Peregrination

 In the last two or three years of her life (she lived to be 93), my mother's astral body left the place she physically was and went on journeys.

"You don't know where I am, do you?" she'd say, dreamily: "I'm not here."

She had a soul friend, an astral dog called Lou who had no physical being so far as we knew. Lou used to travel with her to keep her safe.

She used to return to places where she'd lived, or places she'd visited and loved, and wander around there and look at them, with Lou walking close beside her to take care of her.

She went back to the family home where we lived most happily, the culmination of all her patient buying and selling her way up the property ladder, a thirteenth century house in five acres of land with woodland and a river running through it — where we kept sheep and hens and grew vegetables and had as many apples as we wanted picked straight from the orchard trees. She and Lou revisited that place, and lay down and slept there for a while.

But the place she most often returned to was the North York Moors — "Is there a cardiologist on the North York Moors?", she asked me one day. There she would wander along sheep tracks, with Lou to nudge her or tug at her sleeve to keep her feet in the way she had to go.

"I'm on the North York Moors . . . " she'd say, dreamy and happy and contented; and in my mind I could picture her there, because I also love the North York Moors.

One night among many when we were called out in emergency because she'd pressed her Lifeline button, she said to me, "I want to live for ever."

"Well, you will," I said. "We all do."

But she was not to be fobbed off.

"I mean in this world, " she said fiercely.

But even while she was here, she wandered away. She saw a fairy once when she was a little girl, stood quite still and watched it for a while. One time when she was driving in her car up to a crossroads near the church in the village where she lived, she had to wait at the intersection for a funeral with black horses to go by. It felt very special to have been there just at that moment, watching the horses pulling the carriage down the lane. She asked, the next day, whose funeral it had been; but there had been no funeral, and no such horses in the village.

Once, driving up the M1 with my father, she (the passenger) had cried out to him to be careful because of the black dog jumping up at the car. One of my daughters has seen that black dog, too.

And when my father died, she opened to door one morning to find him standing there, smiling at her, young again.

Back to her mind along the paths of memory came things she had physically seen, too — Fred Denby who gave her a lamb of her own, sitting her on his knee and telling her nursery rhymes, her Aunt Kate saying she was a dirty blossom because she buried her wet underpants in the fields of their farm, a great stud stallion being led along the lane to the brood mares, the Hindenburg flying over the farm one day, the prisoners of war who worked there, the animals in the fold yard with their breath hanging in clouds on the frosty air, and the men taking the kitchen door off its hinges to carry in the man who'd slipped and fallen in the fold yard and broken his leg. They brought him into the kitchen, with its great open fire place and the dairy off the back, and cleared the table to make a place where they could put him down and set the broken bone.

Most of all, in those last years she remembered our sheep — going across the bridge we built over the river, at nightfall, to check they were all safe and well in their byre. And she'd call out to them, "Goodnight, boys!" and they'd call back to her. "Baaaa!!"

She rejected the frequent urging of her next door neighbour to take up knitting or at least listen to the radio or turn on the television.

She just sat quietly in her chair with her head resting on her hand, and let her mind and her soul and her astral body roam free.

She said she thought she was just a waste of space now, but she was never bored.