These pieces were written during June 2015, my mother’s 91st year. The realisation gradually dawned that she was at last withdrawing from the world. The chest infection started. She stopped eating, stopped swallowing pills. Another visit to hospital was not going to happen. So the progress of the pneumonia continued and the end was inevitable. These pieces were not recollected in tranquility but forged in the crucible of the stress of the time.
Waiting
Wondering
What if?
Might this be it?
At last.
The mind refusing to just wait and see
Rushing pell mell through the permutations.
Mentally checking the calendar
Pondering other commitments.
Thinking – oh so heartlessly –
Of the two new cardigans.
So who will win this time?
The power of penicillin to pummel pneumonia?
Or not?
Wait and see.
7 June 2015
Still Waiting
Her words a nonsensical ramble of non sequiturs
‘The children … all of them… in the garden
And oh it was awful! So huge! White metal… dangling… too heavy!
Out of sight… and then the crash! Can’t look. Have to look.
There he was… face all blackened, bleeding.
‘But no one died’, he said, smiling.
No one died! Just all gone!’
It’s funny how infection can turn dementia’s volume up.
Funny too how an east wind and a summer duvet
Can build monstrous images in the sanest mind
As I found this morning as I voiced my departing nightmare.
9 June 2015
Still Waiting… is it 3
The first time I noticed
that the final signal of the graceless indignity
of being terminally ill
was the shit under his finger nails.
Scarcely to be endured.
I blamed her.
For not noticing.
This time
when I saw it again
on her
I had a different realisation.
That in fact to clean her poor old hands now
would be a needless act of brutality
disturbing even more the misery of her troubled final visions.
And now
does the shit matter to her?
Did it matter to him?
No.
It only matters to me.
And this is not about me.
20 June 2015
Waiting – nearly over
All day I’ve been dogged by images
Which I just can’t shake.
I head on, eyes down,
Stepping relentlessly forward
Head down, back braced,
Taking the strain, heaving it on
On and on.
Is it Christopher?
Carrying the child as heavy as the world He made?
Sisyphus with his boulder?
But I don’t deserve to be him.
Then finally I realise.
It’s Atlas, head down, back braced,
forever shouldering the weight of the world.
Except it’s not forever.
Because when he finally lifts his head
To take a look
The sphere of the world
Is crazing, cracking
A blown ostrich egg
As transparent as a ping pong ball
About to shiver into
Nothingness
With her last breath.
23 June 2015
Riverview Songs 