Avignon and Home, Sat. Aug. 28-Sun. Aug. 29, 2010

[Unlike most entries so far about the trip, which, while derived from my journal notes, were heavily edited for various reasons, this one, the last in the series, will be verbatim other than for material required for clarification in brackets. It was written in the train station in Avignon, a city in southeastern France that served as the headquarters of the Catholic Church for most of the 14th century, when Rome and its environs turned hostile to the papacy. This French-centrism of the church looms in the background in parts of my novel, thus my reason for including it on my itinerary.]

Sunday, August 29, 2010 8:11 a.m. Gare d’Avignon TGV

“Sitting in a railway station, got a ticket for my destination….” The old Simon and Garfunkel song. And a reminder how radically things can change. My destination this AM is Paris CDG [Charles de Gaulle airport] and then a flight 10 days early back to NY. On Friday evening the word finally came: Mom had made her transition. Very much in the emotion of the moment…I cancelled the rest of the trip and decided to go back to be with the rest of the family for this momentous occasion. Other than “valiant woman” I have no words yet to express my feelings over Mom’s passing. There have been several spates of tears, some of them lasting, as happened last evening when I was trying to nap in the hotel before dinner.

The service for Mom in CO was yesterday so I obviously won’t get back for that, but I will join many, if not most, of the family for her burial in Easton. It will no longer be just “Papa’s Grave” [Papa was Mom’s husband, our father, who died all the way back in 1964]. I just know I have to be there for that, thus I am going back.

And even though the trip was cut short, it was cut neatly. I did everything I planned for the French leg of it, right up to getting into Salon-de-Provence with its Templar church and Nostradamus’s house, and into Avignon for a tour of the Palais du Papes [Palace of the Popes] yesterday. I would have been departing on the train for Basel this morning per the original plan, but it looks as if the Swiss-German portion of the trip, if it meant to be, is for another time. All this to say I have no regrets although it feels like I will have to revive some of my insights and enthusiasm for what I have seen and discovered about the Cathars after we have laid Mom’s body safely to rest. I do not find it coincidental that I was in the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene in St. Maximin at or about the time of her actual passing.

There was, and still is, a bit of disorientation with this much change although it was always there as a possibility from the time I first heard that Mom was having difficulty. I still remember that spate of tears years back in the Colorado mountains when it came to me that she might be dying. It did not happen then or several other times when I suspected it might be the case. When it came I can’t say I was blind-sided, but still, getting that note from [my brother] Joe just after I had sent out a note to the family about the experience in St. Maximin caught me off-guard. I have not experienced that depth of “loss” or lower emotion for some time and the effects are curious… .

Still 45 minutes before the train comes. Am way ahead of myself on getting where I need to be yesterday and today, unlike most of the trip previously… .
There will be quite a few hours of waiting and/or sitting in what will literally be a long day now that I get all those crossing-the-Atlantic hours back. In a way looking forward to being back in NY, being in easier contact with the family, perhaps near friends who will share a hug with me in these emotional times.

Wish I could begin to write some sort of memorial for Mom or even get in the notes I made prior to her passing, but I will consider having done this much as progress, a duly captured moment, and perhaps my writer’s cap will plop back on naturally at some point. I should have volumes to say about the trip, even if cut short, but I trust my records are adequate enough to have that happen in the near future.

[I did get back to the states in time to join the family for Mom’s burial service in Easton, Pennsylvania, where we were all born and raised. And I returned to Europe in October 2011 and completed the trip as originally planned in 2010. Click here to LINK to the first blog entry for the 2011 trip.]

********
Click to subscribe to this site’s RSS Feed.Click this link to order a copy of The Anathemas, a Novel about Reincarnation and Restitution.