Kieran Mulvaney

Apr 25, 2012 1:31 PM EDT

Its 2012!! ha ha whatever that means...sooo do whatever! You're such a gifted writer...Blessings on all roads you take! Rereading your books makes one see anew...

- Karen

Mar 29, 2012 10:13 AM EDT

Gosh, I can't believe how many weeks - months, even - have passed since I last visited your blog. I have been consumed with work for a lifetime, it seems, but here I am. Catching up. I really enjoyed this entry and have been similarly engaged with loss and death, since the passing of my grandmother when I was on the cusp of my transition to secondary school. There is a very good - short - book by CS Lewis that I have returned to many times. It is called 'A Grief Observed'. In his poignant, real way, Lewis somehow articulates the enormity of bereavement, following the death of his wife to cancer, without descending into sentiment. He writes of sex, quite early on:
"One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe." (chapter one).
Write the book, Kieran. Make it fiction, or non-fiction, or a mixture of the two - like a docudrama, or whatever they are called. I believe that you would write it very well. I miss so many things that remain private, but especially, in advance of their inevitable passing: I miss my Mum and Dad. I came across a tiny little photo album amongst my belongings last weekend. I was looking through my battered old brown suitcase of memories that lives in my loft for something I needed to refer to for a talk, and there it was, dated '1979'. It contains what were my only photos at the time, as I didn't own a camera until later on that year and I know this predates it, because of the subject matter. They are of varying ages - there's one of me on my first motorbike, at 17 and one of me at 16 with my first 'proper' dress. A Laura Ashley creation. And there are two your Mum gave. One is of Michael at 17 with the longest, flowing locks you could imagine. The other is an old black and white of the 3 of you: I've written in pencil on the back that Michael is 13, Stephen is 11 and you are 10 months old. I took them with me to University today and borrowed one of their swanky cameras to photograph them so that I could email them.
Anyway, I guess I should go now as I can smell my dinner and I have eaten more cremated dinners than I care to admit, due to getting involved with something on my computer! I hope you're well. Sue

- Sue