Month: January 2016

Mum in the Summerland

On: By: Tony Papard

Mum passed to Spirit in the early hours of December 2nd, 2015. She lingered in her room in the Nursing Home for a bit, confused. It seemed familiar with all her things around, but when she saw her lifeless body on the bed she thought of me, and, without knowing how, found herself briefly in my bedroom. I saw her for a second as a bright ball of light right above the area where George had passed to Spirit over 24 years before.

She then passed over to the Summerland where her family welcomed her, including the son who was stillborn, now grown in Spirit to ‘a fine young man… very attractive and of a good nature’. She didn’t need much rest at first and was ready to go almost immediately. She asked for a cup of tea and a fag, but after having these, later on she didn’t desire them anymore. She found much to see and do and is living with her parents in a place with a lovely garden. It’s in a kind of village.

She met her former husband, my father, ‘Herky’, and he apologized to her for the way he treated her during their shortish marriage. She was pleased to see him and his sister Athena and brother Filaktis. She met my best schoolfriend, who passed to Spirit at the age of 14 on my 15th birthday, Michael Zacek. She said he’s now a fine young man too. She mentioned my paternal grandmother Ellen (or Eleni/Helen) who sent her love to me, though we only met once on Earth and didn’t speak each other’s language.

Mum keeps her eye on me and knows what’s happening. With help she acted to stop me going around places we went together almost daily a few days after she passed over. She was concerned not only was it too soon, but the weather was too cold and windy. She saw me making a stew the weekend after she passed. She was with me over a month later, January 20th, 2016, when I visited Battersea Park for the first time since she passed over, which was a bit traumatic for me.

She finds it marvelous to feel light as a feather, free from any pain and able to go wherever she wants, not confined to bed or a wheelchair as in her last few months on Earth. Food made her feel sick those last few weeks, she said, which is why she stopped eating. She said she’ll always be near me, allowing me my moments of privacy of course, and she loves the memorial to her I’ve made of the corner cupboard which was a Great Aunt’s and was in all mum’s homes since I was born. She liked the lilies behind her picture a neighbor gave me, but says flowers weren’t necessary for her funeral apart from the token arrangement my brother and I had ordered, and even that wasn’t necessary (she later made sure it didn’t get delivered!)

She told me it’s beautiful over there with so much to see and do. She wonders why she lingered on so long on Earth in that miserable condition, unable to do anything for herself the last few months in the Nursing Home because of her mobility problems. She hung on as she didn’t want to leave me alone, but when I said on that last day before she passed that I’d be OK, she felt free to move on.

She continues to send signs that she’s still around and watching – certain significant pictures falling from the collage wall which conveyed a message, an apport of a friend’s missing ring which suddenly appeared on my carpet at a very significant time (it had been lost months earlier, not known whereabouts).

My partner said she is safe in the bosom of her family, having a whale of a time, and looks in on me often. After her initial excitement, she needed a rest to recuperate from her long years of increasing immobility and occasional dementia on Earth. My maternal grandmother told me she was resting, but happy to be back with her family and free from the restrictions which affected her during her last years on Earth.

Although she refused to rest at first, she felt she needed it later - in a little cottage surrounded by cornfields and with a big avenue of elm trees, like Trinity Manor in Jersey when she worked as a nursemaid many decades ago. She said it is very peaceful. She has met many old friends, including ones she knew from before she came to Earth.  She has no objection to her ashes being kept in a sealed tube in the corner cupboard memorial to her, and says to do with her ashes whatever I am comfortable with.

She apologized to me for being awkward at times and stubborn, and says in her last years she knew she could get away with things she wouldn’t have done earlier in her life. She thanked me for looking after her all those years and said that’s why she stayed longer than she should have. In fact my grandmother said they called her to come over as she’d overstayed her allotted time.

My mother said it is so much brighter and happier where she is now, and when she visits Earth is seems such a dark, dismal place by comparison.

(Most of the above came via various direct telepathic messages to me, either from my mother, George, or my maternal grandmother. The bit about seeing me make a stew came from a medium at a local Spiritualist center. There are several things which were surprising to me, which indicate these are real messages from her, not my imagination. I wouldn’t have expected any sort of reconciliation with her ex-husband – I wasn’t even sure if he was on her plane of existence, probably in a Greek-Cypriot part but able to visit. I was surprised she needed rest after being very active when she first went over there. The cottage surrounded by cornfields and with an avenue of elm trees was not something I’d have immediately thought of myself, I’d have expected recuperation to take place in a special hospital kind of building with a lot of others. It seems the cottage was created personally for her in surroundings she once knew and loved, so does not appear to be the cottage she was living in with her parents in a village. A kind of occasional rest home perhaps, whether permanent or temporary. Like a ‘weekend cottage’ or ‘holiday home’ when she needs to get away on her own perhaps. I would not have expected the meeting with my father’s sister and one of his brothers, and his mother. It is just something I wouldn’t really have thought of. Also I thought she stopped eating because she’d had enough of life here totally dependent on carers, etc., but she insisted food made her feel sick in those last few weeks. It is these unexpected things that validate messages like this as being not just my imagination. I had a similar message about his transition from George. Neither he nor my mother mentioned a tunnel, nor a Life Review, though when asked George said this came later in a special building. He said he saw not a tunnel but a red mist when he first passed over, and heard wonderful classical music.)

 

 

 

 

Cyprus situation

On: By: Tony Papard

In July 1974 Cyprus was invaded. Almost 42 years later huge areas of the country are still under foreign occupation. In these areas Cypriot law does not apply, and people are tried by a foreign court.

Cyprus was invaded by Greece in July 1974. The fascist Colonels in Athens arranged a coup against the Cypriot government and imposed a new leader, Nicos Sampson, with the purpose of ethnically cleansing the whole island of Turkish-Cypriots and annexing the island to Greece. The palace of Archbishop Makarios, President of Cyprus, was bombed, but he escaped, went to the UN General Assembly in New York and in a speech which has been forgotten by all but Turkey, it seems, pleaded for help saying: ‘Greece has invaded my country’.

The island is still partly occupied, and has been since so-called ‘independence’. Britain maintains two huge ‘sovereign bases’ on the island. These are, in effect, two huge areas of colonial rule; areas of Cyprus under permanent British occupation. It includes villages, and public roads, and any Cypriot arrested in these areas comes under the authority of British law and courts, not Cypriot ones.

Yet with thousands of troops permanently stationed on the island in these occupied areas, Britain refused to enact its role as guarantor of the independence of the rest of Cyprus when Greece invaded by means of the Nicos Sampson coup. Turkey appealed to Britain to act to save the Turkish-Cypriot population, but Britain did not respond. Turkey then had no option other than to send troops to the island to create a safe haven for Turkish-Cypriots in the northern part of the island.

In the South the Sampson coup collapsed, the junta in Athens was eventually overthrown. Makarios returned as President of the largely Greek-Cypriot Republic of Cyprus in the south (ethnically cleansed of Turkish-Cypriots), but died in 1977, some may say rather conveniently. My own view is that the Sampson coup was organized by NATO to rid the island of Makarios who was thought to be too pro-Soviet. I suspect they felt he might allow Soviet military ships access to Cypriot ports and therefore to the Mediterranean. My father, a Greek-Cypriot who was in Cyprus at the time of the coup, came back to UK afterwards, removed a picture of Makarios from his mantelpiece and declared: ‘Makarios is a Communist’. My father seemed to know quite a lot of secrets , so this is perhaps an insight into how those who supported the Sampson coup saw Makarios. My father also said nuclear weapons were stored in Cyprus under a green hill in one of the British occupied areas (so-called ‘sovereign bases’).

In the northern part of Cyprus the Turkish Federative State of Cyprus was established under Denktash with the long-term goal of achieving a federal solution to the eternal Cyprus problem of accommodating both Greek and Turkish-Cypriots. Even before the fascist Sampson coup to annex the island to Greece (Enosis) the power-sharing agreement between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities had broken down.  Denktash had been Vice President in name only, as the Turkish-Cypriots had been marginalized.

When it became apparent that the Greek-Cypriots had no intention of forming a federation with the Turkish-Cypriot state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus was declared. However when years later the Kofi Annan plan to re-unite the island under a federal solution was put to the electorates of the two Cypriot republics, the majority of Turkish-Cypriots voted in favor of the plan, while the Greek-Cypriots rejected it. So we now have the ironic situation whereby the Greek-Cypriots are responsible for the continued division of the island, yet have been rewarded with EU membership. The Turkish-Cypriots, who voted for reunification, are denied EU membership and their Republic is unrecognized by any state except Turkey.

Of course not all the blame can be put on Greece, the Greek-Cypriots or the British. Atrocities were carried out by both Turkish and Greek Cypriots before, during and after the tragic events of July 1974. Greek-Cypriots fled for their lives to the Southern part of the island, and the Turkish-Cypriots fled North for the same reason. Turkish mainland troops remain on the island 41 years later, and many mainland Turkish settlers live in the TRNC, as do many British settlers in both Cypriot republics. Famagusta is a particularly sore point, with the tourist area in mothballs since 1974. I suspect this area was taken by the Turkish army as a bargaining chip in the event of any settlement of the Cyprus question. It has never been developed as a tourist center of the TRNC, though the rest of Famagusta is a Turkish-Cypriot town.

Some progress has been made since 1974. For years the ‘Attilla Line’ divided the island completely. A no-man’s land policed by the UN, which ran right through the capital Nicosia, and which only foreign tourists could cross. A ‘Berlin Wall’ ran across Nicosia, and fences separated the rural borders between the two Cypriot states. In recent years, however, the border has been opened and Greek and Turkish Cypriots can now cross the line and visit the other parts of the island.

There remains one village in the UN buffer zone where Greek and Turkish Cypriots still live together, though when I visited they lived largely apart, with their own clubs and cafes, etc., and of course the Greek-Cypriot Orthodox church and the Turkish-Cypriot mosque. Despite the differences in language and religion, the two Cypriot communities are remarkably alike in their culture, the men spending much of their time in the coffee shops drinking Turkish/Greek coffee and playing backgammon while the women seem to do most of the work. A foreigner would be hard pressed to differentiate between a Greek and Turkish Cypriot. What saddened me in 1977 when I first visited the troubled island, was a Greek-Cypriot boy in my father’s village, who had just done his national service, said the only Turkish-Cypriots he had ever seen had been through the eyesights of his military rifle. In divided Nicosia, however, I saw Turkish and Greek Cypriots waving to each other across the line that divided the two communities, the Turkish-Cypriots high up on the ancient walls of the city by one of the gates. Now at least they can visit each other.

The tragedy of Cyprus may never be resolved, since it seems to suit both Cypriot states to maintain the status quo, particularly for the Greek-Cypriot Republic of Cyprus which has international recognition and EU membership. They have little to gain from a federation with the TRNC. Nevertheless they should reach out to their Turkish-Cypriot fellow-countrymen and women and come to a mutually acceptable formula for a federation, and the British areas of occupation (‘sovereign bases’) which did nothing to protect Cypriot independence during the events of July 1974 should be kicked out.