I will never forget the lady behind the Post Office counter. Meeting her was such a reminder of how little we know about the people we meet in the course of our day to day lives, of the things we carry with us, the depths of our feelings, our hidden talents, the grief that many of us share but which we rarely talk about. Sharing grief can happen in unlikely places. …
Read more ...The 1945 bombing raid on Dresden and the poem that Megan Young wrote about it has attracted more interest than any other post. She wrote the powerful poem, Annihila, on the 50th anniversary of the raid. When you read it, you can feel the intensity of Megan’s ability to relate to the suffering of others and transform that into the written word. This is the voice of a young woman who cared deeply about justice and who felt the pain of the world. …
Read more ...I had never heard the word Sprechensang until I read one of the poems by Megan Young. It means, apparently, something between singing and speaking, spoken singing. It doesn’t feature even in a large dictionary. So how did Megan know this when she was only 15 years old. It is just one of the many questions I ask myself about Megan. My daughter was an equine veterinary surgeon. She died of cancer, aged 32. Her understanding of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world is present in her poetry much of which has been published in the book Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul. …
Read more ...Megan wrote an evocative poem about the arrival of spring bluebells in Kentish woodlands. It is one of my favourite poems. So simple, so observant, and – as was so often the case with Megan’s poetry – hinting at a spiritual awareness. It was written only a few months before the symptoms of her cancer began to be felt. This and other poems are published in the memoir I created following her death from cancer of unknown primary (CUP). She was 32. Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul is a celebration of Megan’s life.
Read more ...This year the Archbishop of Canterbury will be one of the many who will gather in Dresden to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombing raid on the night of 13/14 February. He will preach in the city’s cathedral, reduced to a pile of rubble in 1945 but now magnificently restored and dominating the Dresden skyline once again. Its rebuilding was a controversial decision. Some say that the ruin which remained after the raid served as a fitting reminder of the horrors of war – a memorial to all who died. For many years the ruined cathedral provided a meeting place for those who came to remember. I was one of them. The gold and pastel coloured interior of the restored building could not be further away from the gaunt greyness of ruined Dresden.
Read more ...For many people cancer is a death sentence. Maybe this is why a warlike vocabulary has grown up around the disease. We use phrases such as ‘fighting the battle’. But not everyone feels comfortable with such imagery. My daughter Megan was one who did not. It’s not a war, she wrote shortly before her death from cancer at the age of 32. Similar thoughts were expressed by a man facing death in very different circumstances. Michael Lambrix was a prisoner on Death Row in the USA. He was executed in October 2017. ‘I suppose it’s really not that different from the resolve most cancer patients feel when they too are counting down their last days – especially those who have suffered for so long under that threat of death, and when that final countdown does come, there’s almost a sense of relief that the journey may finally come to an end and the suffering will finally pass, ‘ he wrote.
Read more ...Giving Comfort and Inspiration to Others Megan’s poetry has struck a chord with so many people over the past 18 months since I published her poems in Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul. Some people contact me to tell me so and I take great pleasure from knowing that Megan’s poetry is helping and pleasing others. Sometimes it brings comfort. Sometimes it is inspiration. Sometimes it is sheer pleasure in the beauty of her words. But there must be many others out there who I do not know about who have been affected by reading Megan’s poetry. One such that … Read more …
Cancer of Unknown Primary – Megan’s Story The Nightmare of the Hidden Cancer My energetic, fit and healthy daughter Megan was diagnosed with abdominal cancer almost exactly five years ago. She died four months later, aged 32. We have never known what type of cancer she suffered from. Was it ovarian, pancreatic, stomach, liver …. no-one could say. Numerous tests were conducted, scans carried out, consultations held. But the site of the primary tumour which had caused my daughter to become ill so quickly and so devastatingly was never found. The cancer cells riddling her abdomen were secondary. During those … Read more …
A poem which speaks of love Today is my daughter Megan‘s tenth wedding anniversary. She and Toby were married for just over four years. Megan died of an unknown form of cancer, known as Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP), in January 2010. In this poem, which she wrote many years ago, she speaks of love. Lunar Speculation Where there is a crowd There are familiar strangers Acquaintances, smothered by their own ambiguity. Anything they say can still wash over me. The abyss, the sea and suddenly A flight to plains of green. For you are the light in the darkness … Read more …
The significance of remembering those who have died This has been a summer of remembering. As a nation, we have been remembering the young men who lost their lives in the First World War. We have come together to do this. But it is what we, as individuals, do all the time for those we love who have died. We remember them, create memorials for them, simply talk about them. And in this way, they live on. I have often wondered over the past four and a half years since my daughter Megan died about the extent to which our … Read more …
