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I resume this diary after a lapse which, I hope, will be explained by the following sequence...
Saturday, 19th March. I am invigilating the Memoire Collective show (see Bog Bodies and More entry) at the Crypt of St.Pancras Church in London, when I learn that my mother has died suddenly in Kent. My response is tempered in part by the knowledge that she never recovered from my father's death less than a year before; I had been anticipating that anniversary also, and now have a sense of a love story completed. I also recognise that as an only child without children, I am on my own. I last saw my mother on her 83rd birthday, 12 days before; we talked on Rome, and my last image is of her sitting with a friend, surrounded by gifts of chocolates, flowers, and Italian jumpers.
Sunday, 20th March. After a night in Deal, I return to Rome. I am due to present a film inspired by my mother at a conference in Portugal. I decide to go ahead as a tribute to her. The film, "Fragments", is a BBC digital story (http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalstorytelling) in which I talk about the affect of my mother's silence about her life in Jersey during the German Occupation of World War Two.
Tuesday, 22nd March. After the CAA in Tomar, I return to Deal via Rome, to begin the process of sorting the family house. Good Friday is spent with my aunt (my late father's sister) going through my mother's belongings and finding photographs and artifacts I had never before seen. It is a strange time, an unexpected excavation. My uncle is now in hospital, too.
Saturday, 26th March. The first anniversary of my father's death from Parkinson's Disease (in his last days I note how much he looked like the images of the Pope seen with increasingly regularity in the press). At 6pm, following his older brother by exactly a year, my uncle (his brother) dies in the same hospital as my mother. What is left of my family (one aunt, one uncle, various cousins) begin to come together as never before.
Sunday, 27th March. Palm Sunday. I am back in Rome, and invited to a dinner in a palazzo close to St.Peter's, held to mark the opening of a wonderful exhibition of early Jerusalem photographs (to which I will return in a later posting). Before Grace is said, Father Gavin Carney remembers my mother and father, not least the coincidence of the patron of the 19th photographer being a Lady Finn...
Friday, 1st April. My mother's funeral. I make the ceremony as similar as possible to that she chose for my father. Frank Sinatra sings "Moon River"; I ensure she is wearing her favourite red Avon lipstick to the end. (If my father taught me about archaeology, fishing and football, my mother schooled me in beauty, fashion, and glossy magazines). There are so many flowers, that I take some back to Rome - in the blue and yellow of an English spring.
The late afternoon flight is delayed; I get talking to Ilie, a Canadian-Romanian carpenter, on the plane. When we get to Rome too late for the local train, I suggest we share a taxi into the city. The haggling and spiralling fares prompt a quick decision; we will both go to St.Peter's instead. In these early hours, the piazza is emptying.
It is a cold night for spring but we sit our luggage and talk through the hours, the flowers under wraps at my feet, our eyes trained on the illuminated windows of the Pope's apartment.
Saturday, 2nd April. Ilie and I stay around the piazza until lunchtime, by which time the crowd had swelled considerably. Ilie leaves toget a train south; I leave for a special tour of Trajan's Forum, and an exhibition of earliest photographs of Jerusalem. Early evening, I head back to Trastevere to eat, planning to return to St.Peter's for the nightime vigil. I take a glass of wine in my favourite bar, and just after 9.30pm, go to get pizza. I am leaving the pizzeria when I hear the bells. Although I check if they are sounding the hour, I recognise what the news they bring. It was a curious thing to hear news of the Pope's death brought with such symbolism - not by conversation, internet or television, but through something as ancient as the tolling of a bell. I try to find a taxi toget to St.Peter's. My salvation comes from a man called Salvatore - saviour- who confesses he wanted to go to St.Peter's but was undecided as to whether he could leave his shift. He does, not only taking me to the piazza, accompanying me through the crowds, and driving me back home past midnight, but not accepting a cent for the entire journey. The atmosphere in the piazza is extraordinary. Feeling a need to connect, I call a Glasgow couple I met on a flight last year, who had just had their marriage blessed by the Pope.
Sunday, 3rd April. I have to go back to the UK again, this time for the launch of the Jacquetta Hawkes archive in Bradford. I go to mass for the Pope at the beautiful church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, taking the flowers with me. I think to leave them discretely by the door but a series of conversations with Italian officials and the priest, leads to an invitation to leave them at the altar. They are the only flowers there that day, brought from one context another, one loss to another, and also a sign of celebrated lives.
Wedesday, 6th April. I return to Rome on one of the last flights to Ciampino before the airport is closed for VIPs attending the funeral. Millions have paid their respects to the Pope lying in state in the Basilica of St.Peter's, and around the area is being cordoned off. The atmosphere is calm, and the streets around St.Peter's and Trastevere lively with people playing music, singing, huddled together for warmth; as one might imagine a medieval pilgrimage.
Thursday, 7th April. I walk along the Tiber from Trastevere, my eye drawn to the simple reminders of the Pope's passing, posters plastered on roadsides, modern shrines.
.
There is now no access to St.Peter's, but an army of volunteer workers is making pilgrims as comfortable as possible. The city has laid on free water, there are blankets, medics on alert. On the bridges are the remains of votive candles which have burned through the night.
I note that my father would have been 80 today.
Friday, 8th April. The procession to get into the piazza has begun in the early hours. I leave the house at 8.30am, and plan to stop where I am when the service begins. Gradually, I make progress and reach the Via della Conciliazone, the main road leading straight to St.Peter's, where the crowds are seamless all the way down to the piazza.
I am in the middle of a Polish throng, which is a wonderful, and humbling, place to be.
I had only walked for 20minutes, those with me had travelled for a day or more. Random sights and sounds, but the eye is drawn to the vast numbers of digital cameras, and cellphones (mine included) capturing this event. For a Pope of the new media age, large screens project images from his life and messages urging up "not to hurt ourselves or each other" in the crush. When the service begins, the million or so on the streets are suddenly hushed. Each time the Pope's simple wooden coffin comes into view, we applaud. There are wild cheers and chanting as if for a football star, and it is not inappropriate, somehow. The Latin mass and music, the applause and silences continue over two and a half hours. Thunder rumbles overhead, a lone plastic bag drifts by, helicopters circle gathering images which are even then projected before us. When it is over, and Pope John Paul's coffin leaves our view for the last time, through velvet drapes into the Basilica, the applaud and cheers continue, drowning out the tolling Vatican bells which we can see as images alone. Eventually - and it is a some minutes - the solemn toll breaks through. I turn to hug - instinctively - the two young woman with whom I have shared the journey these past hours. Simply standing next to each other we became guardians of our sacred space, and sharers in the reason for this particular communion. Walking back through the Polish pilgrims, many still standing in silent prayer, I join the orderly throng of thousands crossing back over the city's bridges; in the quiet, I hear someone's radio playing a Requiem, above and before us, the international media continue to record the crowd's every nuance. A former and sometime journalist, on this occasion I am happy to be in the other camp, experiencing, rather than observing experience.
The culmination, then, of an extraordinary two weeks, during which I questioned many things not least how I feel about faith. I would like to open discussion on how we, as archaeologists, acknowledge personal loss, and mark the ritual of death with which so much of our work is involved at - in theory at least - an impersonal level. I recognise that I mark ritual knowingly (for example, I will take my mother's ashes back to Jersey, Channel Islands, where she was born but to which she did not return in life and scatter them, with personal artifacts, in the sea). I discussed this at a conference on death and dying at UC Berkeòey in 2000, this time prompted by my research into the allure of bog bodies, and how this corresponded with my previous career as a news journalist reporting on tragedy http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/townsend/ pubs/OP24_SeeingtheDiff.pdf .
Hi Christine, my sincere condoleances (hope I'm spelling this right). I bumped onto your name at the BBC site, remembering it from the Vintage Computing festival reports, and then again onto this site after reading about the Eckert auction a while ago. Very interesting stories there. Reading about the Jersey war years reminded me of the war stories of my grandparents and -uncle here in Holland, visualising their experiences on the very places it happened, in their home village - peaceful now, thankfully - and realising that now that they're gone, by capturing such visualisations we've in a way also inherited some of their memories. Gone but still not forgotten. Wishing best of luck,
Regards, Rudy
