Clearing out old boxes in the loft is not a simple experience. I had forgotten all about this batch of letters. There was the familiar handwriting. I had not set eyes on it for many years. It was a letter from my Dad sent while I was studying French in France, on 17 July 1967 to rue Helene Boucher, Tours,. He died a year later almost to the day. I was quite unprepared. I will reread them when I feel ready.
Other items told their own stories. There was the tiny plastic identification bracelet fixed around the ankle of our firstborn. ‘Emma Rebecca Pearson, Heatherwood Hospital, Ascot’. And then some early school reports for our son Martin: ‘has shown a keen interest in project work’… Some cards and telegrams congratulating us on our wedding day – 28 July 1971…’best wishes from all at Pronuptia shop’. Where Helen bought her wedding dress. It cost a small fortune, £30!! A journal I kept in 1973 during our first ever trip to America: ‘Friday 25 May: The captain tells us that we’ve just left the coast of Ireland behind us. We really are on our way!’
And so on. A small and fairly random collection of selected highlights of our young lives. Of course many other things were lost or destroyed as unimportant. Not dustily preserved in a box and stowed away. It is out of such fragments that the story we tell of our lives is made. ‘The’ story? The official story. The one we have curated and retold many times. Fit for public consumption or maybe, rather, fit for personal acceptance. Other versions could of course be told.
Out of the fragments of our lives we have created a mosaic. I often think it is more like a kaleidoscope. Shake and twist and other patterns will emerge. There are times when I learn something unexpected about a person I know, and it changes my picture of them. The apparent contradictions, the eccentricities make better sense now.
I thought for a long time that there was such a thing as a fixed self-narrative, and that it becomes clearer as you get older. A fixed self. That is not my experience! As Rowan Williams says: ‘what happens [today] reorders what I have been as well as shaping what I shall be...the self is always in question’. Lost Icons 144.
One of the inevitable tasks of later life is to review the past in the light of the present. To shake the kaleidoscope again to see if a new pattern emerges. Like most people, I suppose, I wish to see some kind of pattern. I wish to know that it all meant something.
Other people’s perceptions and reassurances have helped me in my quest. Family members offer this kind of support...sometimes we need more than that. It’s important therefore that I too offer perceptions and reassurances to others that the fragments they contributed were crucial in my life.
Alongside the letters from my father, I found letters from one of our surrogate fathers, Roy Graham, who offered us both significant encouragement and support in our early 20s. The letter invited us to take jobs at the college – an offer that affirmed us and changed our lives. And then his farewell letter of friendship and advice to us. At that time, we thought he was just leaving the College. We had no idea that six years later, he would die an early death. So his farewell letter became even more of a treasure. In it, he offered us advice and warning about the perils of living and working in a Christian community. Try ‘not to give place to bitterness though there may be many occasions for it’, he said.
He was right. Bitterness can so badly fracture the mosaic.
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