There came a late night of writing, when I felt strongly that John was trying to reach out to me mentally. As I tried, again, to steel my mind against this, I started hearing in my head, over and over and over, the words of John Donne:
Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me
They came unbidden, but I thought they expressed very well what I would like him to know about our parting. Just that first verse repeated and repeated, until, with the family all asleep and my office door shut, I ended up crying late into the night.
Finally I went to bed and slept.
Next day, a Saturday, Bill took the boys to one of their school sporting fixtures while I stayed home and did some chores. At some point I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened the newspaper, to discover that John had hanged himself in his cell the night before! I won't describe my shock and grief; I did that in the previous memoir and don't want to relive it yet again. Suffice to say, the shock and grief were both extreme.
I hasten to add that he didn't do this because of our break-up. I found out some days later that it was because he had been hoping for a reduction in his sentence and a transfer to a country prison, but both things were denied. He was detained 'at Her Majesty's pleasure', i.e. indefinitely. He had served eight years, since the age of 17, and was now told he would do at least 'another eight years and you'll do them all in Pentridge'. Pentridge Prison was pretty much Hell.
Bill and the boys came home and found me a weeping mess. Then Ridge turned up out of the blue. He normally didn't visit at weekends. (They were often times with his children.) He too found me sobbing; Bill explained as best he could – though he was probably puzzled as to the magnitude of my upset. Ridge was puzzled too.
'Will you cry that hard for me when I die?" he asked. An odd thing to say, I thought vaguely; we weren't all that close. But I wasn't paying much attention to such irrelevancies.
He also said,
'I just had a feeling I MUST come and see Rose.'
No-one calls me Rose. I like people to use my full name, Rosemary. But John, very privately in letters and poems, called me Rose. In his case it was not a shortening of Rosemary but a reference to the rose in The Little Prince. Ridge didn't know that, of course, and he never called me Rose before or after that occasion. But on that day, relaying the 'message' he had received, he said repeatedly that he had had to come and see Rose – the significance of which only occurred to me much later.
'Would you like me to see if I can contact him?' he asked. I jumped at the chance. Bill decided, wisely I think, that it was best to take the boys out and leave us to it. Reg 'tuned in'.
'That can't be right!' he said, shocked, and tried again. Evidently he got the same thing again, and couldn't bring himself to believe it.
'He's sitting up there with his legs crossed around the electric wires, and he's LAUGHING! Laughing his head off!'
'Oh, that'd be right,' I said, in a sudden switch from tragedy to fond exasperation. 'That'd be him.'
I knew him well; it made sense. I instantly understood that he was laughing in triumph. He'd done it! He was free! It had worked. He had risked death turning out to be annihilation (which, after all, he would never have known if so) to discover that there was indeed something beyond it, and even that he was still him. I tried to explain this to Ridge. He got it fairly quickly, because he was simultaneously able to perceive John's reaction for himself.
Then I realised: THIS was the reason for all those visitations from my connections who had 'passed over.' Otherwise, the grief and shock would surely have been too much for me. I really think I might have gone mad. But by the time John died, I had plenty of evidence of 'life after death' and could not possibly doubt it. Thank God!
Ridge gave me a 'prayer for the dead' from his magical tradition, to help John's soul journey on, which I wrote down. I have said it for many people since, including Ridge himself when he died some years later. After he had left, when I was alone, as instructed I lit a new white candle, said the prayer aloud, and left the candle to burn all the way down. I didn't stay with it; I needed to go and weep, and write, and phone people who needed to know, and arrange for death notices in the papers from myself and from the Melbourne Branch of the Poets Union... I left the burning candle in our big kitchen sink for safety. When Bill came home with the boys a little while later, it gave him a hell of a shock. I'd never done anything like that before; it would have appeared quite bizarre. For a moment he had the fear that I might have gone crazy and killed myself!
But that was never in my mind, even though I went through months of grieving. I dealt with a lot of it on my own, but Ridge was also a great help. He visited nearly every day for weeks, and of course I asked him to get in touch with John for me. I learned that John had soon moved to a beautiful garden, and was basking in its beauty and its peace.
This wasn't like having a whole conversation in proper sentences. I guess none of us was used to communicating across death! When I spoke of my distress that John had spent so much of his life in prison, Ridge was shown, as a message, an image which he drew. We realised it was a chain, but with the links broken open. He then got the words, 'Chains change.' John was finding a way to say: 'It's OK, I'm free now.'
Later, Ridge was given a message for me, not from John but from Ridge's own guides. First of all he told me that the widespread belief that suicides go to Hell is not true. He said it is realised that the life those people set out to live was too much for them, so they are given a rest for the amount of time that would have been left in that life, then they get to come back and try it again in a gentler form.
Then he said, 'But some suicides – a VERY few – are karmic. They are meant to be. In that case the soul progresses on immediately. John's suicide was one of those.'
That was of course a huge comfort to me.
[I have my own soul and my own journey. I have never received any insight into why John had that karma. But there have been a number of indications since then that there was a strong karmic connection between the members of those Pentridge poetry workshops, as a group, including my friend Linda and me.]
I comprehended fairly quickly that the fragment of Donne that had kept recurring in my head the night John died had most probably been his thoughts that he was fervently sending out to me. He always did his best to reassure me like that! On this night, with the intention to die, he would have wished more than ever for me to understand that I was not the reason. (Indeed, I never thought so, though it might have been a natural enough supposition.)
Earlier that night, I had also jotted down a poetic fragment of my own. It seemed like a somewhat bitter farewell to him (albeit one I did not plan to send him; I felt I was really writing it for myself). Afterwards I forgot all about this, until I came across it amongst my papers a long time later:
The path seeks my feet
and I engage,
travelling the track
of an unknown clarity –
nothing to do with simple
questions of you and me.
I got very tired of all that.
I’m free. I’m not coming back.
Again, when I did come across it and recalled jotting it down that night, it struck me forcibly that these were not my words to him, but John's to me.