What makes life last

3. A death in the family

You’d better believe it,

Death is always sudden, brutal, violent –

at least that’s how the body sees it.

The anatomical change proceeds in silence.

though the last sense is hearing, the family throng
whispering: “He’s going now – it won’t be long.”

A surgeon took the family aside

to say my father had a year to die:

“There’s nothing more that doctors can contrive

to keep this mainly healthy man alive.”

They sent him home with drugs to make him fat:

his casenote tautology said that was that.

Don’t mock the bombers’ virgin paradise –

they’re dead, not disappointed by their vice,

(our angels too are hypothetical –

so which to choose?). And how typical

we believe men who opt to splay their guts

are driven to this madness not by rage but lust.

The problem’s not their liquid motivation

but our own crusted dry imagination.

Each day he took his snappy dog

and climbed the windmill hill

contemptuous of rain and fog

and anything that might do him ill.

Did it keep the dog alive?

It did a while.

Did the climbing keep him fit?

Did it shit!

Would he stop what he wanted to do?

Was someone going to tell him no?

No, not even if we’d known.

Was he going to stick to Horlicks?

Was he going to touch his forelocks?

Was he bollocks!

Even if we’d argued and debated

on what gets cells deregulated,

even if we’d pressed and questioned

his guts would still have ganged against him.

I was young driving the interstate

flicking midges and flies with wiper blades,

before I took a turn down lanes where a skunk

misapplied escape with its clichéd stench

of death against my chassis’ sudden club.

Once I had a bird on my car’s bench seat;

it blew in like a crude innuendo,

flightpaths that met at my open window;

its loss of breath and fluids went unseen.

The future of two small girls I’d known

was jettisoned in one cursed moment

when their dad’s car turned a bend on a road

and met a coalman who’d stopped to unload.

A much-beloved dog who died in our arms

learned too late that freedom can do you harm.

Although the pain drove in like splinters

he only once spoke with bitterness

against the great shrivelling disease

that assigned his non-renewable lease,

and laid him imperceptibly,

uncomplainingly low

like a fresh coat of snow on the road.

When we walked, spring plants

surprised the sleeping woods,

summer showed off its goods

and autumn tinted our moods.

When we talked it was of items

we needed carefully defined,

to bypass what we both had in mind

and so we made the conversation rattle

on relatives and war,

tools used by engineers

and naming of wild flowers,

things we cared for, not idle prattle.

His last affecting words were respectful

of the Chancellor of the Exchequer:

it was our deal not to make him reveal

the ache of keeping everything concealed.

Death’s a dread and wrecked absurdity

that deals with living things it catches napping

with specialisms in impurities

and disasters which can’t wait to happen –

it operates with written policies

to mine for pain and inequality

it largely gets its way with harassment

and by disregarding risk assessment.

It gathers wreckage up like tsunamis

and drowns abstractions and lovers of peace;

so even when there’s “good” dumped in the silt

we still feel loss, and guilt in relief of guilt.

Death’s a bloody outrage on us all,

shouldn’t we resist it like terror and war?

It’s not just the gulp of bodies stilled,

but the family which secretly withdraws,

missing the terror that fills your eyes

as they discuss the time of your demise.

Is there any place for truth if you lie

to a man you love when he’s about to die?

We waited for “herb wilson”

to break out among hedgerows

so we could laugh about the fiction

of my dad’s own common name

for a common enough pink flower,

and a term for something we couldn’t say.

Did he have a mate when he was young?

I never asked. A lad called Herbert Wilson?

Was he a guy who didn’t make it back

from war or someone who drowned,

plastered, in the pool, in the dock,

in that treacherous brackish marsh?

Was he just an empty desk

in a rowdy village school,

here one day and gone the next,

mangled by memory, regrets

and some other wasting sickness?

Was this a friend everyone loved and missed?

My father found Herb Wilson everywhere

but never told us what he’d lost.

An end, maybe, rewards endurance.

It’s sometimes just a disappearance

that takes survivors unawares,

leaves an imprint in the chairs;

we see the shadows in the halls

hear a voice whenever someone calls.

Ends are artless – out of order,

beyond communication or the

reciprocity life infers;

we can’t create what just occurs.

He didn’t resist or speak of death, and didn’t betray life either.

Though he sometimes stood in the way of stupidity and officiousness,

he always knew when to step aside and still refused a little while longer. When he grew too weak to walk he’d rant at shop assistants or attendants; he bore their obstructions the way he expected them to suffer his.

But when he’d been eaten away two years or so even he was ready to go.

Down among brickwalled photoshopped bowers

the mourners shuffled off to view dead flowers;

crematorium staff would lay to rest

the mess, while grounds fenced off the wilderness

and priests drew lines they refused to cross,

saying our choice is always god or dross.

He didn’t prize pillowed apologies,

featherweight metaphors or pleas.

And the poor bugger’s breath had to seize

to get a eulogy at last from me.

It’s anger not grief that staunched my cry

the day I watched my father die.

The man who works the shutter sighs

at the photo’s perfect boundaries

between the object, its image and sight;

he paints frontiers dividing dark and light

pixels and pixels between one and nil,

between imagination and his will.

There are so many edges that even

endings themselves become inconclusive;

if Hell existed we’d need to know which way

to go and how to separate each shade;

we’d need these photographs so we could see

anything that’s left after the memory.

4. The search for life in the universe »