Ruth is relieved that Harry is beginning to once again engage fully with his working life. He has no private life to speak of, other than the connection he has with her. He no longer goes to the pub with the others in Section D, and they have stopped asking him. They are all sensitive to his emotional state, but other than Malcolm, none of them know how best to interact with him. Other than the occasional official dinner – which he always attends alone – he very rarely goes out in the evenings. Most evenings he spends at work, which is where he most experiences a continued purpose to his life.
Ruth knows that eventually she must pull back from Harry. She will always be with him, but she has other tasks to attend to in the spirit world. She has barely had a chance to catch up with her father, and she has only fleetingly met the other people from Section D who had died before her. For now, and for as long as his need for her is so strong, Ruth will be with him whenever he wants her, however often that may be. Being in her current state, she can come back from anywhere at all in an instant when Harry calls.
She has garnered information about Harry and the life he has ahead of him. She has little idea where this information has come from, but she knows it to be reliable. It seems that her skills as an analyst have seeped through with her to the world of spirit. There is a lot she knows which she didn't know when she was living. Information just comes to her, like downloading a complete file from the internet. Ruth thinks the spirit world is the nearest thing to the internet outside the internet itself!
She has created a `file' on Harry's future. She doesn't know how she knows this, but she is sure it is true:
Harry will gain much from his overseeing the security for the 2012 Olympic Games. He will be praised and feted by those in power. He will not be swayed or seduced by this attention, having been witness to, and at the mercy of the vicissitudes and the foibles of the powerful for more years than he cares to count. He will put his head down and just get on with it.
Harry will learn how to live with his grief. In time it will no longer consume him in the way it does now. He will accept it as a part of his life without Ruth. He will do what he did as a younger man, and compartmentalise his emotions, so that he will only access his feelings of grief and loss when he is alone. While he is still alive, it will never fully leave him.
In two years, after having turned 60, Harry will take leave for three months and do the Grand Tour of Europe. He will travel alone. He will do this, as hard as it will be for him, because he believes he must do it for her. She will be with him all the way, and he will know, and be grateful of her company, even if from a distance.
He will work right up until three years before his death (default retirement having been declared unlawful in 2011).
He will meet two different women who take more than a passing interest in him, and by whom he will be briefly tempted. He will turn down both. He will remain true to his Ruth. It was his last promise to her, made as he kissed her cold lips that afternoon when she left him for the last time.
Harry will live for a little over another decade. He will not quite live to see his 70th birthday, but he will live long enough to see two grandchildren born, and to make peace with his son. Ruth knows the date, the place and the exact time to the second when he will die. (It will be part of her task to ensure he has someone with him at his moment of death. He will not die alone.) She knows the cause of his death; it is to be from a heart attack, and it will be sudden and unexpected, and death will take him quickly.
Soon after Ruth had died, Harry had purchased a burial plot adjacent her own. He has left instructions for what is to be inscribed on his gravestone. It will read:
PEARCE
Henry James (Harry) KBE
1953 – 2023
Father of Catherine and Graham
Reunited with his Ruth
He will welcome death; he will not fight to stay alive, and she will be there to welcome him as he leaves his body.
After his death, Harry and Ruth will indeed be reunited. Without the distractions brought about by being in their bodies, the desires and drives of which have tended to complicate rather than enhance, they will once again fit together as two halves of a Perfect Whole. They will spend considerable time together in spirit before planning another lifetime – which they will spend together.
They will have earned it.
oOo
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Spoken by Lysander, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Act 1, Scene 1
oOo
I don't know about how you have found reading this, but I have found the writing of this story to be a struggle, but all in all, it has been a cathartic experience.
I have tried to make it a positive and uplifting story, despite the death of Ruth.
I have experienced the deaths of a number of people close to me, and so I am aware of the ability some of us have to communicate quite freely with the dead. I thought it might give an interesting – and ultimately optimistic - twist to the continuing story of H & R.