Remembrance

As this blog is being published on 11th November – Remembrance Day I thought it would be a good day to revisit something I wrote a couple of years ago about remembering those who’ve gone before us.

In my spiritual tradition the whole of November is dedicated to remembering and praying for the dead. We celebrating All Saints’ Day on 1st November and All Souls’ Day on 2nd November. These are important feasts when we remember those who’ve gone before us.

This may sound morbid but in fact it's a great celebration to honour those who we have loved and have left this world. It's also such a good opportunity to remember and honour what they left with us. My dad would have been 82 last month. Sadly he died when he was only 65. But he left me, my mum and sister and all who knew him with so many happy memories. So much he taught me, he taught through example, through the doing, the showing, not the telling. I learnt from him the power of really listening to someone. Full, undivided attention. That’s really saying something about a man who wore two hearing aids and relied on lip reading. He was a deep listener. He heard and understood what was not being said, as much as what was actually being said. People turned to him for advice regularly.

When I’m listening to my coaching clients at that deep level, concentrating on them fully, I like to think that I'm putting into practice what my dad taught me by example, not just what I learnt doing my coaching diploma.

Dad had a real fascination in other people, their lives, what made them tick and I think that I inherited that from him and is one of the reasons that I was drawn so strongly to coaching. I love being part of my client’s journey. Watching her discover things about herself, grow and blossom.

In the last two years since I first wrote this I have lost other significant people in my life. In particular my grandfather who loved to share stories of his life and career. Usually because he thought we could learn something from them or because he wanted to entertain us. Stories that we still retell to each other sometimes discovering we’ve heard one that no one else has.

When I was visiting New York three years ago he told me about his experiences of New York during the Second World War. He did his war service in the merchant navy and was on one of the Cunard ships sailing between Liverpool and New York zigzagging across the Atlantic trying to dodge the German U-boats. I’d heard this many times but this time there was a chilling detail he hadn’t shared before. When he was first doing the Atlantic crossings the United States had not yet joined the allied forces and was not at war and so New York was all lit up. The U-boats would sit just beyond the international water line and watch the allied ships sail out of the harbour all lit up like Christmas thanks to the lights of the New York skyline and wait to pick off the ships as they entered international waters. It made my blood run cold listening to that reality of the Second World War and my friend and I, when we were on the High Line, the old overhead railway that’s been turned into a overhead garden, we looked out over the docks and remembered grandad and all the merchant sailors who weren’t as lucky as him to survive that experience.

So, here’s to remembering my dad, my grandad and everyone else who has gone before me this month with love and enormous amounts of gratitude.