Pam's things..

Pam had this cat picture in her living room. I found it in a box last week. I brought it back here after we had to sort through her things. I've put it on my dressing table. She loved cats, so do I. Her cat Ellie who she called Ellie Maypoles was adopted by her neighbour Alan, who Ellie had pretty much gone to live with anyway. Ellie is still having her love affair with Alan according to a friend here in Santa Fe who told me she'd met him by chance in Newport on her last visit there. We met this guy called Alan with a cat called Ellie who knew Pam! She said he never stopped talking about Ellie. Wow he loves that cat! Pam saw Alan get tazered by the police right outside his house not long before she died.

Pam would have been 47 today

Got married

Wish Pam could have been there...

Reading this made me cry this morning..

A loss of this magnitude - psychologically, it is a loss of the heroic defense - draws the psyche into liminality, which may be coloured most heavily by feelings of grief for a lost past. Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal imagos and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organisation, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self, whose home had been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them. There is memory, too, perhaps, of status, of secured supremacy amidst a host of valiant defenders of the realm. But now all is different.

Murray Stein, In Midlife

Valentine's Day

                                

    Red roses from Ron to me to you Pam..

   with love as always..

But to be frank, and give it thee again.
And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Singing the same tune..

Day 5 of being sick. Not up to writing stories for the blog, been reading other blogs and finished reading a book. I've been grieving pretty hard this past week, maybe it's because I'm ill and feel weak. I read a couple of pages of one of Pam's journals yesterday, after mum mentioned that she wouldn't mind taking a look at them. I didn't advise it. It was painful to read as usual, tears left me exhausted but then I felt a sense of calm after the storm. Later in the evening I read the same pages to Ron, he was reassuring saying that Pam's writing about her difficulties with me was positive. That she was individuating. I wonder if you could describe her death as individuating?

Ron said she sounds so like me. We were very similar women. Often I would call her or she me and we'd both been thinking the same thing or had bought the same clothes or had the same kind of dream. Our sister Angie says we had a special bond because we were so alike.  It feels like part of me has died. I'm glad I've got her journals even though they are so upsetting to read. I said maybe I shouldn't be reading them and Ron replied maybe you are meant to. Maybe I am. Maybe in time they can be my guide? To remind me of the path that we were on together. And perhaps I can let it keep me on track even though I'm on that path alone now.

These lines from Rumi seem appropriate...

Friend, I've shrunk to a hair trying to say your story.

Would you tell mine?

I've made up so many love stories.

Now I feel fictional.

Tell me!

The truth is, you are speaking, not me.

I am Sinai, and you are Moses walking there.

This poetry is an echo of what you say.

Born on the Fourth of July

"Your fight is just beginning. Sometimes no one will want to hear what you are going through. You are going to have to learn to carry a great burden and most of your learning will be done alone. Don't feel frightened when they leave you. I'm sure you will come through it all OK."

Said to Ron Kovic by a priest in Da Nang.

Pam died on the third of July.

Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

William Butler Yeats.

To all those people who knew Pam!

 

This photo of Pam was taken after my parents had visited a dog shelter.  They walked out of the shelter saying they didn't see a dog that they wanted so Pam marched them back in and this little puppy was the result.  They called him Spikey, he was dad's constant companion until he died in 2005 (the dog not dad!)  Pam loved dogs with a passion.

I was listening to a man on the radio last night, Frank Mundo as he talked about losing his brother a year ago.  He and his family have a website where they put all his brother's art work and photos and memories.  They also put stories and memories on there that friends share.  So I invite all those people who knew and loved Pam to please email me and share your stories so that I can put them on this blog.  Don't be shy!  Come on!