Of course!

I (Lindy) went to Ben’s plaque the other day in order to say hi and also to change the flowers. I only use artificial flowers as I hate seeing all the dead ones on the top of people’s resting places.

I took a little while as I had to extricate the old flowers which had buried their stems into the sand below the plaque. I was kneeling on a piece of cardboard as the ground was wet.

I was arranging little daisies in the plastic vase. They are bright and cheery and don’t look ‘kitsch’ I don’t think.  As I worked I became increasingly sure that there was something with me. My certainty of its presence grew gently but surely.

It is hard and inaccurate to put the experience into words because there were no words but it was a gorgeous and “of course!”  kind of  growing certainty that I was not alone.

I realised slowly but surely and again “of course” (and I smiled to myself): there was a cat sitting next to me. There was no cat in the flesh of course, but it was definitely the presence of a cat that I felt to be next to me and I thought “Of course there’s a cat here with Ben! If anything would be here with Ben it would be a kindly, smiling, purring cat.”

My growing awareness of its presence reminded me of a record of Alice in Wonderland that my sisters used to listen to. In it, the Cheshire cat would appear slowly with a musical sound that crescendoed and echoed announcing its gradual materialisation.

It really tickled my fancy as I thought “How neat heaven is going to be if it’s like this! The clumsy rules of gravity and existence and time and space just don’t apply and a veil of separation isn’t there. A bit like “Hmm. What does Mum need now? Yep. A cat next to her sent by me.”  Zap!

Of course there would be a cat where Ben is. Of course!

Ben home schooling in Argentina