Reflected Moments

Extract from Seán Manchester's Reflected Moments:

I suppose for me it was a moment of sudden and great revelation; though at the time I was so slender in years, indeed a mere infant, that I saw it only for what it was - a bright light.

In the darkness. 

The bedroom where I slept had me facing the window, but only night peered in through the panes of glass with glows of gas lamps in the street below. Glows, almost impotent. Dull.  

Increasing brightness arose from within the room. Just slightly to my right. It enlarged.

With intensity.

Then I heard the soft voice. Kind. Beautiful. It was close to my ear, but I saw nobody. One word was whispered.

Just one word.

 A word, a name, that remained with me, and would have more meaning than any other.

The name Jesus.

This was my epiphany.

I felt exceptionally close to my mother who I tried to visit at least once a week throughout my life, until she passed from this world on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels 1992. If she could have possibly contacted me from beyond the veil, she would have certainly done so. I did experience an angelic presence soon after her death, which I discussed on a television programme (Up Front, Granada, 30 October 1992) at the time, but my mother was at peace and did not communicate as do ghosts. Matters such as life after death held a real fascination for her, and her familiarity with the lives of her favourite saints ― St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse of Liseux ― made for some interesting conversations. Fortuitously, the feast of St Thérèse of Liseux fell on the day before my mother died, and the feast of St Teresa of Avila was the day of her funeral. When I saw her solitary coffin in the Gothic chapel, isolated from the funeral director’s office, in a place where the flowers for wreaths are grown, to place items of devotion inside the casket, I was struck each occasion on how she remained so completely without any trace of corruption. There was something saintly about her as she lay in her coffin, fresh and absent of death’s all too familiar hand. It was difficult to believe she had really gone, as I returned in the evenings to lift the lid and view her. My father could not bring himself to see her in such sombre surroundings. I nonetheless drew comfort from these evening visits to the chapel until her funeral at which I was the minister (as I was for my father). There seemed to be a smile of such peace on her face.

My mother at London's Café Royal in 1953.

I was nowhere near as close to my father, who would remain aloof, playing the piano in an adjoining room, or reading something whilst seated in his armchair, whenever I visited. We were at opposite ends of the spectrum in most things. However, we did share an appreciation of music, but little else. My romantic inclination seemed anathema to him, however, as he was more drawn to technique. Ironically, close to the end of his life, he revised much of his anti-Romantic feelings, even to the extent of gaining an appreciation of Wagner.

When my mother died, he absolutely lost the will to live. He would speak of her in the most glowing terms. The house in Islington became cluttered and untidy ― the very opposite to how my mother had kept it ― and he forbade anyone interfering. My mother’s bedroom ― they had separate rooms for many years ― remained exactly as it had been on the day she died. Nothing was touched, and years later it still held the fragrance of her perfume. He would survive his wife by eight years, just managing to catch a glimpse of the new century.

We did not become any closer for most of the intervening period, except for the last year. He came to stay with us for a few days at a time, and his last three visits were far better than anything prior. The round trip was over a couple of hundred miles, and he could not tear himself for long from the home where he and my mother had spent so many years; so his visits were never more than three or four days at a time. When I came to London, and naturally visited him, it was painful to witness the deterioration of his surroundings. He was also deteriorating, having a heart condition for which medication had been prescribed. Yet he was fiercely independent and would not allow any interference. Knowing it would be fatal to stop taking his prescribed tablets, he nevertheless did stop taking them ― no longer able to live in a world without his first, last and only love whom in life he was unable to fully show the appreciation she so richly deserved.

In the weeks following my father’s death something happened that would provide a unique portal through which I glimpsed things as they had once been. Following the traumatic discovery of my father’s body in the house where my parents had spent so much of their lives ― a house, moreover, now more resembling Mrs Havisham’s in Charles Dickens’ Great Expections ― an altered state of consciousness occurred which, coupled with the inevitable adrenalin surge that accompanies stress in crisis, found me walking the streets and calling on people I had not seen for decades. The intervening years temporarily evaporated and became an illusion. I was back. Most I called upon welcomed me as though no time at all had passed. Some, of course, were now deceased, as I wandered the streets to old haunts. I was somehow experiencing it all over again, albeit briefly, for the final time.

Subsequent visits to London in the years that followed found it had returned to the friendless, faceless city that is now all too familiar to those who suffer its crime, pollution and melancholic atmosphere. Yet those weeks at the end of the year 2000 were to offer me a time warp where the past was somehow witnessed through a weathered window. Thereafter I felt like a phantom, who was not physically present in the city, passing through now sadly unfamiliar places. I felt as though I had become a wandering spirit. One of my last visit to England’s grey and gloomy capital was for the funeral of a close friend on 16 January 2004, which I conducted. I no longer envisage returning to the place where most of my life’s dramas ― indeed most of my life ― was spent.

The last photographs taken of my parents together.