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Post by sunfrog on Sept 3, 2013 0:23:03 GMT -5
I just experienced a phantom smell!! The living room is full of the smell of delicious cooking sausage!! ;D Pea? Pea?? It's happening right now. It's 10:13 PM here so no one would be cooking sausage at night. And it's not a memory from my mind because we've never been a family of sausage eaters. Plus, it smells so good, like meat and other ingredients. I know I've never eaten anything that smells like that in my life.
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 3, 2013 0:37:59 GMT -5
I hope heaven for Arch is like the one in Defending Your Life, where he can eat as much as he likes of whatever he want and suffer no ill effects and Shirley MacLaine gives him some lovely past lives.
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Post by sunfrog on Sept 3, 2013 10:23:07 GMT -5
I don't want PLite to be dead.
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 3, 2013 17:27:41 GMT -5
Mmm. No. Indeed.
It's painful when a person dies suddenly, how we keep thinking of a million things we wanted to say to them when they were alive. It's different when an elderly parent dies. It seems like the right order of things. When a young person dies it seems so wrong. Add sudden death or an unexpected diagnosis followed by a very short period and then death, it's hard to accept. Hard to believe.
It's very hard on family and friends who are used to the deceased's presence and personality constantly being there, to have to make funeral arrangements and make decisions about things that were unfinished or undecided in their absence. It's hard to attend a funeral and simply allow the natural grieving to take place because instinctively we avoid pain and don't want this, any of this. We want to get back to normal. We want them back.
And yet the only way to get through grief is to grieve.
The ritual of a funeral is so important. Everybody gathers to remember and honour the deceased. It's a purposeful milestone. It has structure and process, and people at a funeral can offer support, if needed, and care for each other in their loss. Funny stories can be told as people relate their memories and appreciation grows with the realisation that so many people loved the deceased in different ways. That they were important to so many. Faith and spiritual beliefs also help. There may be no intrinsic meaning in a young person's death. We construct that meaning through ritual and what we believe. It helps.
For us on the forum it's hard in a different way, because although Archie's presence was so irrepressible and large on the forum, we only knew him in one real dimension, through what he wrote here. It's hard on us to believe when someone just stops being there and we have no body in a casket to pay our respects to or mourn. We have no process or funeral. We don't even really know what he looked like, or the sound of his voice. We don't know his real name or anything much about him. We can't send flowers to the family, or visit, if they'd allow it. We may not hear from Pigsnie. We may not hear from Andrew again, though I appreciate his coming here and letting us know.
That's why we need to create our own memorial ritual. We might need to write down here our funny memories and mine the threads for typical things he said that made his being here significant. We might need to remember him by, for example, planting a rose, or a tree. The memorial rite is an important part of the process of grieving.
We can also continue a relationship with him internally. We can talk to those who have died, and though it's not the same because we probably won't get an answer in anything like the same way, we might get signs or weird occurrences. The disappearance of a chocolate toffee bar or the smell of sausages cooking, all without rational explanation. I don't know why three white crested birds of a kind I've never seen before just sat on a branch outside my window, chattering to me, but the dead sometimes communicate to me through birds.
So, Sunfrog, what we and all Archie's family and friends're feeling is normal, uncomplicated, painful loss. We just have to grieve to get through it.
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scott
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 75
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Post by scott on Sept 6, 2013 16:02:43 GMT -5
I don't know the best way to respond to this; I'm late to the party but it has taken me a few days to process everything. I was going to wait longer but since I received a message from Avril a few days ago I decided I should say something even if I still don't know what. I have known the entity that is/was Plite for almost half my life and it's hard to process losing someone you've known for so long but never actually met.
There is no closure without some sort of official obituary - a name, picture...anything at this point would be useful. I just can't accept the news as factual just because some guy who goes by the name "andrew" says so. Maybe my skepticism is really denial but this is just a really unusually way of dealing with death, especially when the person has gone to such lengths to remain anonymous. I really hope Pigsnie is doing okay and finds the time to maybe uncover a little bit of who the real PLite was. His presence on Movie-Vault in the days of old was so enormous and affected so many of us I don't see how it would be appropriate otherwise unless it was his desire to remain anonymous even upon death.
I hope everyone is doing okay, especially Sunny.
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 6, 2013 16:14:51 GMT -5
Hi Scott,
So good to hear from you. I'm so sorry to have given you this news on your birthday. Despite that, I hope you had a great day.
There's this phenomenon called 'disenfranchised grief' that occurs when people feel they are somehow not entitled to grieve. It's usually experienced by people who have a relationship with the deceased that is not recognised or sanctioned by those closest to the deceased - such as illicit or gay lovers. But it also happens to children, the disabled, the elderly, friends and colleagues. In a way, because of our connection through the Internet, and because of all the things you've said above that we are experiencing here, what we are feeling is disenfranchised grief.
I would love to send flowers or a card to Pigsnie and their Papa. I would love to have heard Archie sing, or to see even a death notice in the paper. I would love to have been able to pay my respects at a funeral, even though it would have taken place in London, or lay flowers on a grave.
If it hadn't been for Archie I would never have got involved in the MoVa forum. He was a force of irrepressible wit and ridiculous fun.
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scott
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 75
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Post by scott on Sept 6, 2013 17:36:06 GMT -5
If that is a message from Arch it sounds like he's in a good place...but of course that would mean he really is gone.
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 6, 2013 17:38:26 GMT -5
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 6, 2013 17:40:13 GMT -5
Oops, modified my post while you were replying, sorry Scott.
Yes, it continues to be hard to believe.
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 6, 2013 18:03:39 GMT -5
Here's something else Arch would have liked, I think.
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Post by shoegirl on Sept 6, 2013 21:18:58 GMT -5
Beautiful birds Avril. I think P-Lite is gone. We might not have proof, but you Sunfrog and I have all had possible signs of P-Lite visiting, so I would say he is no longer with us in the living form..
I wonder how long he will stay around though before moving into the light?
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Post by sunfrog on Sept 7, 2013 0:26:51 GMT -5
Hi Scott, I'm okay. Not as sad as the first few days, there's just a constant sadness that runs through everything now. It comes and goes.
Yes, it's strange how everything unfolded isn't it? Even the medical stuff that I thought made sense at first seems suspect now. Pea said Pigsnie was the one who had a heart attack not him. But Pea did have intestinal problems.
I thought they tested his lumps for tumors and cancer before and found nothing. Was Pea so sad that no one was posting that he decided to leave? That sounds weird too. In all the years I knew him I never saw him depressed. Does Pea even get sad? Would he get that sad about it?
Also, pretending to die doesn't fit either. Maybe the 16 year old Pea would, but then Pigsnie would box his ears. I don't think the grown up Pea would do that.
The animal messengers could be our grief stricken minds grasping as coincidences as we try to makes sense of all this. Or quantum mechanics like in the movie Sphere. We create what we're thinking about. Or they could be messages from Pea. Unknown.
Plus there's the whole, who was Pea mystery. Who was he, why did he disappear suddenly? Is he alive or dead? On MoVa he always wanted to print out his posts so he could read them later and remember his friends. I always thought that was weird. Like he had to go somewhere or had some kind of destiny to fulfill later. Like he wouldn't be able to hang out with us after he became king or something. Is now the time he had to leave? What the heck?
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Post by shoegirl on Sept 7, 2013 8:18:32 GMT -5
P-Lite was having bladder issues, and he posted about it here...
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Elvira
Pimply Teenager
Posts: 58
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Post by Elvira on Sept 7, 2013 19:23:30 GMT -5
He last posted on 3rd August, so I guess he had the 'minor stroke' very shortly after that.
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Post by sunfrog on Sept 10, 2013 8:54:19 GMT -5
Maybe he left London and came to L.A. to pursue his dream of being a comedy writer.
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