In Memoriam

Susan Elizabeth Parr : 14 February 1946 – 22 October 2011

   When our sister, Susan Armstrong, married Harvey Parr at Northwood Church in the summer of 1968, they promised to love and cherish each other until they were parted by death. Never was such a promise more completely honoured. Throughout the eight long years of Sue’s brave battle against cancer, Harvey was by her side at every step: every hospital visit, every consultation, every bout of therapy, every blood-test and transfusion.

   He shared her joy at every success and relief at every remission. He helped her find the strength to carry on past every setback. When the end approached, Harvey was equal to the final challenge. He was a tower of strength for the whole family. He literally moved heaven and earth to enable Sue to spend her last days in peace, and without pain, in her own bedroom, in her own home and with her family around her. No one could have done more for Sue and we all stand in awe of his loving care, devotion and compassion.

   Together, Sue and Harvey built their careers and their delightful family home, shared all their sorrows and joys for forty three years of marriage, raised their two sons and, just one short year ago, celebrated the birth of Theo – their first grandchild. With Sue’s departure, little Theo has lost his paternal grandmother, Ben & Tim have lost their mother, Carol and I have lost our big sister and Harvey has lost his soul-mate. The waves of grief spread outwards to all her family and friends and they do not diminish as they travel. She was greatly loved and is greatly missed.

   When Sue and Carol and I were children ourselves, styles of parenting were rather different from what is considered normal today. When we transgressed, our parents left us in no doubt as to our deficiencies. If we did something right, they tended to confirm that this was no more than was expected. The effect of this upbringing was to make Sue into a perfectionist. But the only person of whom she ever demanded perfection was herself.

   She worked tirelessly at her profession as a Physiotherapist, as a wife, and mother and ultimately as the doyenne of our extended family. Of all the critics I have ever encountered, none could stop me in my tracks so completely as Sue, when she would look me in the eye, shake her head and say quietly;

“Oh…David…”

   My younger sister, Carol, joined Harvey in devotedly nursing Sue through her last days. And when the three of us were together at Sue’s bedside my thoughts sometimes drifted back to the days in the early 1960s when Harvey, Susan, Carol and I had all been pupils at Ashlyns School, in Berkhamstead. In those far off days - now forever sunlit in my memory - the words of the King James Bible washed over us every day in assembly or in the school Chapel.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

They said it was the Psalm of David. I always liked that one and I rely on it coming back to me at times like this.

   While Sue lay dying, I was already searching high and low for some words from the great canon of English literature appropriate to our feelings for her. When Harvey told me that Sue had chosen a woodland burial, in the countryside she always knew and loved - the peaceful woods and fields which were the last scenery she saw from her bedroom window – my attention kept returning to a few lines from a sentimental poem I had been required to learn for English homework, one evening in the long ago at Ashlyns. 

   They were written by the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke who, like Sue, was given time to contemplate the approach of death. Our farewell to Sue is offered in these lines:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace,

Under an English heaven.