of our occupancy, those manifestations settled down and stopped.

Ancient Witnesses

TO BE CONTINUED……next chapter is Part Four : GRIEF – personal and collective

600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

Part Three: Ghosts(i): Overtaking a phantom

“Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake – much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts….on the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions – they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate….”

Elizabeth Bowen

Definition of a ghost : “the soul of a dead person which supposedly manifests itself to the living visibly (as a shadowy apparition), audibly etc.”

(p 356, The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, Oxford University Press 1996)

An imaginative child, I found going upstairs to bed scary most nights, having probably heard too many ghost stories as I grew up in the storm-tossed Outer Hebrides – home to many a Celtic tale of the otherworld of the supernatural.

There was the woman wrapped in plaid who jostled my maternal grandfather in the winter dark as he traversed the remote, eerie Uig Glen. There was my maternal great-grandmother’s hearing the wheels of lorries rumbling through her remote village toward a deserted headland – many years before they actually came, bearing the materials to build an RAF station there.

There were the shades of the dead appearing to those few in possession of the Sight – sure harbingers of imminent family death. There were ghostly lights luring sailors to their deaths in stormy seas. There was at least one ghost car. More has been forgotten than I could ever now recall.

Fortunately for me, vivid imagination has always sat in tandem with a strongly empirical streak. So I was a true sceptic –inclined to disbelieve in the absence of proof – until the day I  saw a ghost for myself….

Perthshire, Scotland, Autumn 1977

My twenties had been turbulent. Restless wandering – from one career to another, one city to another, one set of friendships to another, and one dwelling place to another – characterised the whole decade.

Now, I was in a mood to settle. Time to face my dissatisfactions, rather than running away when novelty wore off and disillusion set in. Resolution thus colouring my mood, I left Dundee in September 1977 to do my social work training at Glasgow University. Having been such a hippie in my twenties, all I owned could be fitted into several boxes and stowed in the back of my old blue Morris Traveller.

Laughing to myself, I recalled the occasion when, in my role as unqualified social worker, I had called by my flat in a poor area of Dundee to collect something I had forgotten. Accompanying me was the hard bitten female client I was accompanying on a visit to Dundee’s Family Planning Centre. “For f—s sake!” she remarked, quickly scanning my accommodation whilst I hunted for the forgotten item. “Your standard of living’s even worse than mine!”

Thus in transition, I set off to spend a night or two, en route to my new abode in Glasgow, with my boyfriend at the time who lived in the scenic market town of Perth, half way between Dundee and Glasgow. The Dundee to Perth road was mostly dual carriageway, and a distance of about twenty five miles. I drove happily through the area known as the Carse of Gowrie, which grew the best raspberries in Britain. “Pity I’m in a hurry”, I thought. “A few raspberries for supper would be nice.”

It was a clear evening, around seven pm, growing dusk. There was very little traffic on the road. A few miles outside Perth, my headlights picked out a male cyclist on a racing bike, a little way ahead of me. I pulled into the overtaking lane to pass him – and he vanished.

I arrived at Peter’s flat somewhat shaken by this experience. “I can’t believe I imagined it. What I saw was definitely a cyclist. He was as substantial on that road as you are, standing right now in your kitchen !” Peter was quiet for a few moments. He looked thoughtful, as if trying to decide whether to say something or not.

At last he told me that a young male cyclist had been killed on that stretch of road a year or so previously.

This was something of which I had no knowledge. Why should his ghost appear to me? “Firstly, because you’re so sensitive anyway. Cast your mind back to some other odd happenings which have occurred  since we’ve been together. Secondly, your life is in transition. I think at those times, normal consciousness is more porous, as it were. Impressions from other layers of ‘reality’ find it easier to seep through….”

I remember feeling quite relieved that I wouldn’t be travelling on that stretch of road for the foreseeable future….

800 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

Coming up next:

Ghosts(ii)