Gone from my sight

It’s been a challenging time of late. My mother died unexpectedly on 25th April : ANZAC Day, so I’m not likely to forget. I got myself back to England within a few days, and spent the next week living, mostly alone, in her house. Delving, as one does, through the memories of years; each drawer, each cupboard, each shelf, all had their stories to tell. A time of discovery; of feelings that have been buried, or of things being revealed to me for the first time ever. It’s a bit of a helter-skelter ride of emotions – so desperately sorry that she could never be the mother I craved, yet the person that she was was one who I admired and respected, during our mostly difficult mother-daughter relationship. Doubly difficult for both of us because my father had died when I was just 11 years. I suspect the truth is that we were just too alike – and the same case might be argued of her own mother before her.

The funeral was a small affair; I was the only family member to step forward to speak, and I finished with a poem. It could have been about me; I seemed to be always leaving my mother; leaving home at an early age; later leaving the country for a life here in Australia. I know she found these departures so difficult. But this time it was she doing the leaving, and perhaps I now have the tiniest inkling of the grief she experienced every time I went away.

‘Gone from my Sight’ by Henry Van Dyke:

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

“Gone where?”

Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side.
And she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying.