{"id":32533,"date":"2016-06-17T06:30:19","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T18:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=32533"},"modified":"2016-06-16T22:41:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T10:41:40","slug":"he-was-my-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/06\/17\/he-was-my-friend\/","title":{"rendered":"“He was my friend…”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A day like this (but ‘not this day’)<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday, I attended a funeral — a gathering of many in and outside a lovely little old country church, on a winter’s day that was both chill (in the shade) and sunlit, with snow on the Southern Alps which looked very close in the clear air across the plains.<\/p>\n

Several very moving eulogies were given in memory of Eileen, who like the year’s summer turned to autumn, has also left us — but the specific words that have stayed with me were those of the friend who said that what came to her first were lines from Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar:<\/p>\n

“He was my friend, faithful and just to me…<\/em><\/span>
\n…When comes such another?”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Simple words, movingly spoken — and still apt after so many centuries. “Of course,” you may say, “Shakespeare.” Nonetheless, I have been thinking about why his words have endured and become those we turn to at such times. I believe it is partly because of the beauty of the language, but mostly because Shakespeare’s words so often capture emotional truths that are universal, including the nature of friendship.<\/p>\n

When comes such another, indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I attended a funeral — a gathering of many in and outside a lovely little old country church, on a winter’s day that was both chill (in the shade) and sunlit, with snow on the Southern Alps which looked very close in the clear air across the plains. Several very moving eulogies were given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32533"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32538,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32533\/revisions\/32538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}