“While experiences vanish, memory remains.”

January 3rd 2012

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On December 31, 2011, Josie O’Donohue, mother of John O’Donohue, crossed peacefully from this visible world into that invisible realm to which John preceded her by almost exactly four years. 

Those of us who remain here are grateful for the richness of memory.

“While experiences vanish, memory remains. 

Indeed, the narrative of an individual life is the secret construction of this invisible sanctuary of memory. 

This is where all the known and unknown substance of our days and nights is gathered and selected until it finds the form of memory.  This is subtle imaginative work. 

Memory is not merely the reception of the raw imprint of experience nor its simple storage. 

There is a harvesting imagination that works at the heart of memory which searches the lived substance of our days until it clarifies and settles into a form that abides. 

Almost without noticing it, the individual sanctuary of memory is forever finding its way further into structure and shape. 

This work continues until the substance of our last hours on earth is received into its deeper lived form.  When at last the body falls and the visible life vanishes, the finished sanctuary of memory holds all the harvested possibility.”

From an essay titled “Towards a Poetics of Possibility” by John O’Donohue that he delivered in January 2005 at Trinity College, Dublin.

For Josie, family flowers only please, donations in lieu to the Stella Maris Day Care Centre