I came across this beautiful bouquet of roses on a bench on Shipley Glen, no doubt intended as a memorial to one of the people named on the bench. It struck me as an extravagant gesture and made me wonder about the nature of love and loss.
One of my early memories is visiting the town's cemetery with my mother, to lay flowers at the grave of her mother, who died just before I was born. I know it was a heart-breaking and life-changing loss for my mother. I don't think she ever really got over it. It may even have been a factor in my parents buying a plot of land right beside the cemetery, where they built their home. The flower-leaving habit gradually diminished and, as far as I recall, other members of the family (including my mother's father) were cremated, though my grandad's name was added to the gravestone where his wife was buried.
Then my parents were both cremated and the only tangible memorial to them is entries in the Book of Remembrance at the local crematorium. My mother wished to scatter my father's ashes in the crematorium grounds, within sight of our family home - and, out of respect, my sister and I took my mother's ashes to the same spot. My sister then went up there every year for a few years, to mark the anniversary. I (emphatically) did not. To be honest, it wasn't something that really meant anything to me and I sometimes wonder why not? Am I odd or unfeeling? I'm pretty sure I'm not but, despite (or perhaps because of?) professing to be a Christian, I feel sure that after death a person's body doesn't have any meaning. My memories are there in my mind and places are not that significant.
That doesn't stop me being curious to (re)visit 'family places' or to photograph significant things, and I am hugely enjoying researching our family tree, which activity in itself feels often like honouring those who went before and to whom, collectively, I owe my existence. But I don't feel any sense of loss or of trying consciously to illuminate or heal anything, in doing so.
Perhaps the greatest loss I feel I've suffered - thus far, and thankfully - was my marriage break-up, a long time ago now. I once read a quote from Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State in Clinton's administration. She said: 'Divorce has been catastrophic in my life. It would have been easier if he'd died.' That so sums up my own feelings, though I have largely and successfully worked this through to a place where I am at mostly ease with myself and don't really think a great deal about it (or him) any more. Perhaps if he had died, almost certainly if my child had died, I'd want rituals and flower-leaving to help deal with the loss. I can only hope that whoever left the beautiful yellow roses did feel it helped.
