Beginnings and the Grief of Endings
I only really like the first lines of Minnie Haskins poem ‘God Knows’, more commonly known as ‘The Gate of the Year’. I recall it along with many others I guess at the close of each year. But its poignancy for me is more associated not with the opening of a new year but with the closing episode of the 70’s television series ‘A Family at War’.
The series, based in Liverpool, told the story of the Ashton family living through the war years. It aired for 52 episodes and took its audience into the family experiences of the external war and the almost equally disturbing dynamics of the internal wars within the Ashton family.
As a child, it was an intense experience to watch it unfold week after week, yes because of the skilful writing and also because there were few scene changes. Typical of its day, most of the drama seldom ventured beyond the Ashtons living room. The wider world was however brought to that living room, as it was to all our homes, by the medium of the wireless.
In the closing moments of the last episode, we are again back in the Ashtons living room. The family diminished and depleted. The past echoes around the empty walls in the voice of King George reading to the nation as he did in 1939 Haskins poem “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year ….. “ The vulnerability of that moment in time poignant in the timbre of his voice.
Endings are a vulnerable time for the fact that we usually know what is ending but seldom do we know what is beginning. ‘A Family at War’, from it’s very beginning, like life, was all about endings and what they do to us. How sometimes we emerge better from them and other times less so. But episode after episode, as in the days of our lives, what we witnessed is how endings change us. Endings, one by one, took hold of the Ashton family and changed it forever. After an ending life is seldom ever the same.
The endings and the vulnerabilities of the Ashtons were not unique to them and were not confined to the experience of war. No, far from it.
Endings for us all in one way or another are defined by loss and the vulnerability that meets us in our response of grief. No matter the nature of the ending or the cause of loss, the deeply human response of grief is forever the same. 1939, 2023 and 2024 separated by time but not by internal experiences of sadness, sorrow, diminishment of hope and yes, life rearranged.
Whatever endings greet us at the gate of the year. Whatever our griefs and vulnerabilities, may they, may we, be met with peace of mind and a hope in the breaking of a new day.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way”.
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
