Mother's Day

At No 4 Restaurant for Mother's Day

We celebrated Mother's Day with a Johnny Cash tribute show at the Apex (a brilliant and realistic performance celebrating 50 years since the San Quentin performance), and a meal on Sunday at the No 4 restaurant in Bury with Edwin. Ann doesn't welcome flowers, chocolate or jewelry, but I gave her red roses (dead things) anyway as part of the traditional day.

Ann has thought of death often these last few days, in dreams and day-time reverie, and in much of her poetry. Coming home, she mused on the myriad bodies laid in Suffolk soil over thousands of years of history, in fields and ditches and graveyards, all now forgotten, not even ghosts in memory, and wondered that nothing more can happen to the spirit, that once the last memory of the person has died, their spirit too has gone for ever.

I too have mused on death, but they tend to be stupid, morbid thoughts that I generally suppress, such as wondering if my aftershave will last longer than me, or if I'll need to buy a new one, or thinking of the grandchildren going to University, and wondering that I might not witness it, or on a more frivolous note, wondering if I'll live long enough to see us exit Europe! More seriously, I cannot help believing against all the lack of evidence that there is a spiritual side to our lives that continues in some form. But that is the nature of faith - the opposite of evidential certainty, but the basis of hope.

Choosing

We choose someone who
we wish to spend our life with,
share happy memories
with photographs we smile at
and, eventually, we die with.
We little know the dying comes too soon,
then one of us goes on alone
howling at God's moon.

Annie Elliott