Daniel - Stanley's Last Musing July 2014

Shared by Valerie Thompson on 09/03/2014

Stanley sent this to me by email as a 'possible' musing shortly before he died, and given his passing it seems especially poignant .  I've long believed in other realms and Stanley and I had quite a few chats about hereafters (I reckon there's more than one). On the one hand he wasn't a believer, preferring logic and what he could see with his own eyes, yet part of him was open to the idea that man does not know it all.  

My Musings July 2014

There have been some programmes on TV recently where people were trying to get in touch with those who had passed over. I once did that, not passed over, but tried to get in touch with someone who had. What we found was quite extraordinary. Thirty five years ago, Jackie and I found it almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that our beloved son, Daniel, with an IQ at a level to cause the specialist who spent the day with him, to warn me “Please try not to get into an argument with Daniel, Mr Ross, because you are going to lose.” Danny, our brilliant, lovely, beautiful Danny, was suddenly diagnosed with a particularly virulent Leukaemia. This was on a Tuesday afternoon and he died on the Thursday. He never did things by halves, our Danny.

As you might imagine, in those two days as well as in the very many long, following years, we were devastated. We could not accept that he was just, nowhere any more, he had to be somewhere, he cannot just vanish like that. Nevertheless, he had. At a moments notice we were able to take him to the Royal Marsden Hospital, which has some of the finest cancer specialists in the world. They gave us a room there so that we could be on hand for as many days as we might need. We only used it two nights. At the point where Danny died, Jackie was having some of her white corpuscles withdrawn in order to pump them in to Danny. But sadly they came too late. At his bedside I held his hand as he fought to breathe, until the little white T-shirt, of which he was so very proud, was suddenly, horribly, still. That shirt proclaimed, in large letters “I am eight years old.” We buried him in it. So it was, that in desperation, we began to look for someone, anyone, who might help us make some sense of it all.

Now you may have heard of the late Doris Stokes. She was a medium, internationally famous, commanding a huge following, and, as I remember it, one of her last evenings before her retirement, she appeared at the Dominion Theatre, London, before an absolutely packed house. Danny died some years after Doris had retired and when we eventually sought her out for a personal meeting, we found this little old lady, in the tiny kitchen of a very small flat in Putney, looking for all the world as she sat there, just like my dear old Mum.

I looked at her and thought, this is crazy what are we doing here? After exchanging greetings we sat down together and she looked across at me and said quietly, “You’ve come about Stan haven’t you?” We were gobsmacked. “No” I said, immediately becoming  very irritable, “I am Stan, and, as you can see, I am still here, in the flesh, in the land of the living.” We have come about our son Daniel, who died some weeks ago.”

Doris, still looking at me, went very still for a while and time passed whilst we sat talking quietly, till suddenly Doris murmured “I can see Daniel now.” Jackie and I looked at each other, speechless. Then she went on “he is laughing.” Neither Jackie nor I could breathe, let alone speak. What was she talking about? ‘Just like that, I can see Daniel laughing?? Eventually Jackie, ever the pragmatist, said “why is he laughing” and.” Doris replied “He’s laughing at the wreath that was put on his coffin made in the shape of a” …...and it was at this point that she began to look extremely puzzled, but she continued very, very slowly, “in -  the -  shape - of -  a -  Lawnmower??????

You see Danny used to be mad about lawnmowers. Jackie and I had even thought of taking him to see Jim’l Fix It, a television program where children were allowed to ask for anything they specifically wished for, providing it was possible. Danny’s wish was to ride on the Biggest Lawnmower in all the world. We were desperately sad later that we had not followed that through. But Danny had his own lawnmower, which he once took to pieces in the garage, and a few days later rebuilt it, pulled the starter and away it went. Absolutely amazing. No way I could have done that. Thus it was, that one of our close friends, Geraldine, knowing of Danny’s passion for mowers ordered a special wreath to be made for him in the shape that, somehow, little old Doris Stokes, sitting in that tiny Putney kitchen, could so incredulously, describe to us. How is that possible????

And that was not the end of the surprises. When we got home, we sat in the sitting room talking about our day and I phoned my first wife, Mary, to tell her how we got on with the famous medium. When I started to talk she interrupted me, and said “no, no, no, please, please, may I tell you something first” so obviously I said go ahead. She then said, quite simply, “Stan’s dead.” It still brings the hairs up on the back of my neck. Unknown to me, Stan had died in the small hours of the day, thus giving me yet another ‘how is it possible’ question, for there is no way in this world that Doris Stokes could have known about that. But maybe she wasn’t in this world…….

But in the final analysis, how did this help us in seeking to make some sense out of the unbelievable tragedy of the loss of our extraordinary Daniel? Well nothing could, or really did, but I do think that eventually it enabled us to both settle down, with the feeling that whilst death may be the end of life as we know it, it is not necessarily the end of everything, and that we may, when we depart from this world, eventually, still find ourselves existing, if only on a different plane of consciousness. Who knows, certainly not me. I think I shall stop now.

Stanley D L Ross Musings July 2014