7 years ago

Dear Katie

Its been such a long time but nothing in the the grand scheme of things. We live on and we love on. My family had not directly experienced a loss such as yours before, or since, until Sally's father passed away last year. Its is funny how the living that are left go on after a loss like yours. I've learned that death, handled as unavoidable suffering, can be a great comforter - it means, at the very least, the end of all physical suffering. I know that for some of us who are healthy and happy and perhaps not in a spiritual model of exploration this perhaps doesn't resonate that much; but in all likelihood there'll come a day when most of us will relish the idea to peacefully silence the sensory functions and be eternally quiet. For those who go on living, we stumble and mumble but live on we do.

Your passing has become an inspiration to me. I have reached out to seek new meanings in life; to discover the secrets of spirituality. I know if you were here you would be one of the friends who would hold hands and explore too. I am learning from the wisdom of others that what threatens us most is our guilt in the past and our death in the future and that both are inescapable and can be and must be accepted. I can find meaning to life if my failures and shortcomings can be improved upon and the knowledge that one I will not live allows me respect to my mortality. If was perfect and immortal, I'd be a lazy know-it-all (amongst many other unvirtuous things) as I would have no attitude to seek and embrace the universe's myriad of potentialities. Converting my shame or guilt to conscious improvement in the time of life left seems a valuable and worthwhile endeavour. As I remember that in your greatest moments you lived this way in your dance and your language and your zest for travel. 

Everything changes, everything moves but I am slowly but surely accepting the realisation of a connected-ness to the world and the universe - That life's game can be beautifully played if we accept that it is.. just a game. I am sometimes judged as 'hippy' with such contemplations in the presence of, for example, sharing a moment with an apple hanging from a tree. But judgments are unheard when the next act is picking that apple, tasting it and pondering its seed within. Like the apple tree, your seed grew into the Universe an Oscar and it is touching to all of us to see, hear and experience how that seed grows and the love from those that tend him. Its these relationships with love and life and the world they join to that I am relishing experiencing even more deeply with a learned natural awareness. I do often wonder what it would be like to have you here to enjoy them too. (Of course with a little practice I know you can be there, once I am attuned to the fact that your echo is just a little softer and delicately resonant than it used to be!)

So under the urge and pressure of life's ebbs and flows, I am learning to ponder the senses to use the passing time. If by actualising life's possibilities it becomes an actuality then I can register these experiences and resultant acts and my attitude to them to the past by way of memory. You were taken too early from us, that much is true, and the many that loved you have too little of the potential moments shared that could have been shared. But I hope that for those that go on living, filled with the love and memories that you bestowed upon us, your memory is saved from being lost again, irrevocably stored rather than irrecoverably
lost. Having had you here at all is still a form of being, perhaps even its most secure form.

Finally, next to all else, the promise of my death, our own deaths, for those of that walk the earth and still remember you, is that no pain will last forever. Whatever else death may have on stock for us, and whatever else it may mean for us, I hold to the belief that for each us there'll come a day when we are no longer reachable for physical pain and the stresses and the strains and the follies of hatred, disappointment and grief and that in some way or some form we will meet again.

Your friend Jonathan x