the Address at the crematorium
After the larger service at Worcester College, this is our little family celebration of Ros' life, by we who thought we knew her better than most and certainly longer than many. Yet she still had the power to surprise us, even after death - to find out that she passed on a married woman (yet still a doughty feminist!). Unknown to all but a very few who were in the conspiracy of silence, Ros and Paul were married in Sri Lanka on 24 January 1997.
Many friends have told how, throughout her seven years of cancer, she never complained or said "why should this happen to me?" She was always positive and remarkably philosophical. When her brother called her 'very brave', she metaphorically shrugged her shoulders and said "What's brave about it? There's no choice - I've just got to get on with it".

In contrast to such a spirit, I suspect that we want to cry out 'Why?' Why should this ghastly, insidious disease be allowed to rob us of a loving, active, strong, fit, outgoing woman in the prime of life? It makes no sense. We cry 'Where was God in all this? Was He just standing by helpless?'.

Maybe we can get a clue from the Biblical picture of the Suffering Servant, suggesting that far from 'sitting on His hands' (as it were) and doing nothing, God has in fact been in Ros' situation all along. Surely He has been in the prayers of many people around the country - some unknown to Ros personally - who supported her and gave her strength. She was told at the Bristol Cancer Centre: 'Never underestimate the power of prayer'.

Recently I heard a Holocaust survivor on the radio dealing with the question "Where was God?" in that suffering? His answer was that that God was there - with them in the camps, dormitories, gas chambers - suffering with them, giving them strength and comfort.

So with our dear Ros. Was not God there at the John Radcliffe in the skill of the surgeons, the care of the nurses, the expertise of the radiologists and physios?

Surely He has been there in the loving support and care of Paul all along, and recently I am sure He was with the amazingly generous and loving care from Fiona and her mother Diana, and Paul's family during Ros' last few days; care for her and for Paul, not to mention God being with her siblings and parents in their loving concern and care for her in her last hours. Certainly, I feel that the atmosphere at Fiona's on Wednesday and Thursday last week was truly spiritual, full of love - and where love is, God is.

As Paul and Barbara and I watched Rosalind's spirit slip away as the sun rose at 6.15am on February 2O~, I remembered St Francis of Assisi's verse:

'And thou most kind and gentle death,

Waiting to hush our latest breath, Thou leading home the child of God And Christ our Lord the way has trod'. :

As I have already suggested, we know, of course, that we haven't brought the real Ros into chapel here. She is free from pain and discomfort (and her perennial bad back!) and now she says "Cheer up!", with Julian of Norwich "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well".

Ros' old friend and youth club leader Jack Myers sent a card with these words: 'We don't say goodbye to those we love. It is right for us to weep, but there is no need for us to despair. They had pain here: they have no pain there. They struggled here: they have no struggles there. You and I might wonder why God took them home - but they don't. They are, at this very moment, at peace in the presence of God'.
So we want to celebrate Ros' life with real thanksgiving, for a woman who was a 'feisty fighter' (quoting one of our sympathy letters). She was loving and kind and generous from her earliest years, but that was her nature. She once told Barbara that one of her 'lifers' whom she had to visit as a Probation officer said to her: "You were the only one who stuck by me". That was Ros: our hearts go out in love and sympathy to Paul's daughter Emily and to Paul, our son-in-law, who has been a tower of strength to her over the past seven years.

In fact, both Ros and Paul have been examples to us all of courage, and strength and love, both refusing to buckle under the slings of outrageous fortune. Barbara and I are proud to have been Rosalind's parents, just as the Goodman's must be proud of Paul: we must all rally round and support him in his bereavement.
However, lest you are thinking that we have come here today to canonise St. Rosalind of Horsforth and oxford, lest you think that Ros was a paragon of virtue and too good to be true - I'm sure she would have a good giggle at the very thought! Like us, she was no 'plaster saint', and could be as awkward as the next - fiercely independent, as many here know. But that was the Ros we knew and grew up with and loved.

Of course, we shall all miss her dreadfully - her 'Hello, father. Its me!' on the telephone (nice to hear her voice still on the answer phone at 1O8, Paul); her picture postcards from exotic foreign parts; her worrying about our welfare when she herself was being treated for a fatal disease! Those who were at that 1996 party at Tideways will never forget her 'Celebration of Life and Love' when she had only just completed chemotherapy.

Ros did really enjoy life - her garden, music with Eynsham Choral Society, physical activities of many sorts - down at the gym, or playing tennis even during a course of chemotherapy! Her sense of adventure, love of travel, tramping in the Dales, a frenetic life-style (shared with Paul) one must admit which generally left us breathless. It was as if being S2, she thought she could still behave as 22! I still recall a Saturday morning in the 197O's in Scunthorpe when I answered the door to a grimy tramp who said: "Jane and I slept last night in a ditch near Boulogne!". What it is to be young! The trouble is that Ros never forgot what it was! Her enthusiasm never left her. Her spirit lives on in our hearts. So "we must not grieve for her as those who have no hope".

In present company I confess to feeling diffident about quoting Hebrew history, but I remember a story about King David whose wife gave birth to a son, but sadly the child became very ill and at the end of a week, died. While the boy lived, David shut himself away and refused food, praying to God in sackcloth and ashes. When the baby died, to the astonishment of the courtiers and servants, the King bathed, changed his clothes and ordered a good meal. "Why did the King fast when the child lived, but feast when he was dead' David replied: "While the boy lived, I fasted and wept, thinking that it may be that the Lord will be gracious to me and the boy will live. But now he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him: he will not come back to me."

So, with us. We have prayed and wept for Ros, hoping she might miraculously get better. But now we know that she will not return to us: we hope to join her when our time comes. She will expect us to be happy and to celebrate that she is now healed and at peace.

As Paul, Barbara and I watched over Rosalind's last two and a quarter hours, the lines of an aria from Handel's oratorio (called, I think, 'Jophthah's Daughter') came to me: "Angels, waft her through the skies, far above yon azure plain". As the dawn broke, it seemed that's where she had gone. I felt very conscious that (as Josiah Condor wrote): "This world of ours and worlds unseen, how thin the boundary in between!".

Our dear Ros has gone to a new life where she waits for us. Christians believe that, because of Jesus' Resurrection, Christ has abolished death: I think that Ros knows that now.

When our children were at school, Barbara had a habit of going to the door with them and saying: "I'll wave you round the corner' fancying that, in so doing, during the day all would be well with them! That's what we are doing today for Ros: we're here to 'wave her round the corner' and all is well. So we can say:

"God be with you till we meet again,
May He go through life beside you
And through death in safety guide you,
God be with you till we meet again." Amen.
written and read by Ros's father, Fred Gill
full crematorium service