After almost a month back in Vancouver, I’m bedding in. It’s been a beautiful early summer, the catalpa leaves, always the last trees to leaf in the West End, now at full size, the horse chestnut blossoms fallen, turning from pink and white to brown, littering the pavements. A few years ago, I’d take unqualified delight in such weather. Now, with climate change, I always feel a hint of anxiety. The snowpack on the North Shore mountains was unusually heavy this year, and some of the snow is still there. And yet when I look ahead on the weather app there’s no hint of rain. In New Brunswick, Quebec, Alberta, and in Eastern and Northern British Columbia, forests are burning again. And yet all we see for now in Vancouver is a faint haze on the mountains, so that the snow at times seems to be dyed light pink. Look straight up, and the sky is still a cloudless blue.

The energy inspired by travel and return that always fills me in the first week or two is slowly dissipating. I’m not quite finished, though, with thoughts about last month’s journey. When we were in England we made another trip outside London, not to a place of birth, but to a place of rest, the grave where my parents’ ashes are buried, a quiet churchyard in Broadstone, in what was a village but, even when we moved there later in my childhood, had already become attached to the large Dorset conurbation that stretches east through Poole, Bournemouth, and Christchurch. It was raining, one of the few rainy days that we had on our travels. We caught the bus from Poole, near the railway station, winding a route through an old council estate up to the parade of shops at the centre of the village. It was a bank holiday and the flower shop we usually go to to buy a bouquet for the grave was closed. We could not get the red roses that we normally place in the grave, following the tradition that my father started when my mother had passed, while he was waiting to follow her.

The rain grew stronger. We sought refuge in an upmarket supermarket that had opened since our last visit, and found a potted plant with deep pink flowers: not quite roses, but something close. We walked back down the Main Street, the wind whipping water into our faces, the fabric of my jacket already beginning to soak through. 

The churchyard had a lychgate, leading to a tunnel of yew trees, and we took shelter there for a moment. The rain did not stop, and so we walked out to the grave, with its small square stone flush with the turf. We cleared back the grass that had grown over it with our hands. I took off my fingerless gloves, finding a stick to scrape away the soil and moss that had spread onto the edges of the stone. Then I wiped the face of the stone clean of fallen leaves and debris, almost as you might wipe clean the face of a child. I placed the pot onto the the grave. We stood in silence, somewhere between thought and prayer, briefly linked hands and then let them go. We couldn’t quite leave yet, and so we waited, heads bowed, the rain still falling, very fine now, but thoroughly soaking through our coats. And then that last gesture again, wiping the granite face of stone now clean not of debris but of water, just as you might wipe tears from a face.

Two things came to me from this gesture, one in the moment, one later.  In the moment, I thought that in my travels I had completed a circle. One that started in Boston, in Lincolnshire, at my birthplace, in the houses and church that we visited but which I could not enter again. This journey was laid upon the map of an earlier journey that my parents had made. Their meeting in a residential school after the War, two people who had become disembedded from the communities in which they grew up, communities which were soon to vanish entirely. Out of this, the brave journey of their marriage, that began with such hopes, fears, and joy, preserved in the photo albums I looked through, and which ended here in this cemetery.  I was part of that journey without ever realizing their full story, nurtured, cared for, and then taking flight into a wider world and never really returning home. They watched me from a distance, how the trajectory of my life continued upwards, just as theirs plateaued and declined. I did not look back until much later, after my mother’s death, and then only to realise with compassion how different my parents’ lives had been from my own, how they they had become for me the most intimate of strangers.

The second reflection comes to me now, returning to that moment in the churchyard that is already a month in the past. It’s a phrase from the Bible, from 1 Corinthians 13, associated with this act of looking into the blurred surface of a face that you cannot see beyond. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” It’s part of a much larger passage about future transcendence, and how the nature of your worth is ultimately based love. It’s a metaphor that in the King James Bible translation given above becomes very poetic but also more obscure through changes in language use: the glass mentioned in the quotation is in fact a mirror. This was a passage I discovered in my first year of undergraduate study in London. We had a year-long class on the Seventeenth Century, and I read Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, marvelling at their sensuousness and sexual conceits. And then we moved on to the religious poems, in which sexuality somehow became transmuted into religious devotion, and then finally to what Derek Walcott called the “ashy prose” of Donne in his later life. Donne was one of the many translators who worked on the King James Bible, and so I was drawn back to the very text that I’d rejected in adolescence as a religious guide, entering it again as a poem. 1 Corinthians 13 as a full verse was one of my favourite passages: somehow the obscure beauty of the King James Version gave it greater resonance. And then years later I discovered that my mother had chosen the very same passage for her funeral, and I read it out at the church service. All these pieces of the past came together, then, in that sensation of the gravestone as a face or a mirror, something I could look at and touch, but not reach beyond.

I’m finishing the post on another Vancouver morning, the sky cloudy, hoping for rain, with travels over for now, and work to do.