Drawing on The Writer Within

Until November 2008, Angela wrote two columns for The Japan Times, the country’s oldest English language newspaper. On Saturdays, you could read an interview piece on the Weekend page. (Over 1,300 people profiled since 1987.) She now writes profiles and features intermittently, rather than on a regular basis.

Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, she compiled - and this to some degree continues - information to assist the foreign community in Japan (and quite a lot of other people too, since half the readership is Japanese) The column is called Lifelines, and can be found on the Community page. Read online at http://www.japantimes.com

In 2006 Angela was commissioned to write material for EYEWITNESS JAPAN, by Dorling Kindersley (now an imprint of Penguin) in London. She worked extensively on the original edition; now she has added a few new pages and expanded others.

Angela’s last book was published in 2001. “I take full responsibility for allowing DOTWW to distract me from my current project, creeping forward since year 2000.”

Insider’s Tokyo, published in a series by what was Times Editions in Singapore, contains 40+ self-contained stories about this amazing metropolis. The starting point or focus for each is an object or location: a statue, a tree, a plaque a building, even a golf course (built on reclaimed land in the bay area). You can dip in or read from cover-to-cover. If the latter, the history of Tokyo is revealed, from prehistoric times to year 2000, when research was completed. But not chronologically. Rather it is pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.

The publisher’s blurb reads;

IT unravels hidden facts, fascinating stories, faces and places of Tokyo’s ancient history and vibrant present; includes easy-to-read street maps, fact boxes and lively icons that point to related topics or highlight important facts; offers a lively, fun and humorous read filled with insider tips, this is the perfect travelling companion for tourists to better understand the city and long-time Tokyo residents alike! Available online at http://www.amazon.co.uk

Most recently Angela completed a 150,000 word manuscript, lightly but very usefully edited by Robert Kidd of EDITFAST in Canada. “Based on a journey I made to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in 1999, it took so long to write - a chapter here, a paragraph there over eight years - that I no longer knew and could clearly see what I had got. Since it was a personal oddysey, I was just too close. I wrote it for my children, and but with Robert’s encouragement, decided it was time tolet go and move on. I began pressing the SEND button in February, and undaunted, am now switching submission of CHASING SHOOTING STARS - A SOUTH AMERICAN PAPER TRAIL INTO THE PAST from agents to publishers.”

[September 14,2009]
RELEASE, CLARITY
Just as the ancient Chinese oracle I-Ching has for years provided me with just the right message required to ground me in moments of extreme stress, so too do Angel Cards point the way.

I no longer question the hows or whys or wherefores. I simply accept.

I met Angel Cards for the first time a year ago – for a “meeting” it was – at the Findhorn Community, northeast of Inverness in Scotland.

We were staying in one of the early eco-designed houses, now a part-time B&B, run by an American psychologist and educator who had been coming to and fro for years. He’d laid towels on our beds, and on the top of each of these, an Angel Card.

I remember turning it over, seeing the single word and thinking, Oh my God, that is exactly the message I need to hear right now: BALANCE. I was in desperate need of a powerful rebalancing in the wake of the deaths of both my mother and sister in 2007.

My husband also was struck by the resonance of his own word: REASSURANCE. He still has the card too… when I went down into his room and asked if he remembered what the word was, he was able to lay his fingers on it immediately: in a wallet, in a drawer.

It was he who bought a set of cards from the community shop, for his mother, he said, “because with cancer she needs all the support she could get.”

I followed suit, but secretively, as if slightly appalled that I would even consider a pack of cards as helpful and healing. But I used to feel the same way about Tarot, until I learned how constructive and positive it was in helping individuals in their journeying. Nothing to do with fortune-telling, but more an exercise in psycho-therapy.

Now Angel Cards are a part of my life.

Julia, aged 6, who lives next door, loves them. For one thing they are extending her vocabulary; for another she becoming more and more self-aware. When she drew RISK one day, she laughed: “I’m always taking risks. Maybe the angel is telling me to be more careful?”

The response of adults is more variable. Some say “You believe this crap?”Others, “So what?” or “I don’t get it!” Interestingly, Japanese people appear to always get it. They can immediately apply Angel Cards creatively to their own situation, finding comfort and making surprisingly astute connections.

Personally, the last few months have been such a roller-coaster of highs and lows, that I sat down for lunch today with Akii and could hardly speak.

I was experiencing what one of the finest spiritual teachers in the world today, Eckhart Tolle, terms “a pain body attack”.

There has been so much ancient anger bubbling up like gas from a prehistoric toxic swamp, that I felt ready to blow up the world.

Instead, I reached for the cards.

RELEASE, read the first. (We take two these days, the second offering amplification or clarification of the first…)

Immediately I felt over-whelmed with a tidal wave of emotion in the name of fury. And out of my mouth gulped and poured just about everything I have ever needed to say about the men in my life – from the first known in this lifetime (my father) to the man I am with now, after 23 years.

Much as I know he loved me, I was not enough for my father. He wanted a son and got me. He wanted a maths wizard and chess player, and got me. He wanted a dutiful daughter and got me.

Too young and ignorant to pick up the lessons of healing he was offering – a recognition that I was perfect as I was - I moved on… to a man who showed all too soon that I was not enough sexually… then his best friend, ditto. Each time I missed the point. If I had believed and acknowledged I was enough, they would not have treated me with such disrespect. How could they respect me if I did not respect my self?

A lover showed the way with tender acceptance and a genuine belief in my gifts; I missed that too.

He who followed on (that lover’s best friend) acknowledged my many gifts, but threw in the towel with the disgust of disappointment when I threw them back in his face.

Finally, came the toughest teacher of them all, from whom I chose to affirm a whole galaxy of the most deep-rooted painful beliefs: that I was not young enough, not pretty enough, not sexy enough, not accepting enough, not trusting enough… I could go on, but the list is endless (and self-pitying to an extreme).

Card number 2: CLARITY.

Clarity indeed.

The illustrations on each card offered their own lucidity, neat little worldly metaphors. The Angel of Release had just got off a school bus. (Like a prison for many…) The Angel of Clarity is looking into the distance towards mountains and at the sun through a telescope.

Teacher and author Marina Borruso, who mailed me this morning from Vancouver, where she is working and studying with Tolle for a couple of months, ended a message of support with the following words: (depression) is always a difficult one because so much old unseen stuff comes out, but it’s also a time that provides a cleansing, so opening up whole a range of new possibilities… watching yourself struggling without doing anything is the exit.

So here I am, after a sleep of deep exhaustion: once more out of jail, again looking forward, and back to watching my struggle without any need to escape.

The world is safe too. The doomsday clock can be re-set.

And Akii’s cards? RESPONSIBILITY and PURPOSE. Which simply made him laugh because, having given up his job to help aging parents while seeking out a new direction, they are the two words most on his mind these days.

[July 1, 2009]
WE ALL NEED THIS SPACE TO GROW
Today.

On the platform at Shibuya Station.

A young girl wearing a yellow T-shirt announcing ‘we all need this space to grow’ above a row of brightly coloured flower heads.

Immediately I was struck by the joyful (joy filled) metaphor for what we learned with Marina* when she came to speak to us in June: that we all need to create and open up this space inside ourselves to allow our essence recognition and the freedom of presence to blossom.

Also that I need to re-think the old adage: Yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery and today a gift, which is why we call it the present. Might it not be better revised in the light of The Power of Now to conclude, ‘…today is a gift and as the present (presence) the only fleeting moment of any relevance, because right now is all we ever have.’

* Marina Borruso, an Italian of Yugoslav/Sicilian parentage currently based in Tuscany.
Website: www.marinaborruso.net/

[June 30, 2009] It was Akii who inspired me to write about furusato. Since he quit his job in May, he has been training in the gym, studying bee-keeping and writing - entering a lot of Japanese literary contests, writing senryo verse, essays and rakugo stories. One of the competitions offered the theme of furusato, and it was his statement that he felt he did not have an ancestral hometown that led me to write what follows. He liked it so much that he translated it into Japanese, made some suggestions for edits as too long (the brief required no more than 2000 characters) and posted it off. A first for him, a first for me, and a great exercise for both of us. Here is my original.

FURUSATO
I once read that the large majority of people end their days within 18 miles of where they were born.

I remember thinking at the time: Well, whoever this clever dick was, he was wrong about me. After all, I spent most of my life trying to escape, so why on earth would I ever want to go back.

I also read at some time or another – but far more recently – that soon there will be more people living in cities than in the countryside.

Yet the romantic notion of Japan’s furusato (which seems to translate as hometown but also offers the notion of ancestral links with the far distant past) is of rurality – mountains, villages, paddy fields. According to enka, anyway. Those wet songs (like French chanson) that are designed to tug on heartstrings and create a nostalgic yearning for the loves and lifestyles of the past, what has gone before.

Yet the reality is often very different.

A 30-year-old woman may talk of Kyushu as her furusato, but really she is talking about her 50-year-old mother, who moves around from town to city to village as the mood strikes her. No allegiance to family tombs here.

A taxi driver in his sixties will say, yes, his furusato is in downtown shitamachi – Tokyo’s Yanaka district, for example. But his family has not lived there so long; his parents came postwar from Shimane Prefecture to find work, and he supposes there is family still there but rarely visits. These days home is Kanto.

My husband’s 85-year-old mother hails from Otaru in Hokkaido, and yes, there is an enormous emotional attachment. But her mother only moved there a generation before, and the ashes of all the Honma relatives of old are enshrined in Chiba. No-one ever goes to pay homage.

So even in Japan, furusato is not as simple as it used to be.

Likewise in the UK, where I was born.

I feel a curiosity about my birthplace – a Rudolf Steiner residential home near Birmingham – because of the nature of the place: not only the philosophical associations, but the sweeping gardens, biodynamic farm (years before organic became a buzzword) and the surrounding Clent Hills.

But only as much as I feel about Warwickshire, where I grew up, with its lush meadows, lazy winding rivers and Shakespearean associations. It served me well, but when I go back now it feels pleasant and interesting, but foreign and quaintly backward: I move forward.

So what about Yorkshire, where I studied theatre and dance; the moors, post-industrial landscapes and the brooding darkness of pit towns now emptied of work most surely have a drama all their own. And that is the point: it is their curtain call, not my own.

Or Scotland, where I spent my summers from age eleven to sixteen, and am now renovating my mother’s cottage. Is this now my furusato? Is this where I will end my days? Again the answer is to the negative. For there will be no emotional connection once my sole remaining elderly relative has gone.

And so to Shropshire, on the border with Wales, where in recent years – spurred on by the closeness of Japanese family - I have discovered that both my mother’s parents and my patriarchal grandfather had long-standing family roots… and all with a few miles of one another also. Funny that. (My other grandmother, just in case you are wondering, was Scots.)

Finally there is Japan, where I have lived since 1986. But my husband claims he has no furusato to call his own, and so by this token neither do I.

So where do I live? Where do I belong?

Within myself, for a start. My source is strong and secure. Ego will attack whenever it gets the chance, but living in the present, in the Power of Now*, is fortress enough. Not that I defend, but rather accept. Ego stands no chance against acceptance of how things are.

How things are means – for one thing – having a bed on most continents. While I have Japanese friends too many to count, I also have foreign friends in abundance, from every corner of the world. Here we are drawn together simply by our small numbers and not being Japanese. Which is very interesting when I consider that I came from Cosmopolitan London, but really had very few so-called foreign friends at all. Or maybe I did, but failed to notice, because it was the people I was drawn to, not their nationality.

Maybe then people are my furusato, rather than any one particular place. I am home wherever I am with people that I love and care for.

When I am in Toronto, Canada, where my daughter lives and I have a grandson, I am home.

When I in London, where my son and his wife live, and I have many long-established dear friends, I am home.

When I am in Scotland with my 95 year-old aunt and godmother, I am home.

When I am with friends from Argentina to Zambia, I am equally at home.

Home I realize is the whole wide world. Which is a wake up call that deeply affects astronauts when they look out the windows of their spacecraft and see Earth for the first time.

These days I have no borders. Gaia (Mother Earth) - this beautiful feminine world made terrible by predominantly masculine activity - is my furusato.

*The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (Namaste Publishing, 1999)

p>

[June 2009] What follows is a bit of a cheat, because it’s just as much student writing as my own. I started to write something about signs in March, asking DOTWW writers to send me examples of signs received that positively affected the way they saw and lived in the world. Because I was away for all of April, and then sick much of May, I apologise for making everyone - incuding myself - wait so long.

SIGNS
New to the course work of Drawing on the Writer Within (DOTWW), students often ask what I mean by ‘signs’.

This is because every workshop and class begins with a blessing, composed to ensure those attending feel safe, that their privacy in what is often extremely personal emotional work will be maintained. In choosing to share their innermost thoughts and fears with others in the group, the words bind us in solidarity and confidentiality.

STAY CALM…
Everything that takes place – is said and experienced in this room, between us – is private.

BE BRAVE…
We share our insecurities, fears and dreams, and commit ourselves to creativity, transformation and change.

[AND] WAIT FOR THE SIGNS…
We are here because we want to write. It is a beginning. Let us begin…

So what DO I mean by signs? (An ‘in’ joke that students of DOTWW and PW [Proprioceptive Writing] will appreciate.)

I can’t remember how, where or when I heard about the native Canadian radio chat show host in British Columbia who always ended his gig with the words, ‘Stay calm, be brave, and wait for the signs…’ It is even possible I conjured him up, for these days my dream life is as powerful as everyday so-called reality. However, whatever, they impressed me hugely. Especially the third injunction: to wait for the signs.

Since I have begun consciously waiting, they come thick and fast. We are all, I realize now, bombarded with signs – signals, symbolic messages, connections - every moment of every day. We simply do not notice. Our abilities to be aware and creative in putting two and two or even three and six together are fast asleep.

Signs can be synchronistic – what sceptics call coincidences or accidents: you are thinking of someone not heard from for a while, the phone rings and guess who?

You move into a new appartment and hope the mature roses in the garden below prove to be yellow rather than pink (because yellow makes you feel good and after years in Japan pink simply makes you feel slightly sick) and they do.

You are wondering how to pay a bill and an unexpected rebate arrives, so once again saving the day.

(All the above have been experienced or reported.)

Signs can acts as messengers.

You pick up a feather from your doorstep when going out; when you return there is another feather in its place – same colour, same size. Within hours you receive news that enables you – in the short or long term - to move forward in an incredibly positive way.

A high wind in Japan can presage the arrival of Spring. Such a sign can be said (like Europe’s red sky at night, red sky in morning) to be rooted in science, but to the Ancients they were mysteries, and as such regarded with awe. Nowadays we take such things for granted, which is a pity, because the way we see – or rather don’t see - the world is the way most of us live our lives: blindly.

Signs can also bring us what we want or need at any one particular point in time: consolation, resilience, inspiration, resolution, a nudge out of a mind-less comfort zone, as some of the following contributions will illustrate. Signs that include a power button, a piece of graffiti, a stag, a diamond ring, flowers, and examples of revelation and reminder.

So are these student writers – and the others who come to right-brain focused DOTWW classes, courses and workshops - any more aware now than when they first arrived? Most I believe would say yes. Here are a few stories - testimonies, rather - to give left-brainers like scientists, lawyers and academics, who tend to either dismiss or demand hardcore physical - ie logical, rational - proof of anything they do not understand, something to mull over.

Carolyn began to see a natural world she had forgotten:
“I think it was after I took Level 1 of the course. Which must have finished when Spring was starting. I just kept noticing this little white flower with a purple tinge everywhere, and it really was as though I had seen it for the first time, though obviously it must have been there every year. I realised how much I had been unaware of the changing seasons for quite some time at this point. To me at that time, it was a sign of new awareness and a new growth.”

Richard received a sign – made a profound connection - while riding the subway in Tokyo:
“I was thinking about a paragraph that I had read: A satisfactory resolution to our fears and problems lies in our attitude… to sum up, good discrimination is at the heart of resolving a problem, which, in the end, is little more than you meeting yourself.

It was while considering these words that the following phrase – a key phrase - hit me right between the eyes: Meeting yourself. Here then is what I wrote the following day:
I didn’t realize how much anger there was until last night on the subway. It was so stunning, all I could do was stare at the floor with the realization that all that anger - all the emotional ups and downs and the pain of so little affection over the years – was probably a major contributing fact to my cancer.

Sitting there, on that train, I felt like a little kid being scolded by his mom for doing something wrong. For ages I couldn’t raise my eyes, in fact until I came to my stop. At the same time I understood that there was a certain kindness offered in the realization, that having been privileged to see the root of the problem, I could proceed accordingly.

With that in mind, I have been writing more of the “letters” that we spoke of at the last workshop. I find it interesting that the “inner voice’ you speak of not only applies to the actual process of writing, but also the spiritual side of our nature. I have come to
believe it is one and the same, for we are listening to our inner processes, and that is manifest in the voice.”

Sarah also received a useful message while riding the train:
“This morning, so overloaded that my mind felt jammed, I looked out of the train window to see the words “I’m Peaceful” on a banner strung across a building.”

Sarah saw no irony in this. Only her natural state, without all the responsibility and demands of work and family upon her time. It acted as a reminder.

Alison’s experience, initially so awe-inspiring, later turned to puzzlement. Now she simply feels grateful:
“I took my first PW session with Angela at the Women’s Conference in Izu in January 2007. I was amazed at how the experience left me feeling - kind of spacey. It was a lovely day, shiny and cold, so I set off up the hills with my camera. I love taking my camera on walks because of how it makes me look at what is around me and be less in my head.

I walked up the road, found and old hut and started taking pictures. Behind it was some kind of an overgrown orchard. Hilly, I enjoyed exploring it, getting some lovely close ups of trees and mushrooms. Then, pleased with myself and relaxed, I set off to follow the road home.

I had just stepped on the road when I turned and looked into a group of trees. Instantly I was looking into the eyes of a stag, with a full set of antlers. We stood staring at each other for what felt like a long time. Then slowly, without taking my eyes off it, I brought the camera to eye level and snapped a shot. When I lowered my camera, I saw the white of its tail as it turned away into the trees.

I had my film developed quickly; I wanted to see that amazing sight again. But the stag was not in the picture. This didn’t surprise me as its horns had been the same colour and size as the trees branches and its colours had merged with them. But I didn’t imagine it. The image of its white bobtail is imprinted in my memory.

I have never really worked out what the stag meant. To me it symbolizes strength, pride and beauty which, when I think about it, had been absent in my life for quite a while. It also reminds me of Scotland where I am from, and of wild empty mountains and high skies.”

A note here for Alison, who organizes a Christian feminist group in Tokyo: John Granger points us, via C.S. Lewis, to the use of the stag in medieval times as a Christ symbol. He explains that the antlers of the stag came to represent regeneration, in that they would “break off and grow back, tying the animal symbolically to the tree of life and the Resurrection” (Granger, Looking for God in Harry Potter, p. 95).

Brendan is struggling with the breakup of his marriage and family, and desperately sad:
“I saw this (message) on a girl’s bag on the train on the way home last night: Don’t forget to have a moment of happiness! (I logged it in my note book.)

Kathryn couldn’t for the life of her think of any signs she’d received in the previous year that stood out… but then she recalled one from earlier times that did - one of such import, that she has never forgotten:

It’s not because they weren’t there but rather, she thinks, because she was raised in a family where signs, portents, seeing the future, mediumship is all quite commonplace. She thinks what happened to her is more of a “message” than a sign, because and it was not anything she happened across, but rather in answer to something she asked for.

“One week before the fourth anniversary of Jack’s death, a hot summer night, I was sitting in the kitchen feeling sorry for myself because the signs and messages from Jack had been less and less, fewer and fewer as the years passed.

Seeing that I was working myself into a state, I decided to go out for a walk and calm down, But, I was just crazed, thinking, “A sign. Why can’t I at least have a sign that he still cares about me; that he is still around me?”

And then I thought, “How stupid am I? Walking up the south slope in Shimokita… what do I expect to find? A bouquet of red roses done up with a ribbon? A diamond engagement ring?” And just as I thought this I saw a few feet ahead of me, glittering on the pavement (in front of the gyu-don shop of all places)…a diamond ring.

This was no “accessory” - it was the real thing, if very old-looking, with two of the smaller diamonds missing. Needless to say, I thought here was my sign and I was wildly happy, weak in the knees. Thinking of the poor woman who got home and realised she had lost her ring, I took it straight to the police box and turned it in. And then I went home, to the family altar and thanked Jack for putting my mind at ease, for reassuring me with the sign I had asked for.

A little over six months later, I was looking for something on my desk in the study (a room I wasn’t really using then) and a pile of papers fell on the floor, all near the desk except for one that ended up on the other side of the room.

I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, then realized it was the receipt the police had given me for the ring and that it was now within the time frame where, if the ring had not been claimed, I, as the finder, had a right to claim it.

I was not particularly interested in claiming it per se. It had served its purpose for me and the best thing, to my mind, was that it find its way back to its rightful owner. But I had not received any call or letter thanking me for turning it in, which is the polite thing for a person to do when they get their property back because someone has turned it in. So, curious, I called the number and was told it had never been claimed and it was now mine if I wanted it.

What would happen if I didn’t claim it?, I asked. Some sort of sale or auction once a year of unclaimed property, apparently. This made me feel - I don’t know - forlorn - for the ring… it was very old, the fretwork worn thin, two diamonds missing. No one would be interested in such a thing I thought and I felt sad. So, I decided to claim it, to bring it home, to “give it a home.”

And I thought, “It was meant to come here. It was a sign that night. Now, I will put it on the altar in front of Jack’s picture and it will be a symbol, a reminder that I should have faith. Faith that Jack is always with me and will be there for me when I need him, always watching over me.”

Which is what she did and where the ring is today, Kathryn concludes. But, this is an old story, pre-DOTWW and as she said above, it is not so much about coming across a sign and recognizing it as such, but rather, she feels, about asking for a sign and being given what you need.

Angela received a wake up call just as she was getting lazy about working on herself:
“I was in Oxford, in the UK, several years ago now – 2004 maybe? - standing on the street down to the bridge over the Cherwell, waiting for two sisters to come and pick me up to take me to visit a mutual friend in Leicestershire.

I remember I was feeling good and relaxed… pretty damned pleased with myself in fact. (A bad sign in itself!) I had been in therapy for several years, doing workshops, reading, meditating, sorting out my past, facing my demons. Maybe I was done, I thought; maybe I was cooked. After all, it was all so hard. Why torture myself any further? Perhaps I it was time to pat myself on the back and metaphorically speaking, go back to sleep.

Turning around to avoid a sudden a gust of wind that blew dust in my eye (symbolic in itself) I went rigid with shock. Spray-painted across the wall of the medieval college was in every sense a shocking piece of graffiti. Just two words: WAKE UP!

Needless to say, I went back to work, and I’m still working.”

Nancy had lost all her energy and confidence until she found just what she needed to spur her on:
“The second PW WRITE I did at the first workshop asked why my Mom could not keep us safe. The third at the second workshop asked why I always put myself last, why I felt like apologizing for taking up room on this earth. Most of all I hated myself for being a bad mother. I realized that mostly I kept busy to stop feeling so hopeless and alone.

The day after completing the first level of DOTWW, Initiation, I went for my usual walk and there was some garbage along the beautiful path by the river. I got annoyed, thinking, Why doesn’t some one pick this up? Then I realised that I was someone and started to pick up some of the litter.

Walking on, I saw something. Right in the middle of the path, stuck there in the mud, was a power button. It was not attached to any machine, but a plastic button with the word POWER on it, right in the middle of my path. I dug it out, brought it home, and have it still, beside my kitchen sink.”

The last time I saw Nancy she was MC-ing a weekend conference that she had helped organize with confidence, humour and yes, power. Proof indeed that the world works in mysterious ways, if we allow it to so do. But this is the crunch: being open-minded enough to allow the mystery to reveal itself and so start making sense of what it means to be truly alive. We need more than our eyes to see beyond the obvious; we need curiosity, courage and will.

I live in a world of signs – metaphorical,magical yet eminently practical - offerings to help make sense of my life. Welcome to my world.

Much of the writing that follows is connected to the death of my mother and sister in 2007. I believe the piece that follows will be the last in this series and is therefore ready to be archived. I feel very blessed to have been enabled to write my way to healing, and so look forward to writing more cheerful stuff - or at the very least pro-active material - from here on. Thanks for bearing with me.

MY SISTER, MY SISTER
I did not know this until recently, but Bridget had two sisters. I was one. Judy was the other.

Judy is American and lives in California. I knew that she and Bridget were friends; my aunt in Scotland had told me about her - how she practised Tai Chi on the lawn every morning, how she so very much enjoyed my sister’s company. But she and I had never met, or indeed had any kind of contact.

When Bridget died, I knew of no immediate way to let Judy know. It was not until several weeks later that she received my letter from Japan, which she replied to by e-mail with shock and sadness, but tinged with relief that so much suffering was over. That was in late 2007.

Judy and I corresponded, until in the Spring of last year she announced that she was coming to Japan. She would be part of a tour group, but was thinking to add on a week to go see friends in Chiba, and meet up with me. I asked her to come and stay, and she agreed.

Neither of us I think knew what to expect, but in late Autumn 2008 she arrived. And what a well-timed entrance!

I was at Zushi station, seeing a friend from London off on a train to Narita International Airport, and after kissing her goodbye turned as the doors began to close - to bump straight into Judy, who had just arrived on another platform. Much amused by the synchronicity but somehow not at all surprised, we were both able to wave off Eliana on the next stage of her trip - Australia.

And so we began to talk, quickly realising that the Bridget she knew was not the Bridget I knew, and vice versa.

They had met at an arts club in Coventry. As a city manager on a determined career path, Judy was working for a year for the local city council on some kind of exchange scheme. Or maybe I got that wrong. She applied for a job and got one; she’s certainly capable of doing just that, and more.

She and Bridget were the same age, and hit it off. They had interests in common, and even went to London together: “Bridget knew someone who had a flat above one of The Beatles, so we went for a weekend. I shall never forget her coming downstairs wih two suitcases! She had no idea how to pack for a short trip away. Yes, we did see one The Beatles leaving the bulding to be carried away in a large car. But don’t ask me which one.”

After Judy returned to California, where she became the first female city manager in the state (and possibly the US, but she’s not so sure about that). She moved from city to city, making her mark, and every five years or so would return to the UK to spend a week with her friend.

Judy witnessed the changes wrought by Bridget’s condition over the next 40 years. She gave comfort when my sister’s husband deserted her (Bridget by the way NEVER deserted him, and was with him - or as close as she was allowed to get - until the end. She was like that: totally forgiving, 100 per cent loyal.) Judy was there at the end of the phone for her friend when Bridget was at her wits end with pain and despair.

By contrast, I was not. I was there for her, but in a different way: in the role of big bossy protective sister. I had grown up taking the lead, a role I found hard to relinquish.

Remembering how the hospital in Coventry had banned me from talking with her after the last operation, because Bridget got so upset whenever I tried to find out what was going on, I asked Judy if my sister liked me.

“I don’t know whether she liked you or not,” July replied bravely, as honestly as she could, “but I know she was afraid of you. She felt you were disappointed with her, that nothing she could do would ever please you.”

So there it was, out there: the truth as I knew it, had known it for many years.

It was then that Judy and I discovered something remarkable. We had the same birthday: May 30. We were both Gemini; we were twins. Mirrors of one another.

And so it became clear. How clever of Bridget to find Judy, to recognise in her the light-filled unconditional acceptance that as her older sister - stricken with guilt and a sense of familial responsibility - I was unable to provide.

I sent her the piece that follows - One Year On - and she made some astute observations - observations that matched those of my friend and therapist Azzah Manukow, who several years ago castigated me for showing her so much disrespect: “Your smallness keeps your greatness enslaved. When I try to free it, your smallness spits fire with no respect no control. Should I keep standing there and keep being spat at? You attack, take no responsibility, act like an innocent victim, act like your hard on yourself so you will be forgiven and round and round it goes till death do us part. Time to look at your mother’s shadow in yourself.”

How right she was. And how timely that Judy should write to me now with words that in echoing this, enable me to move on with recognition, acceptance and love for all the amazing women in my life - especially those who are so clearly enabling me to wake up and grow up. About time, wouldn’t you say?

Judy’s message to me: I loved the remembrances of Bridget, but I think you are too hard on yourself. It is time to forgive yourself that you didn’t match some “standard” as to what a sister should be. You were in Bridget’s life for a purpose. Maybe she needed a sister who was “tough” [don’t get caught up on this word] on her so that she would find that reserve inside to fight everyday to live an enriched life full of beauty, fun and grace and not let the travails of her life overwhelm her.

Judy, you have no idea how these words resonate for me, release me from guilt. I never imagined I had any constructive purpose in my sister’s life. Now I can accept that I may have been wrong, and can wrap up my anguish with a red ribbon of love, and the most dramatically extravagant bow (noun, not verb) this side of gratitude. Thankyou.
Zushi, February 2009

ONE YEAR ON
One year on, and all I can think about are Bridget’s shoes.

It is very early on September 11, 2008. Lying in bed in darkness, I know it’s time to stop turning over the past and place all my attention on the here and now. (The future? Unknown; it can take care of itself.)

It takes no time at all to dress. Minutes later I am driving up the hill behind the cottage to one of the viewing spots of the Lunnan Valley that my sister loved best. (Too late to walk; anyway, though way past dawn, it’s freezing.)

Parking the car in the gateway to the field, any light on the horizon to the south fades into grey, To the right, storm clouds darken the northern sky, except for a single slit-like breach through which a pale pink and blue sky hints a hopeful sign.

But then as this too clouds over, all hope is lost.

It is 7.53am. Close on twelve months since Bridget died.

A year ago exactly she was still alive. But her breathing slowing. Organs shutting down, slowly, imperceptibly but with surety; there’s no going back now. She is going forward.

It’s icy cold, through the open window of the car. An even chiller wind blows up the valley, rustling trees and grasses. A dog barks somewhere far away. (Sound carries here.) A partridge frets. Black cloud masses are moving at speed now, racing towards me. Two small birds fly – or are blown – overhead: one for sorrow, two for joy? Joy for her that soon all pain will be over, her timeline in this life complete.

A trace of rain? No, a tear trickling from the corner of my right eye. I am not aware that I am crying, but over the past days my eyes have been constantly watering. I am full to the brim with sorrow, and it’s spilling over; anyway, I need to let it go. After all, Bridget forgave me within hours of her letting go. Why can’t I forgive myself?

8.58. I get out of the car, go down into the field. Cry. Talk to her as I did the last time I was at her bedside, stroking her hands and face, singing nursery rhymes and asking if she remembered this incident from our childhood and that. Telling her not to be afraid: her faith would not let her down.

8.15. Rain and cloud have moved in, the view dissipated into mist. I whirl in Dervish-like circles, calling her name, frantic with apology for not being at her side when she died a year ago. I stop only when exhausted, shriven and - I can accept, for the moment at least - forgiven.

Back in the car, I cannot move. Remembering how she came to me as I slept on the floor of her home, wrapped in a duvet from off her bed. In a radiance of light, a glow so blinding that the effect was like a halo around her body, she say up smiling from her hospital bed, her arms opened wide in an embrace of love and forgiveness. Such a generosity of spirit.

I remember the numbed state in which I spent the next few days preparing for her funeral while sorting out all her belongings ready for the bungalow to be put up for sale. The haste may seem immodest but my time was limited by living abroad.

Finding dresses I remembered from our teenage years. Counting the sixty-three blouses that hung in one of her wardrobes. Wrapping the glass menagerie of trinkets that she had only just arranged in a cabinet. Taking down the fifty or more paintings, all signed BRIDGET, that decorated her walls.

Boxing up all the medical paraphanelia that ruled her life: drawers full of pills (fifty a day for as many years; no wonder her body was pushed to the limit); stacks of pads for this and that; implements for reaching shelves, turning handles, getting in and out of bed – a seemingly endless number of appliances and aids to make every day a possibility rather than a liability.

Yes, I had known how much she suffered. It was this that made me so horrified and afraid and, by association, so guilty about such feelings. But suddenly, inescapably, I had the full extent of her suffering - the day-to-day difficulties she lived with so uncomplainingly - in my face. So no way to avoid her reality: I had chosen to understand at a carefully positioned distance, while understanding nothing at all. The shame is immeasurable.

I found homes for nearly everything she owned. The stream of people who came to offer condolences and offer to help all left with some memory of their friend: a painting, a trinket, books, a piece of furniture, but mostly paintings – with everyone drawn to one thing or another; there was no argument, no dispute.

A lot of the practical stuff went to Arthritis Care, the organization she worked for so hard for over the years, raising awareness and facilitating courses on pain management. Her electric chair and recliner went to individuals in need; art materials to her local art guild; boxes of books and knick-knacks would be sold at AC’s annual bazaar to raise funds.

All this I supervised behind a mask of efficiency and calm, which crumbled only when placing a large trash bag full of her shoes outside for disposal. Those horrible brown clumpy built-up shoes that she so hated but, with titanium joints and one leg so much shorter than the other, could not wear anything else.

So this is how we end up, I wept, finding the whole situation woefully pitiful. A pile of ugly shoes that no one else could or want to wear , destined for the rubbish dump.

But Bridget would be cross with me for such a thought. Because she is so much bigger than I. Her courage is as large as the ocean she so loved to swim in, as high as the sky, in which she glided with so much joy and lightness of being. She was larger than life. An extraordinary woman who tried so hard not be defined by her disability, but in the eyes of many, including myself, was.

I find myself smiling in the drive back down the hill to a warm house and a pot of tea. Despite the tough re-run of her death, I appreciate how lucky I was to have had her in my life: Bridget the Bionic Woman, as the local newspaper headlined her so many times over the years. It’s true I didn’t deserve her, that I failed her miserably as a sister and a friend, but better to know this now than never. It gives me something to work on.
Forneth, September 2008

AND HERE IS THE MYSTERY
It has been observed that I see things that others do not observe or even notice.

The man sitting to my left, for example.

The seat opposite was empty, but when another man boarded at Ofuna, there was a flash of recognition, a shared moment of amusement. But then the new passenger ignored the possibility of sitting all the way to Tokyo, and turned his back to strap hang.

What was that about?

Neighbours, whose wives do not “get on”?

Gay, closet for sure? They know one another from a bar somewhere, or have even enjoyed a brief sexual encounter behind bushes in some unknown park?

Or they do not know one another at all. It was simply a soul recognition.

I see these things, but I rarely know what they mean.

And here is the mystery.
Spring, 2008 (Yokosuka line to Tokyo)

THE TIME OF OUR LIVES
I dream I write this. It flows like the dream it is, funny, moving and perceptive. On waking into another dream, the illusion of now, I realize I must get it down fast before it drifts away – drifts to the point I can’t even remember the first word let alone the last. That’s another interesting development: being unable to remember the simplest thing: the name of a friend met suddenly on the street, an adjective to describe a sunset, or any microsecond of the year I was aged five.

But I must stop thinking. Thinking gets in the way. Instead start with Viv’s card that arrived yesterday from Abingdon with a penned note attached saying that her mother is in hospital, “confused” having fallen again. She has had tests +CT scan. “I await results, hoping we’ll be able to spend what might be our last Christmas with her in the family home.” Then at the very end, “Awful news about our dear Mame.”

Mavis, with whom I shared a room at college over 45 years ago, who has another tumour up her nose. I mean whoever heard of cancer of the sinuses? I had to look it up online, and after further surfing found it symbolized holding onto deep emotional trauma. Now she has lost an eye, and has trouble seeing out of the other: enough of a trauma in itself. As she readied for surgery in Skelmanthorpe back in early summer I suggested over the phone that she wear a black eye patch like the archetypal pirate, which made her laugh. Even larger on stage than she is in regular daily life, she’s hugely courageous. Now the cancer (gan in Japanese) is back. Awful news about our dear Mame.

Diana in Manchester agrees but has troubles of her own. After questioning a cryptic note from the most lady-like of us all about haemmorroids, explanation came flying back: “Re banding… to stop them being so painful, the piles are tied or banded, so that eventually they drop off and comfort follows! That’s what I have been told, so I’m hoping it’s so. And that really is the bottom line…Hey Ho! We must keep smiling…”

Smiling. A good idea, despite all the stuff that keeps piling up. (Sorry Di, it just kind of slipped out – oh even worse!)

I knew something of how things would become as I passed from what in my parent’s day was called Middle Age but has been of late re-classified by my lot as New Middle Age. I know because my 93-year-old aunt Jo is the only one left of her generation of family and friends. It’s lonely, she says. A time of “miseries”. And what a time we’ve all been having of late: losing her older sister (my mother) in July, and then a favoured niece (my sister) in September.

It has left us all rocking on storm-battered waters. The boat never quite tipped over, but we’re all sick and tired of stomach-churning loss. Having said that, mostly I’m fine, my centre calm and accepting – but it doesn’t take much to cause a temporary short-circuiting dislocation. Then my personal programming of old kicks in, and I am off, floundering in emotional chaos.

Maybe some hair colour will help. Everyone says how distinguished I look now that my natural grey has grown through. But that’s not how I feel. I’m not ready to roll over - yet. So now there’s a simple choice (because they’re the only colours I have): Carrot or Mango. Mango sounds good to me. I need to feel juicy and luscious; it’s been a while…

Time filled up by those I know with aches and pains and a stream of defiant suffering: arthritic hands, knees, hips; ringing in the ears, or no sound altogether; declining eyesight (“Where did you buy such great glasses? Tokyu Hands? In other colours apart from red? How much?”).

Constipation, palpitations, varicose veins, aching teeth. My parents had all their teeth extracted when they were forty. Can you imagine? “We were middle-aged and everyone was poor after the war, so thought it’d be cheaper in the long run,” my mother told me. “ Even though there was nothing wrong with them, the dentist yanked them out one by one.”

So my contemporaries are being prematurely yanked out of this life into the next.

In the time I have been here: Charlie (who was born in South America, played drums for Ian Drury (yes, he was that rythmn stick) in London and Kiyoshiro in Tokyo, but met his match with cancer in Hammersmith).

Sarah, with whom I last chatted on the Tyseley - the narrow boat that she and Mike been operating as a travelling theatre company for over 20 years. It was early morning on the canal, with crisp mid-summer mist rising on the banks, and we and four actors chomping on bacon and egg sarnies, while Sarah, her bald head dancing with sunlight, cracked jokes about her terminal condition. Her ashes were scattered under a tree above Marsden in Yorkshire, and I am told her commemorative wake was as no other before or since. For one thing, Mike read a poem I had written (from afar) and then promptly fell off the stage. Typical, I can hear Sarah hooting. Typical!

Arlene – a Jewish New Yorker who ended up in Hampstead, compiling quizzes and editing cookery partworks. Our last meeting was in the French pub in Soho, and then in a fancy restaurant in Wardour Street, opposite the building where we had both worked for so many years. Even though she was so ill we reminisced and laughed so much I thought I would burst with a bitter-sweet effervescencemade up of equal parts of sadness and joy.

Alan, my first memorial service in Japan. Tomiko, my first funeral. Heather’s husband the second; then Akii ‘s dentist uncle – my first experience of Buddhist cremation that in its naked severity is shatteringly honest.

Hilary? Well Hilary – who was super-glue-bonded for two years through college with Mame, Viv, Di and me - died in Australia. Since then we have been the Forward-looking Four rather than the Ex-Fabulous Five, and emotionally if not physically close again.

I realize also that gan – a word that tends still to be whispered in Japan, if spoken at all - has taken them all. Each and every single one of those named above who has moved on. There are others too, now I come to think about it, with this link, this common enemy.

Cousin Liz (younger than me: breast cancer.)

Gillian, also in London, a calm, wise, kind and immensely able art editor, mother and friend.

Diana in Devon, who spent the last 20 years loving a man named Steve and a horse named Dave.

George who was bigger than life itself, and just as foooocked up as they say in Scooootland.

Leo, whose American ashes were scattered from his favourite beach on the Shonan coast, after which everyone partied until they dropped; he would surely have approved.

I have known no-one commit suicide. Have known no-one die in a car accident. Only cancer, heart failure (my father way back in 1962), toxic shock (an aunt, my sister) and old age. How interesting, I think. But see? Now I am back to thinking.

I don’t want to think. I want to be.

I don’t want to know the meaning of life - an impossible task.

I want to learn what it means to be alive. I want to experience life, live life to the point of being beyond life as we know it. Not through empty distractions, but through spirit and movement and change. So while I choose to go Mango, my focus is otherwise clear (even without my glasses). In wanting the time of my life, I acknowledge also that this is the time of our lives.
Zushi, November, 2007

SIX MONTHS ON - posted February 2008

In many ways the months since first my mother and then my sister died have been the hardest of my life. Who would have thought that I would miss them so much; for one thing they are not around to be moaned about and worried over. The result? A surprisingly large and painful gap.

I say surprisingly, because there were a clear sign that Bridget was leaving – a sunset so overwhelming in its rare beauty the night before she died, as witnessed on her behalf from her favourite spot above the Lunnan Valley in Perthshire, Scotland, that it defies description. Knowing that in taking the night train down to London and then back up to Coventry I might be too late to properly say goodbye, all I could do was spread my arms to encompass the gold upon gold upon gold and shout, For you Bridget, For you…

The initial mourning process was easy to chart once back in Japan, trying to pick up the pieces of day-to-day life. Several weeks of sheer exhaustion, giving way to numbness and then shock. Shock waves of mind-blowing guilt and sadness.

I wonder how I would have felt if I had not been visited by my sister the night after she died? A million times worse I can only imagine. Unable to bring myself to sleep in her bed (to which I can offer no rational explanation) I was sleeping on her floor rolled in a quilt and, I guess, dreaming - whatever “dreaming” is…

I was back in the room where I had found her at Walsgrave Hospital earlier in the day, weeping and stroking her face and limbs (still warm, still warm, but cooling…) talking, talking, even though she had quite clearly gone. There was no hint or sense of her hanging around, just the broken shell of her body left behind, and good riddance I dare say.

Suddenly, having lost a good thirty years and emitting rays of light that created an aura shooting and sparkling with energy, she slowly but smoothly sat up, stretching out her arms to embrace me. She was smiling, joyous, totally forgiving.

Yet despite this munificent gesture, which is as clear to me as daylight, still I am finding it so hard to forgive myself for my failure as not just a sister, but a human being. I am kinder to strangers than I ever was to her, and that’s the truth.

After the guilt and sadness, a weekend of extraordinarily impatient intolerant anger, followed by a swift falling away of emotion into peacefulness, upon which I floated for a month or so. Good, I thought, the worst is over. But no, it was quite simply the calm before the onset of another far more insidious internal storm.

I began to forget things, mess things up. I missed appointments, got appointments mixed up, culminating in my taking Akii to Osaka one weekend to celebrate his birthday when in fact I was booked to facilitate writing workshops at a womens’ conference in Shizuoka Prefecture. That scared me. How could I have made such a mistake? How COULD that have happened?

I seemed to be operating in a befuddled state of dreamtime. I gazed at the world as if in a state of separation - especially odd because I had become so much more “present” in recent years; now life passed before my eyes like one of those flicker books that storyboard cinematic action.

Just before Christmas I experienced another bout of diverticulitis (an infection in the large intestine) – re-enacting the drama of four years previously when I spent eight days “unblocking” in Ofuna Chuo Byoin. That time, not knowing what was wrong, I had allowed the symptoms to develop until the pain was unmanageable. This time, I recognised the ouch in the gut for what it was, and ran. I needed unblocking again. The message was clear, just as it had been in 2004, when I spent my time in bed writing myself clear, while across the city a neon sign pinked ALIVE twenty-four hours a day. It’s true: that week I wrote myself alive.

While my first week of this new year was spent in Toronto, holed up in Parkdale with daughter and grandson (I arrived in a snow storm, the next morning it was minus 23), Akii was going through miseries of his own – childhood chickenpox-related shingles. Very painful and stress-related, it started him thinking about work, and what it was he really wanted out the rest of his life. How he wanted to spend his time from hereon. The last six months have taken their toll on him as well as me. We have both “aged”.

As we headed towards Osaka for a spot of R&R at the end of January, and opened our bento lunch boxes (one of the joys of travel in Japan), I popped a modest portion of celebratory red rice (sekigohan) into my mouth and spat out half a tooth.

My teeth have been aching so much of late, their sensitivity - I read - a reflection of death.

The next night Akii and I became temporarily disengaged; R&R went out of the proverbial window. In taking the key to our room, and starting to chat with a young man who had got married that very morning, he left me (after immersion in a bubbling hotspring bath) in a freezing corridor. My body heat drained away, then my energy and finally all my courage; he had forgotten me. Such a rare occurrence that it felt like the end of the world.

The day after his birthday, I came clean about missing the conference. The day after that that I fell in my study. Walking between a box I was trying to pack and my desk to get some tape, I went flying, slipping on the rug maybe. My forehead hit the metal strut of my filing system; my head hit the desk. I remember sitting there, screaming at myself in pain and fright, Now what you done you stupid bitch!?! I could see nothing through a waterfall of blood.

As is always the way, it could have been a lot worse: two stitches above my eye (I have only half an eyebrow which in the vanity of youth I would have found devastating, but now simply regard as funny) and ten staples in my scalp.

Blood letting was once commonplace as a means to eliminate toxins from the blood stream and “dis-ease” from the body at large. I’ve certainly felt a lot better since …since the shock wore off, painkillers and antibiotics passed through my system, staples and stitches were taken out.

So what? Body and soul are telling me to slow down? Trouble is, the egotistically driven part of Angela wants to speed up! There is so much to do, so much still unexplored, unrealized, unachieved. Someone once described me as the most driven person she had ever known, and for the first time I acknowledge she may be right.

And then, I believe, came closure. Or maybe another step in a long and complex process. How interesting that this readjustment could go on for years - as long as I survive to tell the story!

I was not sure about staying over at RBR, where I am currently teaching two courses, but it seemed a good idea: save myself the long trek back to Zushi after Affirmation on Thursday, to only have to return the next morning for my shift at NHK and then Initiation in the evening.

I rarely stay overnight in Tokyo these days, so it seemed quite the adventure. I had a sleeping bag, and after waving off all the writers at just after 10pm, created a nest in the corner of the ground floor (first floor in Japan) studio A exhibition of photographs had just gone up on the walls – matsuri (festivals) – but I was too tired to take close note. Instead I climbed into the bag atop a pile of yoga mats, feeling uncommonly smug in the knowledge that these days I can sleep anywhere, anyhow.

Ha! Or ara, as they say here.

It was not hard to relax. I was tired. Really tired. But sleep would not come, and I tossed and turned, turned and tossed, thought and pondered, wishing away many of the things that had unconsidered sprung to my lips during class, and turning over all the things I could have more usefully said. It was at that this point I began to hear the voices.

Nothing was distinct, only the sound of whispering, then a soft tidal chattering and laughing, like waves breaking on the shoreline. Where was it coming from? As I turned over towards the doorway, I saw a mist, sometimes still but then moving, swirling. At the same time I heard the front door open and close and indistinct voices rising and falling, muttering and softening, wreathing and breaking…

Initially I was bemused. Then irritated. It was kind of them (whoever “they” were) not to come in, come closer, but could they not see – understand- how tired I was, that I was trying to sleep? It was so thoughtless and inconsiderate, I mean really… I tossed and turned back and forth, willing them to be quiet, but then eventually lost my temper and began to weep with fury, opening my mouth to shout SHUT UP! GO AWAY! I HAVE TO SLEEP! But strangely no words emerged, they were stuck in my throat; I was voiceless. Or was I?

It was at this point I wondered if I was dreaming? I have become remarkably adept over the years at waking myself from nightmares. So I woke up, sat up, and there was only moonlight and an extraordinary shining silence and peace throughout the house. Had I dreamed the whole thing? Had I in fact been shouting in my sleep? How could that have been when my memory now is as clear as at that time: I was there, it did happen, and yet… Which was real, then or now? Or was I simply slipping along in two parallel time frames?

It is said that the whole of Minato Ward was once covered with graveyards, which is why RBR asked Christine to clear the house before staff moved in. She (visiting from Australia) had found a samurai lurking in a closet upstairs, and identified a few other souls wandering in limbo, but thought she had persuaded them all to move on.

I believe her. My phantasmagorical beings were very definitely from a different world, a different time. From my imagination some might say. Yet what is imagination? Where does it come from and what is it based upon? Maybe the sum of our past life experience; maybe we are simply remembering on a subconscious level, the innumerable lives we have lived before.

Why are some people more imaginative than others? They aren’t. Maybe – I say maybe because of course we don’t know (except on the gut level of pure intuition) - they are simply more awake, and in this improved consciousness, more receptive and open to memory. Or could it be that some souls have more memories than others, simply because they have been around for longer resolving their karma, taking their time to evolve.

When I woke the next morning, the house was full of sunshine, and I saw that I had been lying beneath a monochrome photograph of men carrying mikoshi photographed through a spray of light-splashed water – spectators throwing buckets of water to help them cool down. The title: Purification.

Deciding to walk down to Hiro through Arisugawa Park, I took the low road (typically far harder for me to negotiate) and found a waterfall. It was surprisingly forceful for its size, commanding attention. The sound was crisp, clean and clear, quite unlike all those indistinct mumblings of the night before.

Waterfall. Bloodfall.

Purifying. Cleansing.

I would buy the photograph, I decided there and then. And as I stood to move on, a white heron (sasagi in Japanese) poked its head out of a bush to my right to walk quietly, trustingly and sedately across my path towards the water.

No coincidence for sure that we had visited Himeji-jo (White Heron Castle) near Osaka just days before, for what does this bird symbolise? Good fortune (despite hiccups we continue to move forward together after 20 years); intense concentration and decisive action (despite all I picked myself up off the floor to get myself to my neighbour and hence to hospital to be stitched up); a warning of fire and drought (that’s good, I have felt cold and my eyes have been “weeping” throughout the winter; I need to warm up, dry out as long as it doesn’t go too far).

In Welsh Celtic mythology, the heron – Crevr – was regarded as the primal creator and giver of life. In Arthurian legend, the Lady of the Lake -the “shape-shifting goddess Rhiannon” - often took its form. (Lauren will be interested in this I think; the heroine of one of her writing projects is named Rhiannon.)

In Greek mythology, the heron was an emblem of Atlantis. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, employed a heron as one of her divine messengers.

Herons are fabled also to be the friends of crows. I think of all those crows that presaged my mother’s death, especially when I read that in Japan (and China) a heron and a crow may be pictured together as a symbol of the yin-yang: balance.

As if this is not enough food for thought, it seems that early Christians believed herons shed tears of blood under stress. And that like many wading birds (because of eating frogs, snakes and other dark and slimey things) they are images of the eternal struggle between good and evil.

There followed a week of calm reflection. The following Thursday, sadness welled up all over again. Today, Saturday, a Spring wind is rattling the roof tiles, and last fragment of frozen snow, hunched up against a stone lantern in the garden gave up the ghost. We will see.

In April, I will meet the others back in Coventry to lay what remains of Bridget’s cremains along with those of her parents, in the grounds of St James’s Church. This is where she was christened and remained a faithful member of the congregation to the end, sixty-three years later. We both, together with our cousin Alison, attended my aunt Jo’s marriage there as bridesmaids in 1951. A few years later I was confirmed there as a Church of England Anglican, only to turn my back on any form of religion soon after. My father became active after he became ill; scared for sure so hedging his bets. My mother? Well she just wanted to be with him. And Bridget wanted to be with her. So there they all will be, except of course they wont. Bridget especially.

Because most of her remains were scattered around the airfield, from which she flew so many times. It was a clear and sunny day but chilly Lee wrote to me soon after:

“We walked up the side of the airfield and gathered round a nice spot where you could see the horizon, the forest and the gliders taking off.

“We had a very short service where everyone talked about Bridget, poems were read, the Reverend said the religious parts and then George and I scattered the ashes over the field.

“Then they (members of the fcliding club) offered to take me and Su up for free. I put some of the remaining ashes into the poem I had read and then went up in the glider, across Stratford upon Avon, over the fields and back to the landing strip, so Bridget got her last flight. With mist across the ground, it looked quite magical.”

We have those bits of ashes, also some in the flask that her partner George took home with him. So those will go into the small tin box that Akii bought me in Mexico early last year – it has a painted winged cherub in relief on the top, and is lined with mirror, to reflect her goodness. I’m grateful to the church for being so accommodating; it was a bit of a nightmare when told that ecclesiastical rules decreed the memorial – a piece of granite which had born my father’s name alone for so many years until joined by that of his wife last summer - could not carry their daughter’s name without physical remains being interred.

Just as those gathered at the airfield were completing the ritual scattering, one of the gliders took off – SWOOOSH - against a re-run of Bridget’s perfect sunset. Lee says it was like a glider fly by, with perfect timing. Several people were overcome emotionally, bursting into tears, he reports. Everyone had goosebumps.

FURTHER DISTRACTIONS - THE 55-WORD STORY
After writer-friend Adam passed on the following website from the States - www.writing.com/main/forums/item_id/1253724 - I found myself scribbling with renewed passion: this was fun, but also much harder than it first appeared. Anyway, here are my best four in descending order of success (by my token at least):

BERRY PICKER
My fingers taste of raspberries, blood, sweat and dust. Itinerant workers pick lines of canes that stretch to where the local horizon meets the sky in a stained dazzle of light. I am 12, earning pennies a pound; my first paying job. Beside me, a tinker blows a raspberry, and fruit blows to the wind. [55]

SNOWDROPS
At Burnside, Lexie digs up a clump of snowdrops to take to my mother, which makes her weep: she wants to go home. In Toronto, Ross sweeps snow from the deck. Just as flowers burst into bloom in the heat of a Scottish retirement room, boom! His spade dislodges a huge accumulation, and snow drops. [55]

WAITING FOR GERALDINE
Title of a play? Epic poem? A 55-word slice of life: I’m early; she’ll be on time, work willing. More likely the translation she’s working on will be ahead of time. But she’s telling no-one, the client especially. Because tomorrow she’s out of here, off to Italy, which she loves even more than words. [55]

YOGA SARARIMAN
My kacho (“superior”) at NHK – Japan’s state-owned broadcasting network– lays his head on a book on his desk and grasps his ankles. “Tsukareta da yo!” he groans; I’m knackered. Nothing to do with 18 holes this time, but yoga. Twice a week in Shibuya, where at 65 he’s the oldest but cares not a jot. [56 - well, close!) ]

WRITE OF PASSAGE 2
Reading that last line of Write of Passage 1, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Both, together, perhaps? Because the path that appeared to be clearing so beautifully, was without warning blocked by an enormous landslide.

Akii says the crows returned in late August, not in the same numbers, but in a large enough group and making enough noise for him to take note. My own antennae were less sensitive, numbed perhaps from the effects of my mother’s death just weeks before.

I had always intended to return to the cottage in Scotland, passed on to my sister and myself two years ago, to put in heating for the winter. In late 2005 I bought out Bridget’s share so that she could buy the home of her dreams in the Midland’s town where she was born; now that her mother’s influence had gone, she was looking forward to a new freedom.

Or was she? After all, as a sick child who had grown into an immeasurably challenged adult, Bridget had lost her emotional touchstone. We were all surprised and relieved at how well she had coped with her mother’s death. Now I wonder whether on a subconscious level there was another agenda in operation: that put quite simply she could not, did not want to live without her.

Operation…oh, the irony of that word. In August 2006 Bridget had yet another joint replaced. This time it was her left elbow, and recovery was impeded. A super-bug infection had set in (at the time of the op, her surgeon admitted the morning she died) and the medical profession had battled for a year to save her mobility.

I knew Bridget was ill before I left Japan in late August. Indeed I had been banned by hospital staff from speaking to my sister because I “upset her�?. The upset was due to my increasingly desperate attempts to try and find out what was going on, with questions being blocked right, left and centre. Sadly my little sister (born 29 April 1944) interpreted my frustration as bullying. I see now that as a born-again Christian who accepted that God knew what He was doing is testing her so relentlessly, she was frightened of my directness, my demands for explanation and action. There was a large part of her that did not want to know, maybe did not need to know.

I went up to Coventry the day after I arrived, talked with a doctor, and then took the night train to Scotland. The following Friday, informed that she was “not doing well�?, I flew down from Edinburgh. By this time she was slipping into unconciousness. As I talked to her, sang to her, held and stroked her hands, her breathing became agitated and her face flushed as she struggled to open her eyes. Hearing is the last of our faculties to go, apparently, though whether she knew it was me and understood what I was saying I’m not sure. I like to think so, because there was a lot I needed to say.

Over the next few days, she slipped deeper and deeper into unconciousness, with talk of another op and further desperate measures. Being told she was in septic shock and suffering multiple organ breakdown, I saw no reason to prolong her agony and asked the staff simply to make her comfortable. Due to fly back to Japan on September 11 and told that she was sinking fast, I went down by the night train to Euston as planned, from where I took the 8.10am to Coventry and tore up my return ticket. When I arrived, she had gone, taking her last breath at 8.14.

As her next-of-kin, there was much to do. Organise the funeral and wake, clear her home, put the house on the market, support her devastated partner George (and keep him busy). Lee driving up several times from London) was a tower of strength. Akii came from Japan for four days, Buffy from Toronto for the day of the funeral itself. Mostly I slept alone on Bridget’s floor, rolled in a duvet; I could not bring myself to sleep in her bed.

The funeral was amazing, attended by 250 and with standing room only in the church. The top of the plain unvarnished wooden casket was flooded with red roses – her favourite flower. George, Lee and Buffy all read poems. The head of Arthritis Care Coventry spoke movingly; the vicar also, beside himself with excitement to have such a large congregation and addressing most of his evangelicalism towards the heathen on the front row!

During silent reflection, a soprano and tenor sang Panus Angelicus. The coffin was carried out to “Trumpets shall sound…�? from Handel’s Messiah. As for the hymns, there were so many friends from the choral groups she sang with that the waves of glorious sound much have surely reached into the valleys and chapels of the Rhondha to put male Welsh choirs to shame.

To add a note of questionable hilarity to the proceedings (but let’s face it, some light relief will surely not come amiss) little did we know what during the service, a double-decker bus had sideswiped a visitor’s car and the hearse, with a resulting frantic dash to find a replacement by the time we emerged in all innocence from the church. “Driven by a young woman, Polish of course,�? I was informed in a tone that implied such accidents could only be the fault of foreign workers, a prejudice that did not go down well with this female foreign worker in a distant land.

I had been told to cater for 120 in the church hall. So much food was left over that afterwards we set about helping staff bag it up for distribution to various shelters throughout the city. Thanks to Bridget, the homeless of Coventry ate very well that night.

For the rest, I will allow my own tribute to help fill in the gaps. For now, facing not only life without Mother, but life after Bridget, there are no half measures to my emotions: my glass either brimmeth over, or stands as empty and dry as desert.

The I-Ching was right when it read – so long ago now - as ‘Abysmal’. But I have not fallen, nor allowed myself to be swept over the edge. Deep down I know I shall be stronger for having so many steep learning curves thrown my way. It is only on the surface that I am sellotaping the fragments of my new truly orphan life together.
****
Eulogy for BRIDGET ANNE BATEMAN (nee Loader) – 20 September 2007
St James’s Church, Stivichall, Coventry, Warwickshire, UK

Looking out over this sea of faces, I can well imagine Bridget’s amazement. She once told me that her life had not been ruled by pain, but rather rejection. This began apparently when I went away to college – the year in which symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis began to manifest. Three years later I moved to London, our father died, and our mother relocated to Scotland to be near her sister. The break up of Bridget’s marriage increased her sensitivity; later I moved to Japan.

While keeping in touch and remaining close, the week since her death on September 11 has been a saluatory experience. Clearing the home she loved so much – the bungalow she had dreamed of for so many years but was enabled to move into only 13 months ago, along with her piano, tapestry frames and wool, art supplies, with raised beds in the garden for growing the brightly coloured flowers she loved so much – woke me to the strength of her power, and the depth and richness of her life. Drawers filled with pills – 50 to be taken a day for 45 years – and cupboards stuffed with mobility appliances, finally brought home the extent of her suffering.

From the stream of friends coming to her door with cards and offers of support, I learned how much she was respected and admired. I heard her described as BRAVE and DARING, SPIRITED, INSPIRATIONAL, DETERMINED, COURAGEOUS, CHEERFUL, A FIGHTER (this from the staff of Walsgrave University Hospital, where she died). There was also much mention of her ENTHUSIASM FOR LIFE.

There were also words like INFURIATING and DEMANDING. Bridget lived for the moment. When she decided she wanted to do something, nothing world stop her. It was most probably her stubborn decision to make her 130th flight the day after interring her mother’s ashes – a symbol perhaps of her new-found freedom and happiness with partner George – that contributed to her sudden death. She waited in searing heat for seven hours at Stratford Flying Club to climb aboard one of her beloved gliders, by which time an already septic elbow – the joint replaced in August last year - was badly swollen. Nothing would change her mind; she never wanted to hear about the possible negative consequences of any actions – a source of considerable frustration to those who loved her and cared about her. To Bridget, it was simple: she wanted to fly, she chose to fly, and that was that. Apparently she was ecstatically happy when she landed, even though already feeling very unwell – a successful dress rehearsal perhaps for her final flight on September 11.

Two extracts written in cards and letters of condolence stick in my mind: BRIDGET WAS A REAL TROOPER. SHE TAUGHT ME SOMETHING ABOUT PERSEVERANCE AND SHE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FORWARD TO HER NEXT PROJECT. Also, BRIDGET WILL BE SADLY MISSED BY HER FRIENDS.

Bridget cared very much for the people in her life. Although in many ways she was chaotic, she could also be remarkably organized. I am thinking of the boxes found in her wardrobe: one containing greetings cards filed under Birthdays, Weddings, Anniversaries, Newborns, and so on; another with cards prepared for posting, with initials in one corner and the date to be posted in the other. There was even one for me, for 2008.

Her will apart, she left a three-page hand-written and signed (but undated) list of small bequests, wanting for example her art books to go to the Coventry Art Guild, a pile of lovingly assembled scrapbooks of programmes, fliers and cuttings to go to Coventry Cathedral’s St Michael’s Singers, with whom she proudly sang for many years, and her paintings and embroidered cushions to be distributed between family and dearest friends.

Among her personal cuttings – articles written about Bridget over the years – three stand out in my mind: MEET THE CITY’S OWN BIONIC WOMAN, dated May 16, 2001, in which Bridget is described as a BATTLING COVENTRY WOMAN WHO WAS USING HER OWN EXPERIENCE OF FIGHTING ARTHRITIS TO HELP OTHERS WITH THE CONIDITION. It also features an X-ray of, quote: BRIDGET’S INCREDIBLE SKELETON!

Soon after, the famed red Arrows flying team put on a display for one of their most fervent admirers – Bridget always did an eye for handsome young daredevils! FABULOUS FLYPAST FOR BIONIC BRIDGET, read an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph of August 6.

There was also a far older piece, published in Arthritis Care’s newspaper in 1980 – one that I had completely forgotten about. Under the prophetic headline, BRIDGET IS NOW A HIGH FLIER, it begins:

“When Bridget Bateman was 16, she went skating and fell on the ice. Fluid settled on one of her bruised knees and though it was aspirated three times, it remained swollen and painful.
Then the other knee became affected and all over her body joints began to stiffen and give pain. The diagnosis? Still Disease, now renamed Junior Polyarthritis. The prognosis in those early days? Poor.�?

The article goes on to chart the progress of the disease and the development of its treatment over the years. It recounts how Bridget was on the cutting edge of hip replacement surgery at Wrightington Hospital near Wigan throughout the 1970s and 1980s. How sometimes the disease would go into remission, giving rise to enormous optimism, but then cruelly flaring up again, to everyone’s distress. But she never gave up, and in doing so was able to help other sufferers of RA in the city and throughout the Midlands with pain management courses and ongoing support. The article concludes:

“The friends and relative of arthritics should also take heart. It is a depressing and guild-ridden experience to see a close relative suffering continual pain and debilitation, especially when one is healthy oneself. I should know. Bridget is my sister.�?

My sister. My sister, who also in 1980 was smiled upon by the Queen and the next week interviewed on the radio.

My sister, who always lived within a mile of where she was born at 40 Ranulf Croft in Cheylesmore, but had no fear of heights or speed. How wonderfully mysterious this is to me, who has traveled the globe and yet suffers vertigo and hates amusement parks. I can only imagine that Bridget has been in training for a heavenly troop of angels who travel faster than the speed of light.

My sister, who felt free only in the air and in water. Above her conputor, upon which I typed this, are certificates for her swimming achievements – she began with 40 metres, and finally reached 400! Such guts.

My sister, who was highly commended in the year 2000 for the WHITBREAD VOLUNTEER ACTIONS AWARDS IN RECOGNITION OF OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY.

Bridget Anne – known to me as Bridget the Fidget (because as a small child she could never sit still, and at the dinner table our father was always telling me to sit up straight and her to stop fidgeting) - was a woman of many parts. True some were manufactured from titanium, but her essence was made up of pure love and simple faith. It is for these qualities – the most essential and beautiful of human attributes – that she will be missed by us all.

Paying tribute to Bridget’s strengths and accomplishments is no mean task. Best perhaps to draw towards some kind of conclusion with her own words, as dictated to a reporter, who had asked her to advise others in a similar situation.

MY KEY ADVICE, said Bridget – says Bridget! – is DON’T GIVE IN. KEEP GOING, AND KEEP MOVING. DON’T JUST SIT DOWN AND LET IT CONTROL YOUR LIFE – the “it�? in her own case being arthritis, but which could just as easily be MS, depression or cancer. THERE’S ALWAYS HOPE. YOU CAN MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER.

The Friday before last I talked with Bridget in hospital – our last conversation. She was in great discomfort, but typically uncomplaining, saying only over and over again, “Angela, I’ve had enough. I want to go home.�?

Now that she has joined our mother and father and all our ancestors in the Glory, we can respect her choice, her decision - and wish her well. Welcome home Bridget.

Zushi, October 2007

Angela wrote what follows after she returned to Japan after her mother’s funeral on July 11. She is happy to share it.

WRITE OF PASSAGE 1

We used to joke about it, my sister and I: Life after Mother.

Actually, it was not a joke. Bridget would make one of her long drawn-out appalled “Ohhhhhhh Angela…(you are [seriously] awful)�? kind of responses, before admitting once again that with the pressure of 30 years traveling up to Scotland for every Easter, Christmas, summer holiday et al, she was beginning to wonder if she would ever have a life of her own. You only have to see how far I had run to escape our mother’s emotional machinations to grasp the complexity of my own: Japan: as far around the globe as it is possible to go before starting the return journey.

Anyway, here we are: ten days into life without Gwendoline Edna Loader nee Price: born 4 September 1910 - died 3.30pm, 3 July 2007.

Her very own Independence Day.

On July 2, she was found by staff at Stormont Lodge Residential Home in Blairgowrie, sitting as per usual in her electric recliner, but Not Herself. An e-mail opened here at midnight Japan-time (I had what can only be described as A Feeling) offered up the facts:

Monday 16.40

Hello
I wanted to let you know that your mother has taken unwell this afternoon. Gwen appears to have possibly had a stroke. We are awaiting the doctor coming to see her and have informed Mrs Speid. You may wish to contact us later, the phone number being 01250 872853.
With kind regards
Kristine Blackbourn

The following day, my mother woke, ate a teaspoonful of cereal, and spoke to her carers. As Kristine explained by a mail that I read at 10.30pm:

Tuesday 14.35

Hello
Gwen had a comfortable night and managed a little breakfast, by late morning she was very tired again. We are keeping her comfortable in bed. Dr Shaw visited again, her blood pressure is low which is indicative of either a heart or cerebral problem, most likely due to age. She is not in any pain and is peaceful. Dr Shaw will return tomorrow unless we call him again before then. Mrs Speid (her younger sister) is aware of Gwen`s condition, I have tried to contact Bridget and left a message on her answer machine, but I do not have an email address for her. Not much more I can say; we will keep her as comfortable as possible.
Kind regards
Kristine

What I did not know then but learned later was that my aunt Jo (the afore-mentioned Mrs Speid), had arrived around midday, to sit and hold and stroke her sister’s hand for an hour. By this point, curled on her side on a rubber sheet, moaning slightly (or maybe humming? singing?) sans teeth, sans hairnet, sans everything, Jo says it was hard to know if my mother was in any state of awareness that we might comprehend. Jo returned home six miles away, driven by kind neighbour Lexie. A couple of hours later – at 3.35pm to be exact - , Kristine rang my aunt to say that Gwen had minutes before passed over, “quietly and peacefully�?. Apparently there was no pain, no apparent struggle, simply a swift and gentle slipping away.

Knowing no more than that second e-mail from Kristine I had gone to bed around 12.30am, but been quite unable to sleep – that kind of mind-racing tossing and turning that more usually coincides with the full moon. When the phone rang through the warm humid darkness – rainy season (tsuyu) had just arrived from the south - I was not surprised, and yet the news was somehow still shocking. My mother had died. I was so far away. There was so much to do. And no-one else to do it. At 93 Jo had abrogated all responsibility; severely afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis, my sister was both distraught and incapable.

Unable to sleep, I wandered the house while Akii breathed deep and easy on the futon. I did not want to wake him. He had troubles of his own, and was not feeling well; corporate-induced hypertension the suspect. The man is just too stoically responsible for his own good.

Plans. Scenarios. Anxieties. Memories. Considerations. Memories, memories, memories flooding fast and sweet, sad and furious.

Walking down the stairs at around 4am, just ahead of dawn, I was swept with a sudden icy cold, hair stood up all over my body and I was my mother. That was how it felt. That was my experience, my perception. She was in me, she became me, and then she went away and left me alone. This was when I first cried.

Tears are only part of the story. A lot of water is falling.

The last time I cried was on a visit in late 2006, while dividing my time between spending time with my mother and renovating the cottage she had so unwillingly vacated the year before. Feeling the need to clear the air between us, I had apologized for being such a difficult daughter, and asked for forgiveness. In one of her rare moments of choosing to be wholly in the present, she lifted her head, looked me straight in the eye and said quietly: Angela, I have always forgiven you.

Having allowed the floodgates to open, only one question remained: had I forgiven her.

Back in 2005 I had received a message from my mother. Even by this time she was finding it hard to write, so neighbour Lexie had addressed the envelope. But the familiar loopy scrawl on the note was her own - the last communication proper on paper I was ever to receive from the woman who bore me, fed and clothed me, and in large part led – or drove - me to become the woman I am now.

Dear Angela,
Just in case the bank didn’t accept my cheque, here is another one.
If they did, here is another for yourself,
With love,
Mother xxx

Inside the fold of the cheque, a small photograph: a faded black and white snapped at a Victory Day street party in Coventry in 1945. It is here in front of me now.

Aged four and tasting my first ice-cream, I am looking straight at the camera with a quizzically pained expression, as if unsure what to make of the strange cold sweet stuff on the plate and in the spoon – or maybe the insecurities of the previous four years. I have two bows in my hair and am wearing a gingham check dress over an embroidered blouse that my mother made for me. Bent down on her knees so that she is looking up at me, she is in profile, smiling, laughing even. Her plain jacket looks more crudely homemade; her hair is a mess, as if just pulled out of curlers with no time for a brush and comb. Funny that! A fashionista tending to the slovenly. Her expression though is clear and full of pleasure; by comparison I look inwardly bruised somehow, as if life is already getting me down. I don’t know where she had found this snapshot, or indeed how; she was in a very reduced state by that time.

Did my mother always have this picture of us together tucked away somewhere close to hand? Or had she gone looking? No matter: the message translated as a clear attempt to reach out over 60 years of difficulty and make amends. She and me. Me and her. Why then was it always so hard?

I remember our last fight, tussling over the twin tub in the kitchen at the cottage. I was trying to help by doing the washing (or rather try prove myself the adult I clearly was not by taking control). She knew her machine and I was doing it all wrong. As usual, I lost my rag first and tried to push her away. She retaliated and this time I pushed so hard she nearly fell over. I was 60 at the time, and she 90. I am so appalled – ashamed – to put this pathetic incident down on paper that even now I don’t know whether to laugh or cry… maybe hand myself over to the police for abuse of the aged?

Laughter is mostly good (unless maniacal). Tears are good at times. Deluge is another matter.

The last two days I saw my mother in June, she could neither see nor hear me. That is what she claimed anyhow. When carers and staff came into the room, she saw them, heard them, replied and was sweetness itself. Making me a deaf, dumb and blind spot was common practice when I was readying to leave for London and the long flight back to Japan. A tactic so well-honed I doubt she even knew she was doing it anymore; it just came ‘natural’. Sometimes I could even laugh it off, but not that last day, when I visited twice in a desperate attempt to “get through�?.

Our last meeting began well. I read two quotations I had found among her old sheet music – for piano and cello. Writ in gothic script and illustrated like a medieval manuscript, and covered with tissue paper between yellow covers, they had been obviously regarded as important. Both talked about trusting in God and angels in terms of dying. She seemed to like them, found them soothing, asked that I read them again.

She then remembered that she was not happy – and re-focussed her attention on pain. Though real or imagined it was hard to say; I would say that pain is pain, whatever its origin. Her hand moved down below her blanket, crept down over her stomach… It was at this point (as many times before), that she said she wished she was dead.

“You know�?, I replied as gently as possible, “if that is how you really feel, why don’t you just let go? You have nothing here to worry about. Bridget has her new bungalow and George. Lee has Su (they had married on June 2) and appear ecstaticially happy. Buffy is well settled in Toronto, and now you have a great-grandson…�?

“Maxford, she murmered, gazing across my shoulder at a photo of him on the wall; small he may have been but she could see him alright!

“Yes, Max. Isn’t he lovely? Do you remember Buffy and Ross bringing him to see you just before Christmas last year? He sat on your lap and when you put out your hand – because he equates fingers with thumb-sucking - he tried to suck your own. Akii and I are good. Your cottage is in caring hands. Jo is content and it’s nice to have her down the road for at least a few weeks a year. If you are really so unhappy, what is it that you are waiting for? Have you considered that you are living so long because maybe you still have something to do?�?

“Like what?�?

“Like let Bridget go.�?

My mother looked at me. I knew she knew what I was getting at.

“You need to let go of Bridget emotionally. She loves you but she doesn’t need you anymore. And that is how it should be. She’s a grown woman. She is not a possession, created for your personal emotional attachment and fulfillment. I know these feelings grew out of a mother’s instinct to protect her child, but she’s a child no longer. She has her own path. Let her go.�?

Glancing out of the window, on what was otherwise a perfectly lovely day, I was surprised to observe that a huge black cloud had positioned itself overhead. As I left Stormont, upset that my mother had resorted to not hearing me again in a last ditch stand for sympathy, the heavens open. By the time I reached the car all surface irritation had been washed away: I was drenched. By the time I stumbled into the garage (to which I was returning the rented vehicle) I could have been wrung out like the proverbial wet rag.

Being driven back, the garage owner’s son-in-law shook his head as he tried to peer through the windscreen and avoid torrents of water seeking routes across the road. He had never before seen rain like it, he said. Ever. With my mother behind me, quickly recovered from her drama and no doubt reaching for her book and a chocolate or a glass of lemonade for solace, I could think only about my washing, hung up on the line under the laburnum – how I would dry it in time to leave for the night train from Inverness back to Euston – and my box of tools left outside which, by that time had to be full of fast-rusting water.

When we reached Forneth, the rain began to clear and the road ran near dry. Half a mile on my washing flapped in fresh dry air and the sun beat cheerfully down on my toolbox. Weird, we agreed. The cottage had to be charmed, sitting as it does in Perthshire’s beautiful Lunan Valley – the valley of the moon.

Back in Japan, rainy season, called “tsuyu�? was in full moisture-driven swing. The skies were grey and ominous, the air heavy and hot; my garden was a mess of vegetal decay, the kitchen and bathroom smelled of mould.

Back in the UK, rain continued to fall – especially in England. There was flooding. Most blamed climate change. Those who remembered talked of the old wet British summer resurrecting itself after the hottest driest summer on record in 2006. (In fact, they had seen nothing yet!)

Just days after returning to my watery oriental life, there was a new alarm.

At dawn on the morning of June 28, after several hours of very welcome deep sleep, I was woken by Akii shaking my arm. Immediately I become aware of the most incredible din, a cacophony that sounded like the cawing and screeching a thousand crows.

“Look�?, he said, pulling me up and to the window. “Look!�?

There were not one thousand crows, but I stopped counting at forty. Some were ranged on phone lines and electric cables (everything is slung overhead in Japan), but the mass sat and hopped and fluttered on Nonaka-san’s roof, some ten metres away. It was classic: like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds, and as such both frightening and awesome. Crows are big in this country. Big and noisy, black and glossy, fiercesome and charismatic. The Jungle variety.

The image of crows in the West today is almost wholly negative. But traditionally in Africa, the crow warned of danger. For the Mayans, the bird was the messenger of the God of thunder and lightening (dramatic change). To both the Celts and the Ancient Greeks, a prophet. In Japan, creators, guides and divine messengers, guiding the soul through their last journey.

Something is going to happen, I think (I think I say aloud, but maybe only thought.)

Akii tells me that while not in the same numbers, crows crowded the roof at dawn for the next two days. Strange that I was not aware, but maybe I was too caught up in the power and mystery of that first occurrence. That or too deeply asleep to notice.

Akii is now blown away by the realization that he had not made the connection between crows, and my mother’s death just days later. But that’s the problem with we humans: the signs are there – they impinge upon our lives, crowd us right, left and centre - but most people indulge in the laziness of denial; they choose the easier route: to remain numbed out rather than consciously start putting two and two – and three and four - together. This is why the blessing I use in my writing courses is so valuable, especially certain lines from Native Canadian culture: Stay calm, be brave, and wait for the signs… They not only make people feel safe, but encourage a sensory awakening.

In the meantime, there is more rain – in Japan, in England. It’s non-stop spray, relentless spatter, and more dramatic dowsings is welcomed for the harvest – for the needs of the land – but in wreaking havoc on human convenience, results is more criticism that appreciation.

Just before I left Zushi again for Narita airport on July 5, I turned to the I Ching for comfort. While taking fortune-telling per se with a proverbial pinch of salt, I have in recent years found this Chinese classic to be immeasurably comforting at times of upset and confusion. I threw the coins (three five yen pieces, these having a fortuitous connection with Japanese Buddhism – a play on the word ‘en) and calculated the double reading for the Chinese character:

K’AN/THE ABYSMAL (WATER) Flow like pure water through difficult situations.

The first paragraph: The image of the hexagram K’an is that of water: water falling from the heavens, water coursing over the land in streams, water collecting itself in pure and silent pools. This image is meant to teach us how to conduct ourselves in trying situations. If we flow through them, staying true to what is pure and innocent in ourselves, we escape danger and reach a place of quiet refuge and good fortune beyond.

Next: K’an often appears to warn of a troubling time either drawing near or already at hand, and to counsel you not to fall into longing for an immediate and effortless solution to the trouble. When you become “emotionally ambitious�? – when you cling to comfort and desire to be free of the currents of change in life – you block the Creative from resolving difficulties in your favour. What is necessary now is to accept the situation, to flow with it like water, to remain innocent, pure and sincere while the Higher Power works out a solution.

So, I remember thinking: I am on the edge of an abyss. The abysmal. Do I fall off — give in to the drowning emotions that so crippled my mother’s evolution — or do I try with all the resolve I can muster to remain steadfast?

I chose to do my best: chose to stay calm, not be afraid, and wait for even more signs.

During the time I prepared for my mother’s funeral, I was gifted five feathers.

The first picked up, from the doorstep as I arrived in early morning mist from Birnam Station, was – I see now - the largest. From a crow, I should imagine. Scottish, not Japanese, unless of course it had flown a very long way very fast.

Every subsequent day, there was another. I was not looking. Just there they were: on the ground as I opened the car door; on the car roof above my seat; floating along the burn; on the roadside and on the wooden bench beneath the laburnam; one even fluttered down as I was planting herbs, though no bird in sight.

Daily each feather diminished in size, was smaller than the last. Meaning what? Work load diminishing? A problem solved is a problem halved? Birds are becoming smaller? Interesting to consider if not resolve.

On the day after the funeral, nothing at all. At least, none that caught my eye, fluttered into my sightline. I am not daft; I know the countryside is full of feathers, from the living and the dead.

Ritual became the order of the day.

Every morning, however early – and dawn became the norm from Day Two– I would slide open the doors of what my mother grandly called The Conservatory – and stand on top of the ramp (installed for Bridget’s benefit) to greet the sun with all-encompassing and welcoming sweeps of my arms, while deep-deep-breathing (cough-cough) to draw in all the promising scents of the day ahead.

I reversed the ritual at dusk, which in July in Scotland is any time from 10pm; being so far north in midsummer means that it never really gets dark, but rather a deep indigo to navy blue, flushed on occasion by the northern lights, the Aurora borealis. This time I would embrace the world, drawing in the air and clouds and trees to my heart. (Good workouts for arthritic shoulders as well as holistically for mind, body and soul.)

So souls needs working out? Sure. Otherwise they can hang out on the timelines of lifetimes, knowing full-well that maybe next time around the bodies they inhabit and the personalites they develop in order to survive any one particular set of circumstances, will push and prod towards improved consciousness. The soul has all the time in creation, when all is said and done. But better surely to reach the Light fast rather than have to keep coming back over and over again, ad naeuseum.

If my mother taught me anything in her 96 years, it was not to waste time. Rather take responsibility for the consequences of each and every action and work through negative stuff until the translation is as close to the Original as it is possible to understand and achieve. And then go. Move on to the next lesson.

But back to the comfort of ritual…

I sang a lot. Usually late in the evening, when I would go sit on the shaded bench and wait for the deer.

She would step daintily across the burn from the copse (once a berry field but now gone to wild with sycamores, ash and willow herb) where I believe she had a young one secreted.

Initially she bounded away across the water to safety at my slightest movement. Soon she became bolder, exploring the newly built dyke and coming right up to the fence. But then new tenants in what used to be Chick’s home, let their dogs loose on what they assumed (because my mother had never got around to fencing it) was common land, and the doe vacated the meadow fast. That was when I began to sing. And soon she was back, watching and listening. Listening and ever-watchful; curious but always poised for escape.

To call what I sang A Song is surely presumptious. For the tune was simple and the words even more so. But it was a format that enabled me to go on and on, and one particular night I did:

I see you deer down by the stream,
I see you deer down by the stream,
I see you deer down by the stream,
And I’m so glad that you are there.

Substitute deer down by the stream for, roses on the fence, grass upon the lawn, birds up in the sky, clouds a-passing by, moss on the stone, moths upon the wing, leaves upon the trees, water in the burn… endless. I could sing the tune, but you might cover your ears, or boo me off the stage of this page. So I will keep my hush.

The day of the funeral broke cool and clear and even.

There was mist in the meadow, and it felt even earlier than usual. Four o’clock on the dot, and I was tired. But no sooner had I laid my head back on the pillow than I was assuaged by the scent of Imperial Leather – my mother’s favourite talcum powder. It was so strong that I sat bolt upright, as if the instruction was received and understood. No time for napping; far too much to do. And she was right.

First things first. I carried the skirt she had made, embroidered around the hem (and on her list of I Loves), across the lawn and hung it in her Rowan tree. My mother loved Rowans (also on the list); I remember the battle she had with my father when one grew too large for our back garden in Coventry, and he wanted to chop it down. If he did that, she insisted, we would be cursed forever. Didn’t he know that in Celtic and Druidical lore Rowans were magically endowed?

This tree was stage centre to the left-hand side of the lawn: small and delicate and strong. Just like my mother. To its far left another Rowan, tall and weak and spindly. My father. When I tried a few years ago to cut a flowering cherry sapling planted in front, to make him more visible, give him more light, he obviously instructed it to spring right back stronger than ever and so hide him again from sight. He always was a shy man.

The skirt rocked to and fro in the breeze, then began to sway and dance. It felt as if my mother was well pleased, happy to be so released and free.

By 8.30 I was in Tescos, shopping for the food that Jo told me last night she wanted laid on for any family coming back to the house. Two quiches, herbs and tomatoes for a salad, a baquette, and clotted cream for the raspberries that Gordon had picked from his garden and brought down from Roughstones. He had left fresh-dug potatoes also, with which I’d already made a salad together with hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise and herbs, and popped into the fridge.

I took everything Downalong to Jo’s (just 300 metres along the road) , so that the spread could be assembled fast with little trouble. Yesterday she was very tired, but today had gathered herself to herself to say goodbye to her sister. Her last connection with her childhood. I could not imagine how that felt. All I knew is that I wanted to carry as much of the weight of her pain and loss as possible. Tig and Ted were coming from Dundee take her to the church.

Bridget and George (who had arrived Saturday and were themselves very much to themselves) will make their own way. Having given Bridget the eulogy to compose and read, she was refusing to let anyone see what she has written. She feared we might disapprove, that my editing pen would come down hard. Jo was anxious - worried that Bridget might break down in tears, fearful of the content. To be honest I was too, but funerals are devised to allow for upset, and I felt strongly that my sister ought to be allowed to say what she liked about her mother. I did give her the job after all – in large part because I didn’t know what to say. I find that so strange now? What was I so afraid of?

I collected flowers from my mother’s garden. One of each of her many standard and rambling roses, and three yellow, which she especially loved. Two branches of Rowan with berries in first flush. Three of creamy Spirea. (Everthing was budding into flower; perfect.) Three long bowed branches of a yellow flowering shrub; three of something tighter and a deep crimson. Some lavender. The bucket was full to over-flowering, and my hands ripped to shreds. Virtually every plant and shrub is covered with thorns. Was my mother out to attack, or was she trying to protect herself, like the Sleeping Beauty? Jo of course said nonsense to this. When I quoted that an open mind is the highest form of intelligence, she huffed and puffed, and then majestically suggested we have another cup of tea.

I changed, into white cotton trousers and a black linen shirt, covered with a long black coat of loose-woven asa, or Japanese flax. (My mother always liked to know what fabrics people were wearing; she would feel the fibres between her fingers, then twitch, purse her lips or smile and look knowingly…)

A final check of the list. My bag. Secateurs. Stapler. Scissors. The visitors book for people to sign, and a pen. (A mad romp into Perth for these. So hard to find a plain black notebook anywhere, and as a for a pen with black ink…) A vase for the single yellow rose to stand beside the book in the entrance to St Mary’s, and that skirt, to lay alongside. Anything else? Too, too late, time to go.

So I drove the six miles into Dunkeld to say goodbye to my mother – such a lovely road, between sparkling lochs and hills and moorland. Even though I had already said goodbye, at the undertaker’s, days before. I knew then that the body in the coffin was not my mother. It didn’t look anything like her, for she had long gone. What was left was what I already knew was hidden beneath the characterisation of a little old lavender lady: the skin and bones of a tough old bird.

I think she went very fast, for there was no hint of energy in her room at Stormont. Hard though to first go in, not bothering to knock, and see her chair stand empty, the bed newly made, the window open and with life ongoing: the smell of newly-mown grass wafting upwards from the lawns below. That first day of clearance I took the pictures off the walls and began to go through drawers. Underclothes for the bin (including the new half petticoat she had fretted for, and so I had purchased from M&S less than a year ago). Letters and cards to be sorted, mostly to be burned later at the cottage. I was fine until I found her hairnet, and then I was done for the day. I had always hated that hairnet. Now such a vainglorious silly object simply made me fall apart.

The second day of clearing I sat in her chair, lay on the bed. Nothing. She must have flown at the speed of light – but trailing a few feathers to show there was a way to go to perfection yetl; she was not that neat!

By the third day, there was only her wardrobe left to empty. But who would want an old tweed skirt? A lambswool sweater shrunk to felt by the home’s industrial washing machine? A cocktail dress that was not simply out of fashion, but out of vintage? All her clothes, about which she so fussed when moving in, now bundled into black bags and heading for charity shops and recycling. This is what we come to when all is said and done. In the eyes of others, the stuff of our lives is mostly meaningless rubbish.

Stormont was happy to inherit the electric recliner. The jolly green wheelchair (hardly used) is in the garage. The little cane-seated chair that I used to sit on to read and try to chat to my mother is in the cottage, together with cushions she stitched. Bridget has taken many of the pictures. There’s not much else.

There was not much traffic on the road to Dunkeld either. The Dundee contingent (Ted and Tig, together with Virginia’s twin, Jenny) was there already parked in front of the church, with sons Ben and Jonny driven up that morning from Leeds. Lee and Su were just arrived, flown into Glasgow and then across country by hire car.

Sending them off to find a coffee in the town, I set about arranging the flowers. The stand was in the left-hand corner, beside the altar. I wanted to bring it forward, but Julia was fretting. The coffin was already in place. Robin had set out programmes with Order of Service for family in the two front rows of the pews. G. Loader’s watercolour of flowers on the front – one that Jo loaned - had printed out well.

Robin used to be vicar of St Mary’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Birnam, when my mother and Jo were still attending on a regular basis. They knew him and his wife Julia well. Retired, the couple – who spent a long time in Asia so we have much in common - now live half the year in Spain. Fortuitously they had just returned for the summer, and as soon as they heard the news, offered to organize the service. (The incumbent vicar was recovering from an auto accident.)

And so the church filled up. Jo, closely guarded and flanked by her husband’s nieces on the left-hand side, with elder nephew Michael Cox and his sons behind. (Charles Speid’s sister Mary was married three times.) Bridget and George to the right of the aisle, with me behind and Lee and Su to my far right. I was very aware that there was a space to my right, and that I was solitary. Have I brought this on myself to be regarded as so self-sufficient, so un-emotional, so un-needy? If so, I only have myself to blame, and rightly so.

Robin conducted the service. Kind words about my mother’s interesting life, her creativity, her many talents. The first hymn, as chosen by Gwen: Be still, for the presence of the Lord, the Holy one is here… Then up sprang Ben (who had volunteered to do a reading) to do his best with Song, by Christina Rossetti, which my mother (who used to sing) had told me several years ago was her favourite poem.

To celebrate her love of music and strings in particular – and with no cellist to hand - I had asked Gordon to play, suggesting a lament that gave way to something a bit more uplifting. Good of him to leave the golf course to don kilt and sporran and pick up his fiddle on a fine warm Wednesday afternoon.

Next, Bridget’s appreciation of her mother’s life, which she got through without stumbling and making anyone blanch. In retrospect Jo felt it did not fully do her sister justice, but then I’m not sure anyone could in her eyes. We were all I think surprised by Bridget’s open admission that her mother could be More Than A Little Controlling, but no-one objected and I most certainly was not going to disagree.

After the second hymn, For the beauty of the earth, chosen by Bridget (familiar words but not set to a tune I knew) it was my own turn: reading the list of 100 things that Gwen that told me she loved back in 2005. She was still in the cottage then, and in a bad way: confused, forgetful, depressed. This exercise by Julia Cameron in her book on creativity helps people focus on the positive things in life. Gwen’s own - we did 15 a day- list began with Snowdrops and ended with A beautiful Sunset. I found it in a drawer when I was clearing her room, so like to think it helped her remember who she was when sliding into psychological disintegration.

The last hymn was my own choice: the life-affirming Lord of the Dance. This I hoped confirmed the service as one of celebration and thanksgiving rather than grief and regret. From the hymns chosen by my mother, I knew she fantasised something rather more dismal and melodramatic - sombre veils, lots of weeping and wailing, even black horses and plumes! But I felt – and Bridget and Jo went along with me – that she had spent too long on emotional manipulation and negativity. The service, we agreed, would best serve her as a commemorative wake up call.

Those attending – some 40 or so - were very kind. Some said it was the best funeral they had ever been too. (A humorous response if ever there was one!) Others that my mother would have enjoyed it very much. (I hope she did.) The undertaker, Billy – the kindest man – thought the service Different, and especially liked the 100 I Loves… “Such a good idea!�?

Good idea or not, Lee and Su were outside, still sobbing. I shall never forget reading the last line of my mother’s loves – No.105 in fact – and looking up to see two red swollen faces aflood with tears.

By the time I had shaken the last hand and thanked everyone for coming, the hearse was gone, with Julia and Robin and Bridget and George following on at all due speed behind. They had 30 minutes to make the crematorium in Perth by 3pm. I would not have been able to go even if I had wanted to. (Half did, half didn’t.)

Instead, there was the wake at the Birnam House Hotel to host – as fine spread of sandwiches, cakes, scones and jam and cream, tea and coffee as you would ever hope to find. Manager Alex had done us just fine. By the time we were leaving, the Perth contingent was returning, ravenous and happy to scoff any remainders.

Ben and Jonny had already left to make the return dash across the border. I just had time to show Lee and Su around the cottage and take them to Jo’s to say hello, goodbye, before they too had to leave, for the flight back. Oh, how I would have liked them to stay longer, to try re-connect in depth after years of difficulty. But working the next day, and both in new jobs, I understood – though I do wonder why I always have to be quite so understanding. Maybe if I shouted Me more often, like my sister, more attention would be paid? But that would be quite monstrous.

Tig and Ted and Jenny made a sterling attempt to tackle the food prepared. But everyone was either too tired, too full (of scones and cream) or both. They went away laden with doggy bags, and later neighbours Ena and Paul benefited from a quiche. (“I don’t eat quiche,�? my sister had said. Yes, of course she ate eggs and bacon and vegetables and pastry. But not quiche?)

That evening there was a sense of euphoria. The next morning there was a sense of having been sandbagged. Slumped, unable to move, I was left with this nagging doubt: did I kill my mother? What was my true intent in offering advice as to how to Let Go. How much was for her? How much for me? And at rock bottom, did any of it really matter.

The important thing, I decided after some strong words with Self, was that the wishes of the living had been realized, my own included. Now that such a target had been met, what next? Where now?

I was sitting, I realized, in my mother’s old chair (retained on instruction, For Bridget). And I was looking out at the view she looked out upon for so many years. I even had my index finger in my mouth, cosmetically nibbling my nail! (A familiar affectation!) Jesus Christ! Was my future then to replay my mother’s life? Over my dead body, I said aloud, and then burst out laughing. There is life after mother, and it will be wholly my own.

Bridget joked about it last night — her anxiety about whether she would be able to survive without the depth and power of her mother’s loving but equally self-serving support. She had not been at all upset, my sister said. “There’s sadness, of course, but basically enormous relief.�?

But still my mother is dead. My mother is dead. It is no new feeling to feel an emotional orphan. To be a physical orphan may be different, but right now there is only processing.

I continue to be amazed that the elements are coming so clearly to my assistance to make this as painless as possible.

In the International Herald Tribune, July 26, 3007, Under the headline, No Reprieve for Flooded Britain, Sarah Lyall wrote: “The floods are coming after a period of unusually abysmal weather in June and July. One of the counties most abysmally affected was Warwickshire, where I grew up. My childhood: washed out.

As I complete this at 11am on July 30, 2007, the thunder and lightning of last night (30 minutes on ongoing fireworks as never before witnessed) are repeating their energetically power-driven extravagances, providing a spectacular finale to my mother’s life and my contemplation of her death.

Of course there will be ups and down. Moments of sadness. The tendency towards regret. But most of my mourning was conducted while she was still alive, and I believe it was struggling with this gradual sense of loss over the last decade that made me so angry and frustrated.

As if to draw a curtain on this final act of a life lived as best it was able, Zushi is invisible behind impenetrable veils of rain. Water is cascading off the hillside behind in a silvered leaf-driven fall. The drive is a torrent, the road beyond the gateway a rushing river.

Now I see: the way forward: washing itself clear.
Zushi, July 2007