MacLeod talked about thin places where there was just a thin tissue dividing the material and the spiritual, where heaven and earth seemed to touch. But, there are thin moments too, liminal moments, thresholds between the life with a loved one we have lost, and the life we are about to begin without them. It's in these moments of profound absence, as we stand at a crossroads of change, that somehow we feel the greatest presence of the person that has passed. The poet Seamus Heaney once compared the death of his own mother to the felling of a great tree, like the Pontfadog oak the Prif Weinidog referred to. 

'The space we stood around had been emptied / Into us to keep, it penetrated / Clearances that suddenly stood open. / High cries were felled and a pure change happened.'

For some, this will be a moment of great anxiety, but perhaps, Llywydd, as Queen Elizabeth begins her final journey and we consider what the future holds, we can follow the Queen's own injunction in that great Dublin speech to 

'bow to the past but not be bound by it.'