This essay was published in Leviathan Quarterly, No. 2

(December 2001): 55-68

Mourning and Reconciliation: An Essay on Grief

Martin Padget, Aberystwyth, Wales; mp@aber.ac.uk

Joshua

On a drab afternoon in February I heard my father cry for the

first time. Voice breaking, he told me that his grandson, and

my nephew, had just died. Joshua was only four months old.

He had developed a bad cough and been taken to hospital, where

he was diagnosed as suffering from bronchiolitis. He seemed

to recover for a brief time but then took a turn for the

worse. Two days before my father's telephone call, I had

watched Joshua's tiny body shake gently to the rhythm of an

oscillating ventilator. He was on paralysing drugs to

restrict his movement and aid ventilation, so he displayed

little sign of life. Perhaps more painful than watching

Joshua's almost static body was seeing his parents sick with

anxiety. During those two days Joshua's health had declined

1

rapidly until his parents asked for the ventilator to be

turned off. He died in my sister's arms.

Subsequently we learned that Joshua had been suffering

from cystic fibrosis, which explains why the bronchial

infection was so devastating. At the funeral his father

walked into the church with the tiny white coffin in his arms.

My sister's sharp sobs were plaintive and at the burial she

was inconsolable as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

Back home there was silence interspersed with inconsequential

talk that provided a kind of solace. The bereaved parents

simply sat on the sofa holding hands, their glazed eyes

focused only on loss.

The death of an infant brings such pain. In the Western

world we have grown so accustomed to expert medical care for

children's illnesses that the death of a young child strikes

us as almost incomprehensible. Small consolation that in

reality many infants struggle to live and often die, through

cancer, cot death, meningitis, severe allergies and other

conditions. The hospital consultant provided a rational

explanation of Joshua's condition, pointing out that in all

likelihood he would have struggled to survive even if the

2

cystic fibrosis had been diagnosed at birth. But these words

hardly filled his parents' hunger for meaning. If there is a

God, they thought, why should he take our son away? It

appeared to them the supreme rejection, even as their loss

partly echoed the story of Christ's sacrifice. I, faithless

in the Judeo-Christian sense of belief, forged a funeral

speech that stressed the value of community and love, the joy

that we had all experienced at Joshua's birth, the wonder of

procreation and the beguiling plenitude of the natural world

about us, and the value of words as being, perhaps, the

supreme expression of our collective humanity. Weighty words,

I suppose. And words I couldn't help but feel rang hollow on

returning to my parents' home after the burial. That day my

father suddenly found it necessary to sort through his pots of

paint, deciding which of them was worth keeping as he came to

the end of decorating the house.

Such preoccupations serve as a form of displacement for

the unresolvable fact of death. We struggle to articulate

words that console even as we realise words and sympathetic

gestures are all we have. Frustrated, we grow tired of being

reasonable and of striving for equanimity. We turn angry and

3

bitter. We curse, we rail, we cry. We indulge our hurts and

doubts.

Two days before Joshua died I ran hard, straining to keep

under six-minute mile pace, believing, however irrationally,

that the faster I ran, the higher my pulse rate and the more

tired I felt, the greater the likelihood of Joshua breathing

for himself again.

In the months, and now the year, that have followed Joshua's

death I have thought hard about the ways in which

storytelling, community, personal and family identity, sense

of place and spirituality are interrelated in everyday life.

I have particularly valued the role of storytelling in

articulating a sense of community and place that has helped

assuage the debilitating effects of familial grief. And yet I

have also come to realise all too well the ease with which we

can fall into a downward spiral of torpor and unease as

questions of responsibility, personal morality and faith

appear to go unanswered. Whereas my sister's and brother-in-

law's grief seemed natural and explainable, the unexpected

severity of my own sense of loss was jarring and left me

4

reeling with guilt at my failure to think and act selflessly

at a time of crisis. I wish to reflect on the uncertainty,

equivocation and conjecture that have filled the time since

Joshua's death. At first when I felt compelled to write about

this event I thought in some way that I was writing for, or

even on behalf of, my sister and her husband. I have come to

realise, however, that I cannot speak for my sister or her

husband and that I neither could nor should try to

characterise their thoughts and emotions beyond the occasional

reflection on their public expression of grief. It is enough

to know that their emotional pain has been immeasurable and

that they have sought counsel with a host of people--family,

friends, a church minister, nurses and doctors--who have

provided invaluable sustenance for them. With the benefit of

hindsight I can see how Joshua's death deepened a lingering

darkness that had shadowed my life for a long time. I seem to

be able to articulate the character of this darkness only in

abstract terms. Perhaps, even, this something is omnipresent,

as much a part of my being as the beat of my heart and the

drawing in of breath--physical acts that become terrifying

when one grows overly conscious of them. It is enough to say

5

that I have discovered that I cannot afford to look hard at

such things for the sense of isolation and imprisonment they

precipitate is debilitating and, more to the point,

unnecessary.

My writing here, then, is an effort to tell a story about

seeking freedom and transcendence of the imprisoned self

through the potentially liberating acts of talking, reading,

writing and walking. Simultaneously I wish to convey how on a

quiet and still Sunday morning at my home in west Wales, when

from indoors I can just hear the ceaseless chatter of blue

tits and great tits clustered about the bird feeder and the

rhythmic tumble of water in the stream that runs beside my

cottage, images of the Yellowhead Highway in British Columbia

come back to me strangely and incongruously. I want to

ruminate on the desire for movement and rootlessness and

discovery expressed in such images by musing on the way in

which we may pay the price for our restlessness by failing to

find comfort in place even as we realise that in not finding

place, or in refusing stasis, we find energy and a sense of

affirmation in mobility. I should clarify that the very

process of writing this essay is the means of creating a

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bridge between self and community. What might appear in the

essay as a certain lack of narrative cohesion is due to the

fact that the connections I characterise between personal

memories and literary texts are often associative and

speculative. Thus I seek to meditate on the interplay of a

sense of place, history, community and personhood in diverse

forms of storytelling without striving to stand outside the

experiences related in this narrative. Above all, I wish

these words be understood as being forged through dialogue and

that they contribute to an ongoing process of collective

storytelling through which we all attempt to come to terms

with loss, grief, the passage of time and the inevitability of

death.

Hole in the Sky

At the beginning of Hole in the Sky, his powerful and elegaic

memoir of growing up in southeastern Oregon, the American

writer William Kittredge tells of being haunted in late middle

age by the plenitude of childhood experiences on the family

ranch that took him into an intimate relationship with the

natural environment. Contrasting the direct association

7

between self and place that he experienced as a five-year old

boy with his adult longing for connection, he writes: "We

yearn to escape the demons of our subjectivity. We yearn to

escape our selves, into intimacy. We yearn to sense that we

are in absolute touch with things." Kittredge continues by

considering the subject of walking and other means of

transcending the self:

People go walking into nature. They say they feel

they are becoming part of things. They say they want to

be like a stone, or a flower; they say such release from

the self is bliss, a kind of religious ecstasy, and they

want it over and over.

But you have to wonder. Philosophers argue that we

cannot be aware of ourselves without language. They say

we are created by our language, that we live immersed in

language and cannot escape; they say language stands as a

scrim between us and what we think of as "real," and that

we have to name things before we can know them. As a

result we can never know what is "actual." All we can

know is names, stories.

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After Joshua's death I re-read Hole in the Sky. I was struck by

the insistent rhythm of Kittredge's writing, the repetition of

"yearns" in the sentences quoted above. I felt named in his

writing, even though our disparate ages and the patterns of

our lives testify to great differences in experience and

outlook. At the beginning of his memoir, Kittredge describes

the "hole in the sky" after which his book is named. He

recounts a visit to the Tsimshian village of Kitwancool in

northern British Columbia, just off the Cassiar Highway.

There he saw a house totem pole named Hole in the Sky, its

hole symbolising a passage to heaven. He writes:

The Tsimshians believed that stepping into your house was

stepping into a place actually populated by your people,

all of them, alive or not--the dead at least to the

extent that they were remembered by anyone. It is a

lovely notion, the space inside the house connecting to

the landscape of communal imagination, the actual place

bound together with story and recollection.

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On reading this passage again I suddenly realised that I

cycled past Kitwancool and the Hole in the Sky totem pole

while riding the Yellowhead Highway in the summer before

Joshua's death. I cannot say that I share Kittredge's

apparent enquanimity toward death, but I have found his words

combined with my recollection of viewing totem poles at 'Ksan

in British Columbia beautiful and reassuring. Significantly,

though, it is another person and another event that provided

what might loosely be labelled spiritual insight on the

cycling trip itself.

I was riding from Prince Rupert to Calgary, via Jasper

and Banff, having started the journey by riding up Vancouver

Island from Nanaimo to Port Hardy and then taking the ferry to

Prince Rupert and the magnificent Skeena River valley.

Alongside the river bald eagles perched high in the pines

surged toward the water on spying fish, their great wings

beating the air langorously and almost arrogantly. Up river I

watched three adults and five young bald eagles frolic on a

sandbar. One day while riding I heard clumsy rustling come

from trees nearby the road. A black bear mother and her two

cubs stopped their feeding, warily watching me pass by. Later

10

in the Rockies, from an overview above the Athabascan River, I

watched a male black bear bound with large, loping strides

across a meadow and into dense woodland.

Two days east of Prince George I came across a fellow

cyclist riding a heavily laden mountain bike. He was

whistling happily, breaking into the odd snatch of song.

Shoulders, arms and legs tanned deep brown, and hair twisted

into short dreadlocks, he looked quite the traveller. We

greeted one another enthusiastically. I asked where he had

ridden from. Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, came the reply. And

where was he headed? Tierra del Fuego. It soon transpired,

though, that his journey hadn't begun in Alaska. Far from it.

He'd actually started riding from Switzerland over three years

before. At that point Claude Marthaler was around 56,000 km

into what became a 120,000-km journey around the world.

Before I met him, he had passed through the southern republics

of the former Soviet Union, traversed the Indian subcontinent,

and travelled through China, South Korea and Japan. After

cycling the length of the Americas and flying from Buenos

Aires to Cape Town, he cycled through Africa and Europe to

arrive home in Geneva in June 2001.

11

I spent three days with Claude, including his 37th

birthday. He struck me as being friendly and effervescent,

keen-eyed and intelligent, modest yet single-minded and

determined. Since that time I have often thought of him,

wondering what it must be like to have biked through some of

the loneliest places one can imagine, struggling through ice

and snow to cross high mountain passes, and contending with

impassive bureaucrats and guards at border crossings.

Claude tells a wonderful story of crossing the high

Tibetan plateau, at between 12,000 and 15,000 feet, and being

amazed to meet groups of pilgrims who covered hundreds of

miles making full prostrations in order to purify their souls

before reaching a holy site. The pilgrims, who strapped bits

of old car tyre to their feet for sandals and attached small

pieces of wood to their heads for protection, would plunge

rhythmically to the road while reciting mantras. One day a

sandstorm made travel particularly difficult. Biking at a

mere five miles per hour, Claude slowly gained on a vague

figure moving haltingly ahead of him. Having caught up with

the figure, Claude ran toward him and they embraced with what

Claude calls "a strange, exhilerating intensity." The figure

12

was a Chinese Buddhist named Chen Yin Chao who carried almost

nothing with him, only a gallon of water and some food. The

sandstorm blew so hard that both men were forced to keep

moving. I leave the remainder of the story to Claude's

narration:

I struggled on. A small commune for road workers

appeared. Prayer flags flapped in the empty courtyard.

A group of Tibetans took me inside and served steaming

salt-butter tea. As I slowly warmed up, I tried to

explain that a man was outside on foot. From time to

time we clustered at the doorway hoping to catch sight of

him. After three hours or so, a distant figure could be

made out making halting progress through the murky air.

Coming closer I could see it was Chen Yin Chao. I ran to

him. He was totally exhausted. I put his arm about my

shoulder and helped him along. Later the Chinese pilgrim

produced a newspaper cutting from 1985 telling of his

journey. He intended continuing with his spiritual

journey for another five years. He asked for warm water

in which to soak his feet. A hush fell on the room as he

13

pulled off his shoes. Chen Yin Chao had the shining

presence of a yogi. For a time animosity between China

and Tibet seemed remote and improbable.

The second hole in the sky that Kittredge mentions is one

with which we are all too familiar in the Western world,

namely "the simple emptiness we may take as a modernist idea

of God." It strikes me that travel such as Claude's is, in

part, impelled by a desire for connection and spirituality,

and by the sense that it is through travel and rootlessness

that, curiously and perhaps paradoxically, a sense of place,

in both the geographical and personal meanings of the term,

can be realised. I like to think that despite what might seem

to be the typicality of a disaffected Westerner enthusing

about Eastern culture there is something humble and genuine

about Claude's journey. Now over four years on the road, he

has not indulged in some superficial sampling of diverse

cultures and nor has he ridden as a means of conquering time

and space. He appears porously open to experience and many of

the people he has met on his travels have responded to the

immediate impression he gives of kindheartedness and simple

14

joy in sharing his experiences with others. As a traveller he

is rich in stories, and it is as a storyteller--talking,

smiling, gesticulating--that he connects with people. For how

long and for how many miles he will keep moving, I don't

suppose even he knows. Not that that question really matters

because clearly he has found an inner balance through the

momentum of travel. For months after arriving home I looked

longingly down the road Claude had travelled.

Edward Thomas's Melancholy

At the outset of his essay "Walking," Henry David Thoreau

claims that those who truly know how to walk in nature are

saunterers and that to saunter (a verb which may derive from

the French term "sans terre," to be without land or home)

means becoming "equally at home everywhere." What an

achievement that might be! I suspect, though, that while for

many of us walking and storytelling are forms of expression

through which we seek connection to nature and community, our

sense of fulfillment is often only too temporary and tenuous.

If Claude Marthaler appears to be a Thoreauvian saunterer par

15

excellence, then Edward Thomas's poetry and personality are

suggestive of a perhaps more pervasive struggle among many of

us to compensate for a deep-seated sense of lack--Kittredge's

second hole in the sky--with redemptive visions of nature and

community.

In April 1915, Thomas wrote a beautiful poem that

meditates on personal withdrawal from family and friends:

"Melancholy"

The wind and rain, the wind and rain, raved endlessly.

On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy

Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude

Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude

Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.

What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice

Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair

But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the wild

air

All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling

And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling,

And, softer, and remote as if in history,

16

Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes, or me.

I find Thomas's poem troubling because it conveys the sense

that isolation and estrangement are prerequisites for knowing

self and place. That is to say home, place, familial

relationship, a sense of rootedness and a sense of the

fullness of being are discovered through upheaval, through

departure from home, place and family. Thomas conveys the

sense, similar to much romantic poetry, that self-

consciousness and alienation are the essential order of

things. Language provides the bridge between self and

community; words materialise the imaginative link between

isolated consciousness and the complex ecology of the natural

world.

Here to write is to objectify the self, to dis-associate

from others. It requires isolation and concentration. Many

writers are plagued by the necessity of writing. We struggle

with the perhaps contradictory but necessarily complementary

desires for isolation and abstraction on the one hand and

community and direct experience on the other hand. Perhaps

for many people writing--its compensatory aestheticism, the

17

struggle to create well-honed prose and poetry, the dream of

realising full self-expression--is the very sign of our

inability to project ourselves in other ways. But I would

like to think that this isn't quite true. I hope the

restlessness I have described--a shuttling back and forth

between two only outwardly opposed poles--is the means of

extracting what is best from one's person, that it is the

means, ultimately, to sharing a story that brings the

individual back to community and place.

Ah, but how we struggle. I learned "Melancholy" by heart

as a seventeen-year old at school. I shared my enthusiasm for

Thomas's poetry with one of my then best friends, who in those

days smoked, rather pretentiously, a white clay pipe. I last

saw him almost a decade ago. He was three years beyond

receipt of his university degree and drifting. A frustrated

and dimly dissatisfied fellow who appeared mired in his

subjectivity, he talked morosely into pints of beer and

claimed that he might be becoming alcoholic. I was bored by

such talk and at the time took it as an indulgence. In

retrospect I see only too clearly how his drinking appeared to

go hand-in-hand with self-loathing and spiritual pessimism.

18

It deeply saddens me to think that since that evening we have

not spoken.

Certainly Edward Thomas was vulnerable to bouts of black

despair that typically involved brooding silences at home

followed by physically punishing walks, sometimes through the

dead of night, that left him exhausted and repenting of his

cruelty to Helen Thomas, his wife. Despite struggling

throughout his adult life to make a viable living from writing

and then suffering crises of conscience over his often

faltering economic provision for Helen and their children,

Thomas never doubted his vocation as a writer. In her memoirs

As It Was and Time Without End, published in 1956, Helen eloquently

describes her husband's tendency toward withdrawal and

melancholy. She recognised the helplessness of his condition

and the necessity of his withdrawal at points of internal

crisis. From what did Thomas's discomfiture derive? It is

hard to say exactly. But it seems over the years his personal

shyness and sensitivity combined with a melancholic outlook on

social interactions to make him vulnerable to moments of

deepset spiritual pessimism. Walking, however, provided some

19

consolation. Helen writes of her own pain at Thomas's silence

and distance:

There were to come dark days when his brooding melancholy shut

me out in a lonely exile, and my heart waited too eagerly to

be let into the light again. When those days came, with no

apparent reason for their coming, bringing to him a deep

spiritual unrest and discontent, he would be silent for hours,

and perhaps stride out of the house, angry and bitter and

cruel, and walk and walk far into the night, and come home,

worn out with deadly fatigue. When those days came my heart

trembled for what might happen, and I, suffering his terrible

spiritual loneliness, had no thought, or seeing, or hearing,

for anything but his agony and my own despair.

Perhaps Helen's greatest pain was in being forced to recognise

that "this fierce unrest which beyond all found peace in

nature" could not be relieved through Thomas confiding in her.

She writes: "Alone he had to be in his agony, but when he

emerged from it, exhausted by God knows what bitter contest,

he looked for me and needed me, and our love was always the

20

firm ground on which we stood secure and that no storm ever

swept away."

Not originally written for publication, Helen wrote As It

Was to help combat the depression she suffered in the years

her husband's death at the Battle of Arras in April 1917.

Thomas, hardly a man inclined towards violence, had long

pondered over whether to volunteer for the war effort before

enlisting in July 1915. A significant proportion of his

poetry, all of which was written in the last two years of his

37-year life, was composed while in the Army. Before that he

had written myriad articles, reviews and books, much of his

writing filled with lyrical and haunting images of the

countryside and the rhythms of agrarian life.

If "Melancholy" expresses a heightened sense of personal

isolation moderated by the "rumours of what had touched my

friends, my foes, or me," many other poems suggest a far less

fragile sense of connection between the enunciatory "I" of

the poem and the sense of place and community conveyed in

verse. "Lob", one of Thomas's longest and most complex poems,

meditates on a mythological figure of the English countryside.

Edna Longley remarks of this poem, which in geographical terms

21

is principally set in and around the southern England county

of Wiltshire, "It is a Noah's ark, transmitting to the future

an essential cultural continuity and exemplifying, like its

subject, a sanity and imagination, not simply English but

human, which is always in danger of being lost".1 The poem

narrates the poet's search for the archetypal figure of Lob,

or Lob-lie-by-the-fire (or Hob, or one of many other names),

whose presence is traced acrossed landscape and history.

Thomas recites place names, renders spoken voices and evokes

storied associations with relish to create an intricately

textured portrayal of a figure both ancient and continuing who

serves as a repository of folk wisdom and agrarian craft.

Much of the poem is spoken in the voice of a squire's son, who

tells the poet:

"He sounds like one I saw when I was a child.

I could almost swear to him. The man was wild

And wandered. His home was where he was free.

Everybody has met one such man as he.

Does he keep clear old paths that no one uses

But once in a lifetime when he loves or muses?"

1

22

Clearly Thomas himself sought to "keep clear old paths", not

in some backward looking reaction to the pressures of

modernity but as an exercise in affirmation and bridging past

and present worlds. If there is a belief here in organicism I

do not think it slips into essentialism, for the poem is far

too fluid and mobile for a fixed sense of "England" and

"Englishness" to be established. Thomas mixes conservative

and radical elements to convey an enriched sense of quotidian

existence without lapsing into grandiose and elitist

conceptions of the "folk". Toward the end of the poem, the

squire's son's narration culminates with a glorious crescendo

of naming. As the echoes of pivotal scenes of military

conflict suggest, Thomas was keenly aware of the necessity of

creating enabling visions of continuance in light of the

capacity of modern warfare to imperil community and

environment:

"Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?

Or that is name is Walker, or Bottlesford,

Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?

23

The man you saw,--Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,

Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,

Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d'ye-call,

Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,

Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob

One of the lords of No Man's Land, good Lob,--

Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,

Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too,--

Lives yet. He never will admit he is dead

Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread,

Not till our weathercock crows once again

And I remove my house out of the lane

On to the road."

I cannot help thinking there is a quiet heroism in such

writing and that these words convey a sense of loyalty to

place and history that I am unfamiliar with but which appears

to have been shared by many men of Thomas's generation.

24

Walking

Several months after Joshua passed away my grandfather died,

his funeral service taking place in St. Ethelreda's Church in

Old Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Refreshments were served nearby

in the church hall, formerly a school in which he had taught

on first arriving in Hatfield from his native Yorkshire during

the Depression. We were relieved to say goodbye to him for he

had grown frail and utterly tired over the past few years.

How ironic, we thought at the time of Joshua's death, that my

grandfather, who had life but no longer wanted it, should

prevail when Joshua slipped away to haunt us with the

potentiality that we attach to those who die young. At my

grandfather's funeral a man who had known him since well

before I was born spoke of someone who was a stranger to me.

Listening to that man tell stories about my grandfather

playing cricket and slipping off his bicycle clips before

settling down for a pint in a long demolished pub, I thought

of all that children and grandchildren may take for granted

about the parents and grandparents who have featured

throughout their lives. Perhaps we remain strangely childlike

25

in the presumption that we know those who have nurtured us

through childhood and into our adult years.

As an eight-year-old boy I took my first walking trip

with my grandfather. We visited the North Yorkshire Moors,

close to where he had grown up in Brotton, near Saltburn-by-

the-Sea. I still recall places we stayed, such as Wheeldale

and Westerdale, and can also picture us walking the coast near

Robin Hood's Bay and listening to my grandfather recite

Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetry from memory. There were

other walking trips in which we hiked the length of Hadrian's

Wall, tramped across Dartmoor, and wandered through the

Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean. On those later trips the

two of us were joined first by my cousins and then by my

sisters. I, the eldest grandchild, quickly lost the

privileged position of holidaying alone with my grandfather as

those cousins and sisters grew older.

I like to think my grandfather knew Edward Thomas's

poetry. I imagine the two men as kindred spirits insofar as

they shared a passion for walking and reciting poetry, and

also shared in having experienced warfare, my grandfather

serving for four years during World War Two. I can only

26

imagine a connection with my other grandfather. Killed in

army service, his death left Nana, my mother's mother, a widow

caring for four young children. She did not re-marry. I

picture her sorting through an old biscuit tin in which old

letters and photographs were kept. Deposited in the tin was

my grandfather's army record book, sent back to his wife after

his death with the inscription "DECEASED" written across its

centre pages. So many families, in both Thomas's time and my

grandfather's, received similar booklets marked with the

brutal black ink of wartime bureaucracy. On leaving Nana's

home, in which she lived for over fifty years, I looked

countless times at the framed document that hanged on the

wall. It told of World War Two, King and Country, and

Sacrifice. I have often wondered about my grandfather's act

of enlistment. To what extent did he have a choice about

going to war? What sort of internal dialogue developed at the

point he knew he would be joining the Army? Perhaps he did

not allow himself to express his fears and doubts and divided

loyalties too freely--to himself, to his wife, to friends, to

fellow enlisted men. Unlike Thomas, he died without seeing

27

action, killed in a freak training accident on home soil. As

a child I boasted of his death to schoolmates.

To write of my grandfathers is a conscious act of memory,

even though one "grandfather" died almost two decades before

one of his four children became a parent for the first time.

My mother's father is at best hazy in her own memory (she was

six years old when he died) and yet she can tell many stories

about him, learned through family gossip that was often

articulated while old photographs were passed about. To me

she passed on a silver cycling medal that belonged to her

father. He won it in a cycling race as an eighteen-year old

in 1928 for covering 25 miles in an hour and fifteen minutes.

That may not be up to much by today's racing standards, but I

suspect the time is not at all bad for a teenage time trialist

cycling seventy years ago. I picture him astride his bicycle,

legs swift in circular motion as he pushes hard toward the

finish line. I wear the medal as a talisman on long journeys

by bicycle.

Walking and cycling, through each physical act and its

connection to memory I create a connection between myself and

the preceding generations of my family. Where would we be

28

without language to express such a connection? William

Kittredge is of course correct to point out how language

appears to us as the very marker of our individual

estrangement from reality, but equally language is the means

of articulating our redemptive longings for self-

representation and the creation of community. The writers I

have discussed--Kittredge, Claude Marthaler, Edward Thomas and

Helen Thomas--have each confronted the darkest places of self

and history and yet have provided uplifting visions of renewal

and possibility that revolve about ideas of reciprocity,

responsibility and, above all, reconciliation to the

inescapable losses we each must learn to endure in our lives.

Kittredge's evocation of the wonderous childhood consciousness

he wishes, however illogically, to again inhabit; Claude

Marthaler's epic journey and his exuberant embrace of a

Chinese Buddhist in Tibet; Edward Thomas's redemptive vision

of the transhistorical figure of Lob in the face of the

carnage of World War One; and Helen Thomas's courageous

attempt to write against the isolating tendencies of grief and

depression in the aftermath of her husband's death--it is

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these images that have reverberated through my consciousness

in the months that have passed since my nephew's death.

In light of such storytelling and reflecting on the time

that has passed since Joshua's death, I have often asked how

my sister and her husband can come to terms with the loss of

their child. Three months after the funeral my sister spoke

of how scared she was not to think of Joshua. Her home was

filled with physical objects--cot, toys, clothing,

photographs--that spoke only too eloquently of his absence.

Her thoughts, speech and actions revolved about her memory of

him and loss of him had become the centre of the life she

shares with her husband. There was nothing else to do but to

listen to her halting, bewildered and fearful speech that

through its very repetition could gradually dilute the

intensity of her emotion, and then to hold her during the

shaking silences when there were no words to express her pain.

Only time can ameliorate such anguish ,and in this there is a

banality as well as a profundity to grief.

To conclude I refer again to Edward Thomas and to William

Kittredge. Shortly before dying, Thomas commented in a letter

to his brother Julian, "Death looms, but however it comes it

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is unexpected, whether from appendicitis or bullet. An

alternation of comfort and discomfort is always a man's lot.

So is an alternation of pleasure or happiness or intense

interest with tedium or dissatisfaction or misery." These

strike me as somewhat stoic but altogether understandable

words in light of his participation in World War One. But

perhaps his most measured deliberation on the meaning of war

and personal sacrifice is found in his poem "As the Team's

Headbrass," in which Thomas meditates on the interrupted

rhythm of everyday life during World War One. Here the poet

rests from walking by sitting on a fallen elm that intrudes on

a field being ploughed. Every ten minutes or so he converses

with the ploughman, speaking for a minute before the team

heads away from the tree. If the man's workmate had not been

killed on his second day of action then the two of them could

have moved the tree from to edge of the field. But he is dead

and the elm has fallen and the poet now sits on the trunk. At

the end of the poem lovers who have entered a wood return to

view, the "stumbling team" of horses again turns away from the

poet and as the horses move on so the earth is turned in

preparation for another season of growth. And thus, the poem

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suggests, we all must stumble on, individually and

collectively, moving haltingly but doggedly onward in the

knowledge that although we have suffered immeasurably it is

only through continuing that we can provide for the future and

the greater good.

I find that I must return to Kittredge's Hole in the Sky. I

am guilty of an omission for in quoting one passage I left out

several of Kittredge's qualifying words. He writes: "We yearn

to escape the demons of our subjectivity. We yearn to escape

our selves, into intimacy. We yearn to sense that we are in

absolute touch with things; and we are, of course.” These five

simple words convey a significant difference in meaning to the

way I quoted the passage earlier. While I realise only too

well how much of the story I have told is focused on loss,

absence, grief and isolation, I hope that I have also conveyed

how in the midst of such experience, and even because of it,

there is always potential for ecstatic awareness and the

ameliorating consciousness of community, place and personhood.

Recently my sister and I walked through a park in

Hertfordshire, resting for a while beneath chestnut trees

ebullient with blossom. I took her hand to pull her up from

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where we had been sitting on the grass. Arm in arm, we

stepped on through the bright, shadowy light.

Notes

Cystic Fibrosis

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is a condition that is passed on

genetically from one generation to another. In Britain

approximately one in 20-25 adults carry the defective gene

which causes CF, while around one child in every 2,500 born

suffers from the condition. Although over 500 mututions in

the CF gene have been identified by genetic researchers, for

the most part the Delta F508 mutation is found in people

suffering from CF and in those who carry the defective gene.

CF mostly affects the lungs and the digestive system, making

it difficult for infants to breathe (due to mucus building up

in the lungs, which in turn can lead to viral and bacterial

infections) and to digest food (due to mucus conglomeration

comprom+ising effective function of the pancreas). Since the

discovery of the CF gene in 1989 the prognosis for children

suffering from CF has improved dramatically. At present in

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Britain only a small number of local health authorities screen

for CF at birth. I have drawn information on CF from the

booklets "Finding Out about Cystic Fibrosis" and "Genetics,

Carrier Tests and Tests During Pregnancy" published by the

Cystic Fibrosis Trust, a charitable organisation which can be

contacted at: 11 London Road, Bromley, Kent BR1 1BY, Britain.

(Telephone: +44-(0)181-464-7211.) On behalf of my family, I

thank the Cystic Fibrosis Trust for providing information on

the condition and arranging invaluable counselling services

for bereaved parents.

Claude Marthaler

Claude Marthaler completed his 122,000-kilometer journey

through sixty countries and four continents in 2001. His book

Le Chant des Roues: Sept Ans à Vélo Autor du Monde was published in

Switzerland by Olizane in 2002, and is also available in a

German language edition. His website (www.Redfish.com/yak')

provides copious evidence of Claude's lively character in

exuberant prose and compelling photographs.

Edward Thomas’s Spiritual Pessimism

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In 1911, several years before starting to write poetry, Thomas

suffered a nervous breakdown. Before this he had already

sought medical help to help recover his mental health. Thomas

attributed much of his alienation--the inability to

communicate effectively with others and a corresponding self-

condemnation for his incapacity to move beyond the prison

house of self--to his dreaded "self-consciousness".

Significantly, he was anxious that a cure would lead to a loss

of intensity that he believed vital to his creativity:

"seriously I wonder whether for a person like myself whose

most intense moments were those of depression a cure that

destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity--a

desperate remedy?" I have drawn quotes from Letters from Edward

Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, edited by R. George Thomas. It is also

important to note how writing poetry helped redirect Thomas's

inner sense of irresolution to more personally and

collectively empowering images of personhood and nationhood.

Importantly, Thomas appears to be an individual who discovered

a profound sense of purpose through enlisting for the British

Army during World War One.

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Helen Thomas on Edward Thomas

This is by no means the only point in Helen Thomas's memoirs

where she alludes to the devastating effect Thomas's

melancholy had on her own physical and mental wellbeing.

Should one accuse Thomas of deliberate mental cruelty toward

his wife for such acts of abandonment? I don't think so, but

it would be naive to think that complex power relations along

lines of gender and sexuality were not at work in their

relationship. For a compensatory view of Thomas's compassion,

we should take note of the concluding lines to his poem "And

You, Helen" in which he expresses hope of giving back to Helen

"Many fair days free from care/ And heart to enjoy both foul

and fair,/ And myself, too, if I could find/ Where it lay

hidden and it proved kind."

Two-and-a-half years after Joshua’s death, my sister and her

husband welcomed Ethan Rhys, a healthy son, into the world.

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