The Absent Prince by Una Suseli O'Connell BLOG TOUR #TheAbsentPrince @RandomTTours #UnaSuseliOConnell #BookExtract

 

Do we inherit the psychological as well as the material legacies of our ancestors, the hidden dynamics that influence our relationship patterns, our health and our self-image? 

Una's heartfelt family memoir, based on her parents' letters and diaries, follows the arc of individual lives between the years 1933 and 1997. 

Over a four-year period Una travelled in England, Ireland, Switzerland and the United States speaking with people who knew her parents and grandparents. 

Alongside painful and shameful family secrets, she discovered stories of great emotional courage, resilience and abiding love.

The Absent Prince by Una Suseli O'Connell was published in June 2020 by The Conrad Press. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you.

Extract from The Absent Prince by Una Suseli O'Conell

Chapter One

The Faithful and the Faithless 

I’m very fond of newspaper vending machines because they are so delightfully un-twenty-first century. They are entirely mechanical, have no moving parts and only accept coins. But their days are numbered. Before too long, the only remain- ing example will be on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington. 

When I drive long distances in America I like to pull up in small towns, park my car on Main Street, offer up my seventy-five cents for a local newspaper and settle down in an unchained coffee shop. I give myself over to understanding the lives people lead in communities such as Monroe, Wisconsin or Beaufort, North Carolina and the section of the paper that allows me to do this most fully is the obituary page. From an obituary I get a sense of what was important to a person; the tone of writing tells me how the deceased was seen by others; I learn about family and personal tragedies, the opportunities offered during a lifetime and the consequences of accepting or declining those opportunities. 

In 1978 my father, Peter O’Connell, was living in Bulgaria where he heard tell of an old woman in the mountains near Sofia who could accurately predict the day of your death. Dad told me of his intention to visit her: he thought it would be useful to know how many years he had left, so he could prioritise his interests and plan his time better. I never had the courage to ask him about his visit, but I often wondered whether he lived his life differently with an anticipated date of death forever in mind. It’s not something you can easily forget; unless you develop Alzheimer’s, which my father did, so perhaps that fact got swallowed up with so many of the others. I wonder too whether the date the oracle predicted turned out to be the correct one: September 5th, 1998. 

I was on a sailing boat in Narragansett Bay, off the coast of Rhode Island, when I heard the news that my father was dying. I was a hostage to circumstance, unable to return to land until the following day and I went below deck in search of solitude. On the wall of the cabin I read these lines from the poem Merlin and the Gleam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 

And so to the land’s

Last limit I came--

And can no longer,

But die rejoicing,

For thro’ the Magic

Of Him the Mighty,

Who taught me in childhood, 

There on the border 

Of boundless Ocean, 

And all but in Heaven 

Hovers The Gleam. 

I found the words soothing and oddly appropriate. My father had a profound need to believe in something beyond the limitations of time and space and he spent a lifetime seeking to make a spiritual commitment, to offer his devotion to a god who would protect him from the turbulence and uncertainty of life. 

Shortly before he died, he wrote in a letter to his aunt: I wish most heartily that I could find it possible in my heart and in my mind to accept the gospel of Christ. I have prayed often and fervently for faith but there is only silence. 

Una Suseli O'Connell was a teacher in traditional and alternative schools for twenty years before
training in Systemic Family Constellations at the Hellinger Institute of New York in 2001. 

She worked in inner city schools, supporting children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and managing issues around belonging, inclusion, family and culture. 

Una now works independently, providing workshops for educators, school therapists and social workers. 

She has two adult daughters and lives with her husband in North Hertfordshire.

www.unaoconell.co.uk

Instagram @unasuselioconnell