Compassion, Spring 2024

5 tcf.org.uk COMPASSION | NEWS FROM THE CATHARINE POINTER MEMORIAL LIBRARY thank you to both of these wonderful people for all the time and hard work you’ve put into these recordings; something else that makes our library unique. I do have some other audio books but unfortunately, because everything is streamed these days, I’m not able to buy any more on CD. Some of the titles I do have are ‘It’s ok that you’re not ok’,’ The Knitting Circle’ and ‘See You Soon’. I also have some recordings of a radio discussion with bereaved parents in America. Finally I’ll mention a section of books I don’t write about very often but which are very popular with readers and these are books about the possibility of life after death. TCF is an organisation which supports people of ‘all religions and none’ and our library reflects that. We have books for people who find comfort in their religion and books for atheists. Harold Krushner, who is a rabbi and a bereaved father, has several books in our library, ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People’ or ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ for example, and C S Lewis’s ‘A Grief Observed’ is a wonderful description of early grief, from a Christian’s point of view. His opening sentence, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”, is one of the most well- known openings to any book and one I can so easily relate to. I also find it very interesting to learn how other cultures feel about death and grief and a book called “Finding Hope When a Child Dies: what other cultures can teach us” by Sukie Miller PhD is very informative. Lots of us see things like butterflies and white feathers as a sign our children are still around and, in ‘Windows of the Mind’ Jane Smyth has compiled an anthology of such experiences. Another subject which is very popular with readers is the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDE) where people who have been close to death, and survived, relate a journey into a different reality and then being called back to continue living. I’ve been fascinated by this subject since the 1970s when I was a student nurse and my patients started to tell me about them. The first book I read was Raymond A Moody’s ‘Life after Life’, which was published in 1975 and is a balanced and intelligent investigation into NDEs; it’s still a good place to start if you’re interested. Another type of book which lots of people are interested in are those about, or by, mediums and, since I come from an evidence based profession, I wanted an intelligent and balanced investigation into that subject too. I found a couple of examples of this and my favourite is ‘If the Spirit Moves You’ by Justine Picardie. This author, whose sister died, is a journalist and she takes nothing at face value. Her book gives no definite answers but does give plenty of food for thought. Of course not everyone has any religious affiliation, or belief in an afterlife, and we have a very interesting book called ‘The Sarah Journals: surviving tragedy without God’ by Ailsa Fabian. Ailsa calls these the diaries of an unbeliever and they reflect her thoughts and her research into the writings of other atheists, as she dealt with the challenge of coming to terms with the death of her five year old daughter without the consolation of any sort of belief in an afterlife. Just to finish, I would like to share an entry from ‘A Broken Heart Still Beats’. The author Mark Twain was in England when he was handed a cablegram telling him his 24 year old daughter, Suzy, had died unexpectedly. Almost ten years later he wrote: “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a vast sense of dumb loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it he finds it was in that house. Always it is an essential --there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced.” With love from Mary Mary Hartley, TCF’s volunteer librarian can be contacted at library@tcf.org.uk