New Journeys Now Begin

Tom Gordon

Description

Formerly Chaplain at the Marie Curie Centre, Edinburgh, Tom writes with sensitivity and clarity about real people, including himself, as they begin to understand their journeys of bereavement. This is a book that speaks profoundly to individuals coping wi

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Wild Goose Publications
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781849521444
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Journeys Now Begin
Learning on the path of grief and loss
Tom Gordon
Copyright © Tom Gordon, 2006
First published 2006 by
Wild Goose Publications, 4th Floor, Savoy House,
140 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK.
Wild Goose Publications is the publishing division
of the Iona Community. Scottish Charity No. SC003794.
Limited Company Reg. No. SC096243.
www.ionabooks.com
ePub:ISBN 978-1-84952-144-4
Mobipocket:ISBN 978-1-84952-145-1
PDF:ISBN 978-1-905010-26-4
Cover photo © Mary Gordon
All rights reserved.Apart from reasonable personal use on the purchaser’s
own system and related devices, no part of this document or file(s)
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means,
without the prior written permission of the publisher
Non-commercial use:
The material in this book may be used non-commercially
for worship and group work without written permission from the
publisher. If parts of the book are photocopied for such use, please make full
acknowledgement of the source, e.g. ‘© Tom Gordon from New Journeys Now
Begin, published by Wild Goose Publications, 4th Floor, Savoy House,
140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK.’
Where a large number of copies are made, a donation may be made
to the Iona Community via Wild Goose Publications, but this is not obligatory.
For any commercial use of the contents of this book, permission must be
obtained in writing from the publisher in advance.

Tom Gordon has asserted his right in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi ed as the author of this work.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. The depth of relationships
2. Denying reality
3. Final moments
4. Promises made, promises broken
5. Out of control
6. Rituals and celebrations
7. Where is God now?
8. Impossible expectations of coping
9. Healing words, healing moments
10. Anger again
11. Searching for the spirit
12. Lost saints
13. New journeys now begin
14. Real people, real lives
To Jean and Jimmy, Mary and Willie,
Talbot, Farquar, Colin and countless others,
whom I loved in their living and still grieve for in their dying,
but who are part of every new journey I will ever travel.

Acknowledgements
I suggested in my acknowledgements for A Need for Living that writing a book was like giving birth – inasmuch as any man can understand what that means. Well, the child I bore and gave birth to these few years ago is now, it would appear, standing on its own feet and able to make its way in the world, largely independently from me. That process, and the helpful comments from many people, has given me the encouragement to offer another infant child to the world. But this time I do so with more confidence, knowing that this new life has an older sibling to stand beside.
I am immensely grateful to many people for their support in the preparation of this book: my wife, Mary, for her unfailing patience and love - and for the photo from the North End of Iona which graces the front cover; my colleagues in the hospice team, particularly Alice and Mairi, from whom I have learned such a lot and with whom it is a pleasure to work in our bereavement support service; Ann, for the space and time she gave me in Fife; Sandra, Alex, Neil and Tri at Wild Goose Publications, for their patience, reassurance and thorough professionalism; Eric Bogle, for the wonder of his music and his ready willingness to allow a phrase from one of his songs to be used as the book’s title; Tom Fleming, for his graciousness in agreeing to write the foreword, and offering the profound insights with which this book can begin; all those who have agreed that their stories could be offered to a wider public; and others who have given permission to use quotes from books and song lyrics.
But most of all I pay tribute to the people whose stories, insights and growth give this book its contents and purpose. They would never consider themselves to be in any way special, far less wish their names and circumstances to be readily identified. Through the years, they have been trusting enough to allow me to offer what support I could in their bereavement journeys, but they, in return, have given me much more than they will ever know.
Tom Gordon
April 2006
Port Seton, East Lothian
Foreword
by Tom Fleming
This impressive, informed and intensely moving book by Tom Gordon makes an important contribution to a subject of universal relevance. Death and bereavement are experiences shared at some time by all of us. My generation has often been guilty of pushing these stark realities beyond the horizon of daily consciousness for as long as possible. For me, having an awareness of death is not to be afflicted by chronic morbidity. It is what gives to every moment of life an unrepeatable wonder and joy. Death is not the mystery. Life is the mystery and the miracle.
Perhaps I am lucky that such awareness came to me early. I was four and not yet at school when my mother, a skilful artist and a young woman of forty, full of love and fun, died, unexpectedly, from complications after surgery. I was present when my father, a Baptist minister, was told of her death by our family doctor. It was the first time I had seen a grown-up cry. In the custom of the time my mother’s body rested in the front room of our house. When I was taken in to see her I was intrigued to find a familiar face looking as if it was sculpted from whitest marble. I stretched out a finger to see if the skin on her brow still moved - and was unceremoniously hustled from the room. Rows of chairs arrived by van for the funeral service, also held in our home, but when the day of the funeral arrived my older sister and brother were allowed to stay and I was packed off, despite my vehement protests, to ‘play’ in a neighbour’s garden.
It was forty years later, while visiting Australia to perform at the Adelaide Festival, that an elderly friend of the family handed me a letter written by my father in the days immediately following my mother’s death. It read, ‘We are all devastated by our loss. Fortun ately wee Tommy is too young to understand.’
These words taught me a great deal about received attitudes to grief. You can live in the same household and be unaware of or unresponsive to feelings which do not match your own. I was ‘too young’ but I did understand that my mother had died and that her going would leave an unfillable gap in all our lives. I was ‘too young’ but I did understand that I didn’t want in some way to be ‘shut out’ because of that. I was ‘too young’ but I did understand that for the distant (and mostly unknown) relations who appeared in our house to eat ham sandwiches after the funeral it wasn’t as important an event as it was for me. It was just that my reaction was not the accepted norm among ‘grown-ups’. For me death was in J.M. Barrie’s words ‘a great adventure’ - a totally new and interesting experience. The small child lacks the sentimentality of the adult and the child mind can be quite clinical in its insatiable curiosity.
That experience prepared me for a succession of family deaths, culminating in my father’s death from a long-standing heart condition when I was twelve. That was the end of home-life as I had known it. We lived in a manse so, on my father’s demise, my sister and brother and I had to move out within a couple of months. I left for school one December morning never to return to the house where I was born. Others decided what few possessions we could retain. We moved to my elderly grandfather’s house on the south side of Edinburgh. A year later he died and we had to move again. Then my sister married and left for England, while my brother joined the Fleet Air Arm (it was war-time) and served mainly overseas. I continued my schooling living in ‘digs’ until that was completed.
You may gain the impression from all this that my formative years were dogged by misfortune and filled with gloom. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was left with an overwhelming sense of deep gratitude for having had such wonderful parents, for spending my earliest years in the happiest of homes and for the ongoing kindnesses of so many friends in the years since. If I have inherited one legacy of mixed blessing it is a fierce independence of spirit - a character flaw I am still trying to deal with on the eve of my eightieth year!
As one grows older, acquaintance with grief sets one on an ever steeper learning curve. Friends from childhood, valued colleagues from working adventures and, more painfully, those who have shared one’s life most intimately (and, therefore, know one best) are with increasing frequency removed from the scene.
Familiarity with such events doesn’t make them easier to bear. I had got tickets for my closest friend and his wife to attend the opening night of King Lear at Stratford in November 1962. A couple of hours before ‘curtain up’ I had a telephone call to say he had died of a heart attack, aged 54, in a London hospital. The anxiety and fear which accompany a first night performance in the theatre saw me through, until, in the last minutes of that epic tragedy, came the words: ‘Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?’ That eternally questioning word ‘WHY?’ … One comes to realise that, often, what we mourn is that part of ourselves which seems to have gone for ever and that what those we love have meant to us lives on, woven into the very stuff of our daily being.
In more than half a century of describing national and state occasions for the BBC, including historic funerals both at home and overseas, I always tried to remind myself that, under the panoply of solemn ceremonial, this was a time of deep emotion for some individual human being on whose personal grief we were intruding. Each year at the Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph, confronted with the appalling statistics of war, I was at pains to try to ensure that a you