The Blue & Yellow Post

I read somewhere that colds and flu are a sign of confusion. Well if that’s right - I’m knee deep in confusion, because I can boast the worst cold in a millenium.

What we have here is doubtless a case of psychosomatic illness. As you change your thoughts it reflects in the body.  Your spleen gets damp when you have trouble digesting life, or is that your stomach that gets acidic when you have trouble with your partner? Was the asthma suffocation or was it that my sinusitis was veiled anger? Duh!

I discovered the joys of psychosomatic illness during the neurotic bent of my almost 30s.  I was unable to hold down a satisfying job, and I used the body rather than the CV to explore the boundaries of life.  All was fine in my ill world.  I sniffled my way across every new age book shelf, until at last I could go no farther. My waterloo was a book with the title, “Love your rectum back to health.” Arguably the finest title of all from the mother of all body  illness relativity, Louise Hay. An angel of hope to everyone that had a sneeze, rash or piles. But for me it signalled enough.

I’m happy to say that sort of navel-gazing and rectum loving is all behind me. But the sustaining message I took from the literature is one of personal responsiblity. I was “reared” as a Catholic, which often meant abrogating responsibility. Or at least handballing the lion’s share of it to something called sin, a fall from grace or dodgey advice from a guardian angel. Non- Catholics had no idea that we had a 24-hour 365 days a year counselling life-line (in the shape of a guardian angel.)

The guardian angel was supposed to be good. But there was one religious icon I recall from my early childhood that showed a bad angel talking into one of the saint’s ear, and good angel earbashing the other.  What a conundrum. The secret was to rely on your inbuilt conscience. Truly an elusive component - especially for little kids, who had their work cut out for them managing anything under this 24/7 surveillance.

Angels and colds are, I admit, hardly parallel realities. But, lately my thinking has been preoccupied with both. Perhaps it’s because I just finished a charming book, Miss Garnett’s Angel, by Salley Vickers. In any event, I’m head over heels back in love with the idea of visitations from winged dudes to help you over tricky times.  But then again, my thinking is cloudy with the infected cavities of my head and maybe illness is an essential criteria for seeing them.

My darling bloke saw angels coming out of the walls in our bedroom - as he lay dying. One of them had long hair with body paint, and he danced “between us”, Stephen told me. Those that know Stephen (aka bloke), would know such an image would be most unlikely if he were in good health.  Clearly another great mystery about transition.

Garnett’s book also included a reference to the bridge of separation, over which a soul must travel when they die, assisted of course by an angel. Stephen, in one of the morphia-ridden rambles that characterised those precious last days, also mentioned a bridge. He told me he “was building a bridge between heaven and earth”.

So, Holmes, Hays or Vickers - what next? Is the bridge accessible to me too? Can I get over it? Will I ever get over it? Apparantly that’s the task of those left behind. A chilling idea indeed. No wonder I’m sniffling.