Last weekend I spent time with Michael’s dad in SouthWestern Queensland.
It was a bit of a pilgrimage for me, you might say. I wanted to visit one of the areas where Michael and his brother had spent time as children, visiting their mother, Mary Ann. And the place where she herself was buried 30 years ago.
Michael and I had planned to visit her together one day, on some future adventure through the west that we would / could / should have had.
So I went anyway, accompanied stoically by Michael’s dad. A mixture of feelings had been drawing me out there to visit her since Michael died. A curiosity, into the places where Mary Ann and her boys had spent their limited time together. An area where she would have lived, driven, walked, perhaps bought groceries and gone about her own business.
I felt compelled to go; both to fulfil an adventure with Michael and to pay my respects to the woman that created him.
Charleville is a typical Australian, country town with a stark and candid vibe. Two kilometres out of town they have the most amazing ‘Cosmos Centre’, where a troop of friendly ladies guide tourists in star-gazing and education about all areas of Astronomy.
We spent a magical (and freezing cold!) evening using a planisphere and enormous, high-tech, GPS-tracking telescopes. We got to look at near and distant stars, star clusters, planets and Magellanic Clouds (now my new favourite word, ‘Magellanic’).
I saw and heard many fascinating things during the visit but a statement that stuck with me most was that;
“for stars to form, a star must die.”
Our own star is about half way through its life at 5 billion years old, created randomly from clouds of dust and gases floating around after an enormous star exploded. One day it too will collapse and leave gases and dust that may then create further stars. The energy and matter never dies, it only takes on new forms and is re-directed, re-shaped, re-used, like some immense, self regulating recycling system.
Yet again, I came to ponder on how such strong, bright and vital energy from a man like Michael, cannot simply disappear into nothingness. It just can’t.
Standing at Mary Ann’s graveside contemplating the numbers I felt immensely sad about the tragic and painful snapshot of this part of the Vaughan clan. Michael’s mum was 36 when she died. Both of her sons are now gone, Alan in 2006 aged 35 and Michael last year aged 45.
I felt confused standing beside Michael’s dad. Watching this man observing the names of his three loved ones, carved in stone before him, was almost unfathomable. What must he have gone through? And HE had come away for the weekend, to support ME. That he could stand there, hold my hand, hug me back. Unbelievable.
There was a pleasant surprise at this sad vigil however. I had been searching for a grave for, ‘Mary Ann Evans’, in her maiden name. But what I found was a, ‘Mary Ann Vaughan’. A Vaughan woman.
For some reason it made me feel closer to her, through Michael of course. A fellow Mrs Vaughan… That made me smile to think of Michael and I discussing that together.
I just hope that some of his energy was out there somewhere, and that it was conscious of my presence at her graveside.
June 9, 2016 at 12:20 am
There are no words that could pinpoint my response… Precious, real, vivid, heart-opening.
Your truth-speaking connects me to my Core Self in a way no other writing does.
Thanks for being you… And for sharing your Truth with me.
With deep respect and complete awe,
your Cali friend,
Gina Xx
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June 9, 2016 at 12:47 pm
Hi Kate
Thanks for all your posts here, I enjoy the depth of emotions they create within me & I hope they help you too.
I’ve always had a fascination for the Cosmos and have spent many nights in awe of it’s beauty and want to send a couple of quotes I’ve come across that have helped me. The first I transcribed from a space doco on TV and was spoken by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist (who is well worth watching on youtube)
“Recognise that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centres of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life, so that we are all connected to each other, biologically; to the Earth, chemically; and to the rest of the Universe, atomically.
That’s kinda cool!
That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the Universe, we’re part of the Universe.
We are in the Universe and the Universe is in us.”
And secondly by Aaron Freeman……
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”
Hugs
Steve
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