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Anorak News | Grave Concerns

Grave Concerns

by | 14th, January 2005

‘IT takes a special kind of person to invite Hello! to photograph them visiting their mother’s grave.

”Mum’s always there for me”

But Sarah Ferguson has never wanted to be seen as ordinary.

Operating like some Geri Halliwell/Victoria Beckham chimera, Fergie crouches down and reaches out a hand to touch the simple wooden headstone that marks the spot where her mother, Susan Barrantes, lays buried.

Billed on the magazine’s vaunted front page as “an emotional visit to her mother’s grave”, we who are invited to appreciate Fergie’s grief look on in a state of hushed and bemused wonderment.

But while we fidget and stare at our shoes in an embarrassed silence, Sarah speaks to herself and to her audience.

“I wonder whether I ever really grieved for my mother until I came back her to Argentina,” she says. “It has been one of the most emotional trips of my life.”

And for us, too. For it is a hard heart that fails to be touched by Fergie’s grief, a pain that has given her a rare sense of poignancy.

“When someone dies,” says Fergie, now grasping the stinging nettle that is death, “it is so final.”

Yes, it is. It is terminal. It’s the end of the line. It is a dead end.

“This has been my chance to thank the Argentinean people for everything they gave my mother and to give something back.”

And what better way to say “thanks” to a nation than by way of an eight-page photo spread in Hello! magazine?

Why, by way of polo match, naturally.

“It would be the fulfilment of a dream,” says Fergie. “It is now time for me to spend more time here and make it happen.”

Or die trying…’



Posted: 14th, January 2005 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink