Going Home

Welcome back, and thank you to those faithful followers who have checked back regularly (hello Germany, Finland, China and the others). I apologize for taking so long to continue – it has been a trying time for us all.

If you are joining me for the first time, be sure to scroll right down to the bottom – Justin’s story is there. Then work your way up to join us here.

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Self-deception is the ego’s trip wire, and so in the weeks, months and years that followed I bought every Moody Blues album I could find and listened with a skeptic’s mind to disprove what my heart and soul acknowledged. But I found the opposite, as you might if you choose to do the same. Almost every song, written by Justin or the other members of the Moody Blues, confirmed it, albeit with some projecting forward to a successful outcome. If you’ve ever wondered about some of the mysteries in their music – some of the thoughts that are expressed that don’t quite make sense in the context of everyday life as most of us know it – you will know that I speak the truth.

I was struck by the extraordinary strength it took for Justin to persevere against all odds for all those years, and the love and loyalty that Mike, John, Graeme and Ray showed toward him.

A year went by. I kept my silence while I carried on with my life – caring for my husband and children – but I was exhausted by the effort it took to keep my two worlds separate and safe from each other.

But of course that was impossible. My husband demanded to know what was going on. I knew that once I began to speak nothing between us would ever be the same. He would never see me as the person he knew so well again. I would have to hurt the man who had done nothing but love me well since I was sixteen years old.

It was agonizing, as you might imagine. He reacted as anyone would but in the end he held me close and promised to help. If I could prove it he would change his thoughts about life, about love, about death.

If I died on the Titanic, then who was I? He wanted to know. He said I should know that, if reincarnation was real.

But I didn’t know for sure. I only had a vague notion that we had been on honeymoon. That I had chosen to stay with my husband. I was deathly afraid to think that I had had children – that they had drowned and I hadn’t been able to save them.

My husband, sons and I traveled to Halifax and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic where I donned white gloves and was ushered up into the freezing room where they keep the archives. A woman in a steely grey suit and sensible shoes chatted as we rode the elevator and made our way down the hallway. “Halifax of course played such a vital role in the Titanic disaster,” she said. “We sent the MacKay Bennett to retrieve the bodies and set up a morgue to receive and process them. Gruesome task. Some of them just babies. They say the tarpaulins over the bodies rose and flapped with the wind and the motion of the ship as she came back to the harbour. Made them seem to still be alive. A good many bodies are in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery here in Halifax, but I guess you already know that, as you’re doing research. Anyway, here we are.” She lay a large volume on the steel table, and looked at me sternly. “Here is the ship’s manifest. Handle it carefully. You have twenty minutes. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

As I scrolled down the list of passenger names – I felt sure we had been in second class and some references in the music suggested the same – my finger lit upon the name Benjamin Howard. I looked across at the point of origin – Swindon, Wiltshire. Justin was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, backing onto the tracks of the Great Western Railway. I looked at the profession listed. Mr. Howard worked for the GWR!

My mind leapt to the possibility of a grand design. What if Justin had been reborn right back where he had lived before? What if the familiarity of the surroundings were designed to help him bring the possibility of reincarnation to the world?

Some time later I flew to England and drove to the Maritime Museum in Southhampton. The Titanic left from that port in 1912 and the museum there had a large exhibit. It was there that I found out that Benjamin Howard’s wife’s maiden name was Truelove. Ellen Truelove. Surely this was the universe telling it’s story.

I was seduced by the simplicity and beauty of this answer for many years, but all the while I felt unsettled. I let all sorts of fantasies cloud my own feelings – (the common letters in both Benjamin Howard and Justin Hayward are “in” and “ward” – surely the word “inward” was significant – and other things of that ilk.)

And that left me to relive all the deaths of the people on that passenger list. Had I been Augusta Goodwin, scrambling to gather all her six children to her as the crowd pressed against the cages that kept them locked in steerage? “Frederick, for God’s sake make them open the gates! Let us out! Don’t be afraid my darlings, Mother’s here. Frederick!” Had I held Sidney, my infant son out of the freezing water as long as I could? Did I fear that I might die first and drop his tiny body in the sea?

Or was I Bess Allison, holding my five year old daughter’s hand and frantically searching for my little son, Trevor. “Come out of the boat, Lorraine. Yes, out of the lifeboat. We must find your father and that blasted nurse. She has your brother and I don’t know where she’s taken him! Hudson! Hudson! Trevor!”

Over 1,500 people died that night on the flat stillness of the north Atlantic, under a sky studded with stars. Justin and I had been two of them, I felt sure of that. But who?

In Saved by the Music by Justin and John on Blue Jays they sing “This time I’m saved by the music – saved by the song we can sing – the song that you bring.” The band played well on until they could stand on the slanting deck no longer on that fateful night in 1912, but could save no one. Of course no one ever figured that the Titanic would be found, as Justin mentioned in You – again on Blue Jays. “I- I believe what is lost forever has brought the change in me.”

But Dr. Robert Ballard did find the ship, and by some strange cosmic alignment, James Cameron at precisely that time made a film about it. I slipped away while the boys were in school and my husband was at work and sat, shivering in an icy cold theater watching the frigid water race down the hallways. Watched the bodies float by the Grand Staircase. Watched the ship stand on end and then plummet to the sea. Still I felt like I had amnesia.

It was years later as I drove to Cornwall, Ontario to lay the ashes of my mother-in-law that the answer came to me. Her name – Isabelle Sarah – had always haunted me. Sarah. And I remembered how I’d felt in another Cornwall all those years ago when I’d first stepped onto English soil in this life. A sense of coming home.

And then I knew. I was Sarah Elizabeth Lawry, lately married to John Chapman. We had lived in St. Neot, Cornwall. It made sense. As a child I had named my doll Elizabeth. I called the statue in the garden Elizabeth. I had been Sarah Elizabeth Chapman. John had always called me Lizzie.

I finally felt settled.

It seems that John and I had stood by the rail that night and watched the lifeboats being loaded. But when it came my turn to step in I turned back, saying “If John can’t go, I won’t either.”

So many questions. Was I really that brave? Or had I felt safer on the ship with him than in the lifeboat? Had he cajoled me into staying? I sometimes think that he believes that, and that this demand put upon us, this dedicating his life to finding me is somehow, in his mind, karma. A life for a life.

I don’t feel that way. I hope someday to tell him so.

Until next time…. thank you for joining me.