Barry Gittins

Several years ago, my wife had a vivid sense of my mother’s presence; a sense that she was joyfully listening as our daughter played in a music exam. That still brings awe and gratitude to me. I am not a mystic or a deeply spiritual person, and rarely do I catch ‘echoes’ in that way of loved ones who have gone. But it did make me wonder about how our loved ones stay with us after they’re gone. We in the West make a habit of hiding from death and ‘moving on’, learning to forget our dearly departed.

I grew up within earshot of a railway station. Trains thundered past every half hour from dawn to dusk, yet I barely noticed them unless I was heading uphill to catch one. Call it selective hearing, filtering, or simple habituation: I only heard them when I chose to. So it is with gendered violence. Reports of domestic abuse, sexual assault, or family violence fill our feeds, but we tune them out. Sometimes it seems we have to, because these abuses of power are everywhere.

Conflict soon arose over which tail was more righteous in the Great Spirit’s eyes, and therefore more worthy of the plumpest little honeybee hogs? Soon the forest, once filled with laughter, reverberated with the thud of tribal conflict. The Shinies and Peeps — so similar in culture and belief — turned on each other in a bid for primacy. A war of tails. Shinies and Peeps alike were dulled, both clobbered by grief.