When you passed, I don’t know if I mourned you, I think I mourned your potential. The woman I defended and made excuses for daily, the woman I wanted nothing more than for you to say you were proud. I mourned that one day you would say you’re sorry, and that you would embrace me while I cried all those tears you told me to suck up. I mourned the absence of gentle hands that never reached out to me, and a calming voice that never sung to me. I mourned a woman that never existed, but I hoped you’d be. I am haunted by a ghost that has no body, and memories that don’t exist. That image I mourn is a mirage in a desert, as I desperately drag my limp body to it’s shores. You were supposed to be there. You were supposed to lift me up. You were supposed to be there even if I wasn’t perfect. I never got to meet that woman that everyone gets promised, and I got 24 years of you.
I want to be mad, I want to be enraged, I want to scream at you in a fury, scream and ask that you give me what I’m owed, at least for once you can tell me how you really feel, tell me that you love me, tell me that you are proud, tell me that I can cry now, tell me that everything will be okay, tell me! But you can’t tell me now! You’re gone! You left me! You left me all alone with everything you forced upon me! I’m alone!
The only difference now is that the potential is lost.
I mourn that potential, but I wish I had started sooner.
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"Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother", by A.E. Stallings
First – hell is not so far underground –
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is “loud” (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).
The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals – losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes – but just at night –
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame – lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don’t remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details –
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.
My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with torturous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many –
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils –
Without sex or seed – all underground –
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)
I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing at all –
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.
He does not fully understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True –
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he’d be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn’t forbid it.
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In words laden with affection and warmth, Prince Philip told the then Princess Elizabeth how he had fallen in love with her 'unreservedly.'
The letter, written in 1946 — a year before their wedding — was among several revealed in Philip Eade's 2011 book Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life.
The Duke of Edinburgh, who has died aged 99, told the Princess how falling in love with her so 'completely' had made his personal troubles and even those of the world 'seem small and petty.'
He also found it difficult to put his feelings into words, describing in another message after they had spent time together how he felt incapable of 'showing you the gratitude that I feel.'
And he told the Queen Mother in the year of her daughter's wedding to him how 'Lilibet was the only thing in this world, which is absolutely real to me.'
Love letters
Philip served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and saw active service against German, Italian, and Japanese forces.
The Greek prince's early life was also marked by upheaval — he escaped his home country as a baby by being hidden in a makeshift cot made from an orange box.
So his words were filled with meaning when he told Princess Elizabeth in 1946 how his love for her made all his past struggle — and the horrors the world had just been through — seem trivial by comparison.
He wrote:
'To have been spared in the war and seen victory, to have been given the chance to rest and to re-adjust myself, to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly, makes all one's personal and even the world's troubles seem small and petty.'
Three years earlier, Philip had spent Christmas at Windsor Castle.
Princess Elizabeth was said to be animated in a way 'none of us had ever seen before,' her governess, Marion Crawford, wrote.
Writing to her after seeing her again in July, Philip wrote of the 'simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.'
'I am afraid I am not capable of putting all this into the right words and I am certainly incapable of showing you the gratitude that I feel.'
The same year, he apologised for the 'monumental cheek' of turning up to Buckingham Palace uninvited.
'Yet however contrite I feel, there is always a small voice that keeps saying "Nothing ventured, nothing gained,"' he wrote.
'Well did I venture, and I gained a wonderful time.'
And in a letter to the Queen Mother two weeks after his wedding to Princess Elizabeth in November 1947, Philip expressed his vision for their time together.
He said:
'Lilibet is the only thing in this world, which is absolutely real to me, and my ambition is to wield the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good... Cherish Lilibet?'
'I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me. Does one cherish one's sense of humour or one's musical ear or one's eyes?
'I am not sure, but I know that I thank God for them and so, very humbly, I thank God for Lilibet and us.'
Public speeches
The pair's wedding, attended by an array of foreign kings and queens, captured the public imagination in the austere post-war days of November 1947.
The newly-weds were called the Fairy Princess and Prince Charming.
After honeymooning at Broadlands, Hampshire, home of Lord Mountbatten, and at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate in Scotland, Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh stayed at Buckingham Palace until renovation of their new home, nearby Clarence House, was completed in 1949.
And in the years since then, both Philip and the Queen have spoken of each other with affection in public.
In a 1997 toast during the couple's 50th wedding anniversary, he said:
'I think the main lesson that we have learned is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage.
It may not be quite so important when things are going well, but it is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult.
You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.'
She said on the same evening that Philip had been her 'strength and stay all these years.'
'I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know,' she added.
In 2002, at her Golden Jubilee Speech, the monarch said of her consort:
'The Duke of Edinburgh has made an invaluable contribution to my life over these past fifty years, as he has to so many charities and organisations with which he has been involved.'
And, during her Diamond Jubilee address to Parliament in 2012, the Queen said to her husband:
'During these years as your Queen, the support of my family has, across the generations, been beyond measure.
Prince Philip is, I believe, well-known for declining compliments of any kind. But throughout he has been a constant strength and guide.'
Private moments
Philip was there for the Queen when her father, King George VI, died in February 1952.
Only six days before her father's death, the then Princess and Philip had embarked on their tour of Australia via Kenya.
According to Eade in his book, Philip said of the days following the King's death that 'there were plenty of people telling me what not to do.'
He added:
'I had to try to support the Queen as best I could without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.'
And according to an anecdote told by Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Philip is said to have told the Queen when recalling their first meeting in 1934 that — 'you were so shy. I could not get a word out of you.'
Mischievous Philip is also said to have joked to his wife on the day of her coronation in 1953 — when she was wearing the 17th-century St Edward's Crown — 'where did you get that hat.'
Elizabeth II (21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022)
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (10 June 1921 – 9 April 2021)
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