+++ ICN FEB 2008: MOURNING MARGARET: ONE YEAR ON…One year after the death of his dear mother Margaret Patricia Harris (1923-2007), ICN Founding Editor and former Concerned Citizens’ Coalition candidate Patrick Jamieson writes about the mourning process in these excerpts from the original longer piece printed in the latest February 2008 number of the Island Catholic News in a full page article, on page three. The article is accompanied by a black and white photo of the author’s late mother with his father James Jamieson, with the accompanying caption: ‘Margaret and Jim Jamieson circa 1951 in Edmonton. At that point they had two sons with four more children to follow in the decade of the 50s.’ +++ It will be a year February 8th since my mother died and seems time to remember a few more significant aspects of her personality, life and dynamics in our collective family. ++ We are all having a very difficult time, I would say, in integrating her physical disappearance. ++ My sister Christine and I wrote tributes and eulogies a year ago at the time of the death which were printed in Island Catholic News. ++ Mourning, it seems to me, requires self-conscious processing if we are to truly grow through it. If we are to reap the benefits mourning grants to us as a grace. ++ Too often the funeral itself is seen as a sour imposition upon family and friends and perhaps should be done without. As Christians and Catholics my family feel they have no real choice. It is spiritually too important to say goodbye properly and start the process of living beyond. ++ The funeral and the year following were a critically important period of growth for those left behind, a gift just as much as the ones granted when she was alive. ++ For my mother was someone who in her being granted gifts by her mere presence. It was always a pleasure as a youth to introduce my close friends to her, knowing her charm would work on them. I enjoyed watching how they reacted as it would reveal something about them, their character. ++ She was hospitable and graceful in her loving way. Personally what I miss most is just being able to sit in her presence and connect. Chat about the day. Bring her up to date on what is going on in the community, with the newspaper and often within the petty world of politics within the Catholic church. That connection was a metaphysical compass bearing which gave meaning and direction to the deeper regions of my life. ++ II. She went to Saint Anne’s Academy, graduating in 1940, so her roots were in the region, although she travelled away with my father’s military postings until 1977 when they could return upon retirement to help care for her mother who lived on the Island from 1920, coming from Northern England at Darlington, a Quaker town. ++ My father, after sixty-five years of married life together, it must be said, misses her the most acutely. Although some of her children are close behind. She was one of those people with a sort of personality that insinuates itself deeply and permanently into your psyche. She was not to be denied. In a good sense, as they say. ++ My father, I would say, has had a very hard time filling in the gap. He still lives in their condominium apartment but finds it haunted. Wanting to move out of its confines but realizing it is much too soon. Their apartment represents physically what we have left of her in a way. A sort of permanent shrine, none of her children wish to see it sold yet. ++ Christmas was interesting that way. The feelings from the years when she constructed and reconstructed the traditions that had grown up through the years. Because we were a rootless military family sort of group; Vancouver, Edmonton, Whitehorse, Ottawa and Oromocto, New Brunswick as well as Chilliwack, Winnipeg and finally Victoria all added their dimensions. It always seemed like it would go on forever with her mystically at the helm. ++ My father has kept up his refugee work but with an obvious lessening of intensity at age 86. But of course he realizes that it is all largely a distraction from this gaping maw at the centre of our collective life created by her passing. His challenge, and ours, is to symbolically let her go again and again over these next few years. ++ Just before my mother passed, a great grandson, Jamie, was born who she was able to hold two months before her death. Now within the year of her passing a great granddaughter, Poppy, is born in Winnipeg and my father looks forward to meeting her soon. ++ My sister, Rita, who lives in Winnipeg has drawn the connection already in her visiting with the baby and feels it helps in some small if concrete way. The tangible experience of healing through mourning. ++ … IV. My mother’s creativity was how she created a whole phenomenal universe for her family. Physically and emotionally. It was a power she took for granted yet tempered with an alluring charm and graciousness. She rarely had to threaten. He method of discipline was largely that of charm. One never wished to disappoint her or go against her best values. It lent itself to great difficulty when it was time to leave the emotional security of the family nest. ++ She could be fiercely aggressive and highly articulate in defending and explaining her values, particularly in the earlier years when it was key to our earliest and permanent formation. ++ This whole way of life she wove, converged at a central point in the values and spiritual principles that guided us out through its cone at the end and into weaving similar patterns in our own lives, ones that we had all but unconsciously learned. ++ As my sister wrote in her eulogy, such a richly symbolic figure when she dies leave a huge gap. The temptation is to try to fill that gap with another person, frenzied activity or some other false substitution. ++ But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: “Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a kind of substitute: we must simply hold out and see it through. This sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap: he doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary He keeps it empty and so helps us keep alive our communion with each other.” +++
