Vigils and Farewells
I finished writing “The Butterfly” in the foyer of Brewsterwells crematorium, alone, perched on a chair at the edge while the room swelled with loved ones, waiting to go in to the service for my beloved high school English teacher. It seemed fitting – tinkering with a poem about death in the corridor before going in to honor the man who taught me to love poetry in the first place. I think he would have chuckled and shaken his head ruefully at me. How many times had he seen me fretfully trying to finish my homework just like this?
That poem was about my father-in-law’s death. The funeral I was about to attend was for the teacher who had made me believe words mattered. Two profound losses, layered on top of each other in the space of a few months.
What I’ve learned about being present to death is that it requires all of you and leaves you with nothing but your thoughts. You sit too long on red plastic chairs that were never designed for the weight of what you’re carrying. You might hold hands and sing hymns and tell lies about sheet music to keep someone calm in their final performance. You write poems in foyers because poetry is the only container big enough to hold all those thoughts.
These poems emerged from that season of loss – from hospital bedsides and memorial services, from the work of bearing witness and the harder work of continuing after. They’re about showing up for death when every instinct says to leave. About the vigils we keep and the farewells we give, whether we’re ready to or not.
Red Plastic Chairs
A hospital-wide network of sentinels
Limited in number like the bedside visitors.
Spares stacked in corridors,
Nested like our hopes and fears.
Providers of comfort turn into instruments of torture.
An antidote to malingering not built for relaxation,
Absorbing the weight of people, grief and emotions
While remaining impervious.
Wiped clean of emotion, sanitised and reused.
Unyielding, unforgiving like a grim prognosis
Delivered with tight smiles and soft words.
Not the cushioned fake wood of the relatives’ waiting rooms
Holders of clothes, hopes, fears and optimism.
Quiet stoicism.
Uncomfortable; unable to offer comfort
But durable and resilient when we are not.
Heart
I wonder if it knew, when you followed it as a teen,
Out of those school gates to become a motor mechanic
The amazing life this humble heart would live?
For over eighty years that pump transforming
Well beyond a mere means of mechanical oxygenation.
Trusting it to the best of custodians
Her quiet loyalty and love nourishing its growth.
A catalyst for world adventures and the creation of so many homes.
Its capacity increasing as the years together grew.
Family life bringing both loss and contraction alongside joy and expansion.
Did it know then, that heart, of the number of connections? Of friends and family?
As you took your turn as one of the pistons in many an organisation,
Bringing people together in music, brotherhood, sports and community
Powering an engine that drove the creation of a business, a cog in the society’s machine
Fuelling both the town and the dreams of your children
Accelerating and revelling in musical expressions of love,
Songs written for your grandchildren pushing tears from your eyes.
Or tattooing a toe-tapping rhythm, underscoring the organ,
Driving the Hogmanay calls as we dreamed and danced in the hopes of so many new years
Working in tandem with the man-made dialysis pump,
Well-deserved receipt from years of contribution to the health service
But it’s tiring work now and tough on parts.
You sold more extended warranties than you purchased
None easily available for this model
This heart has taken us all on so many journeys and you’ve drawn great maps
They say the view is best enjoyed from the passenger seat anyway.
We have so many trips still to take together
So you choose the direction and rest that vintage motor
We’ll take you wherever you want to go.
I gave this poem to my father-in-law while he was still alive. It was a gift, not a eulogy – though it became both.
Dissection
I learned to love and study poetry at school.
Scant words potent, brim full of meaning.
Conjuring between stanzas
Breathing in clear page space.
Dissection was taught there too.
Carefully crafted pieces of imagination
Pinned to tables like biology class frogs.
Unable to escape teenagers’ clumsy knives.
Keen to deconstruct, to understand.
No longer an unpredictable creature of possibility
The sum of its parts undiscovered
Unable to reanimate, the magic released.
Field trip to the Makar’s flat, no wellies required.
Smoked glass mugs of muddy tea in place of ponds to dip.
A reedy voice recasts the spell through tone and timbre,
Pencils and clipboards redundant.
Annotation slashed across pored over print;
Offerings to the exam board.
Slavish syllabic equations, underlined metaphors unmasked.
Marks for faithful accounts of a noble death.
Now the reverse, as I write.
The limitless frog’s pond life, animated by inspiration.
Evading investigation,
With no thought to rhyme or meter.
Uncomfortable
(For Hannah)
I watched you as they spoke
Of your loss,
and their loss of the one who loved you best.
You were uncomfortable
Utterly unable to be comforted.
We tried to provide it in a touch, a smile, by sharing your tears
Hoping that our soft presence would cushion
the brittle fragility of your pain displayed so bravely.
And although the solace we offered is felt by looking back upon it;
it can only be provided
in those moments where it cannot be grasped.
Presence.
Love.
Softness.
Comfort on this most difficult day
Digging for Hope – A Glimmer of Truth
Battening the hatches is futile
This storm in the mind is a feature of the season.
Learn to live with the fist of turmoil that drags, shakes and pulls.
The hope of a calmer season, or that the storm will abate forever, unrealistic.
The glimmer that eludes me cannot be found and held indefinitely
The vigilance required to endure the onslaught of each subsequent storm
exhausting
Learning to sleep through every screaming squall to dig deep another day.
Awakening to peace, sunlight though a window, the clouds departing
Deep rest from the tiring storm in my mind, a glimmer of hope that it will not return
Nothing is there for now, but sunny days don’t last
Naked vulnerability seems naive in storm season
So dig until you are tired, a wild, dirty excavation.
Create a safe, dark place to weather the inevitable return
Line it with soft moss then let go and close your eyes.
Care not whether the sun shines in all its glory or if it is bitter night
Dug in deep underneath the soil you are left with the truth
Warm light deep inside
And everything else is falling away.
Inspired by Frans Stiene’s “Digging for Truth – A Glimmer of Hope”
What Remains
Grief doesn’t end. It just becomes part of the landscape, like the rivers I walk beside. Some days it’s a quiet stream. Some days it floods the banks. But we keep walking. We keep showing up.
We sit on red plastic chairs because someone has to keep vigil. We give the gift of poetry while people are still alive to receive it. We learn, slowly, that being present to death is one of the most human things we can do – even when we feel utterly inadequate to the task.
Read more: “The Butterfly” – the full poem about my father-in-law’s death
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