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sea. This turned rough enough to take some of the children to the brink of seasickness while Dad whooped up and down the deck to encourage the lemonade out of them. Cousin Andrew was aboard with us: he had bought the lemonade and was on his way to relieve an excise officer on Islay whose sole task was to ensure that all the locks in the seven distilleries on Islay were secure. Islay has a number of sea lochs that penetrate the island's mass leaving it like a starfish that has lost a couple of its arms. Loch Indaal is the longest of these indentations. It runs for several miles into the island between Port Charlotte and Bowmore with its round stone church. Athene was baptized in the church at Kilchoman not far from the head of the loch on a headland that looks west to the Atlantic and north to the Machirs, sandy scrub lands that slope gently into the sea. Just beyond Port Charlotte is the cemetery of Nereabolls, where Celene's ashes were interred in 1958. Dad was buried there in 1971 and in 1978, Luther and Doris placed Mother's ashes in the "lair." When Dad died on the 4 th June, 1971, Clyde was able to be at the funeral. Then in an amazing sequence, other members of the family came in relays to be with her until at last, I put her on the ship in Liverpool as Mum and Dad planned months before. The Keswick conference was on at the time so we shared in the communion service when the chalice given in memory of Celene was used. Poetry is always multi-layered. In the following lines, I wrote some months after returning home to South Africa, the picture of seagulls following a ship waiting for scraps to be thrown overboard came to me. We, the children were the seagulls following in Dad's wake. "Wake" was three things: the path left by a ship; the occasion when a scattered family gathers to celebrate the life of a member who has died, and finally a person stirring from the "cemetery" (place of sleep) to face the light of a new day. June 1971 was all these things. We followed Dad's wake; we celebrated together- I had not seen Luther or Doris for over 20 years, nor Athene for nearly as long - and we live in hope of resurrection.
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