"Yesterday evening I was discharged from hospital after a month as an inpatient. While I am back home now in my own comforts and surroundings with my Sheila, I will still have to behave as though I was in the hospital for at least a month if I'm to get through the continuation of my chemo programme for a third cancer they found. So it means plenty of rest and sleep and to regain enough physical strength to manage the next five months of chemo treatment.I would like to thank the hundreds of my facebook friends who daily followed my progress, kept me constantly in their thoughts and prayers and even said Masses for me in England, Ireland, Australia and America. I have not the slightest doubt that your prayers pulled me back from death's door and I urge all of you, never ever forget the power of prayer; and thank you so much. I love you all.
When I was in sideward in the hospital, I looked out of the window often and saw other patients also looking out. One or two waved and some seemed so sad in spirit as to see me or anything else beyond their fear range. That experience got me thinking about the pain that is often contained behind glass; the topic of this morning's post.
A sadness that is seen from behind a glass pane often symbolises the trapped feelings that the subject's body holds at that given time. Whenever I see framed photographs or paintings that are shielded by glass, I imagine all the feelings and emotions of the subject matter to be suspended in time.
It doesn't surprise me, thinking as I do, when I learned that the native Americans refused to have their photograph taken, as they believed to be photographed was to trap one's spirit!
One of my quirks is that I find it impossible to see a framed photograph where the glass has been cracked or broken without having the glass replaced.It is as though I do not want any of the emotions of the subject matter escaping.
Indeed, when I think about some of the saddest moments in my life, it has been leaving someone or having someone leave my presence; and it has usually been through the reflection of a glass window that my lasting image of them has been retained.
I think about the cold winter morning of December 1963, when at the age of 21 years, I emigrated to Canada. Going to live thousands of miles away from home then was a big thing. As I left home, the image of my mother that stayed with me until I returned home two years later, was her crying through the frosted house window pane as she waved me off. My seven-year-old sister Susan was also holding mum's hands and crying to see her big brother go across the other side of the world in the belief that she would never see me again.
Other occasions of remembered sadness include waving a loved one off on a train and watching them through the train window for as long as possible before their image disappeared in a puff of smoke. I recall a girlfriend from Cannock Chase who was a beauty for her 18 years but she gave me the runabout in the courtship stakes. I remember seeing her off in the train on that last weekend when we parted and as the smoke from the engine made her disappear from view, at that precise moment in time, so did my future dreams of what could possibly have been.
I also feel sad when I occasionally look at the framed photographs of my parents and grandparents whom I loved and are all deceased. Trapped beneath that glass are all the feelings I and they felt at the time, all the hopes and fears, all the pleasure and pain.
Perhaps the saddest image I recall behind a glass pane was when the hearse left my sister-in-law's house on the morning she buried her baby who had died in her womb during the1990s. My sister-in-law was informed after five months pregnancy that her baby would be stillborn and she was to carry the dead child inside her it for the full term of her pregnancy. To see the smallness of the cask that contained the minute body for burial inside the funeral car made me cry for the rest of that day and to question my religion and belief in God. Although I have never been a drinker, I recall that was one of the few occasions in my life when I got well and truly drunk. Please note that I said 'got' drunk and not 'was' drunk. My state of intoxication was deliberate and my inner rage so great that I remained emotionally upset for a few weeks and angry with the perceived injustice that occasionally visits the innocent. Despite the Drink and Drive rules that existed at that time, I foolishly drove my car home, parked on the front lawn and knocked down a cherry tree. I stayed in bed for two days and have never been drunk since!" William Forde: January 26th, 2017.