I wrote the following en-route to Berlin, shortly after my step-father, Robert Ross was first admitted to the Sobell House Hospice. I returned from Berlin yesterday and Robert, as I have written in a previous post, died peacefully this morning, aged 63.
“Mourning, or rather bereavement is the shock at discovering oneself, of seeing for the first time the shape, texture and colour of objects by which one has been surrounded for years. For some, this shock is too much to bear and things are given away, sold off or moved; suddenly ugly, the reason for their ever being placed on shelves impossible to fathom. Through the death of a loved being, we become through a period of mourning, the newly born child, existing for a time without a name. Without a name of our own we borrow that of the loved one, we hold on to it, we trace the shape of its letters, as if they were the contours of an effigy on their tomb.”