Today we had the sorting of clothes
01/09/2011 02:16 p.m.
It's never easy, in fact it's quite grim. The moment when you have to face the sorting out. It's not just the clothes, the records, the photos, the hundreds of possessions that have accumulated, no, the hardest part is sorting the memories.

He may be gone but in this pile of clothes the memories are made real. The oldest one, his University blazer, a riot of stripes and dating back to before my birth, the one I've seen many a time in the portrait his brother painted when they were both young men studying. His Master's Gown, I can just remember him wearing this on formal occasions. His dinner jacket, rarely worn but somehow it still fitted him whenever he needed it.

Then there is a period of blanks until more recent clothes and the memories become of his descent into illness. The jacket he wore the last time he was able to walk with us; the thick coat he wore to keep warm in his wheelchair; the vests, all with a slit in them where his feeding tube went.

So now they lie in a pile of bags on the floor of my van, some for the charity shop, some for recycling and a very few put back in the wardrobe until we can put it off no longer and have to face the future where the clothes too will only be memories.

Steve

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Peter - A death in poems
12/22/2010 10:11 p.m.
Peter, Dad, had been ill for many years. Following heart attacks and strokes he developed Parkinson's (later re-diagnosed as PSP). In some repects his death was one of a myriad of things he could no longer do. I remember the last time I took him to church, the last time I could truly understand his speech, I have the last birthday card he signed his name to.

Even so there was something indominatable about him, I could never conceive of him not being there. We all knew he was dying, he was doing so each time we visited him, but the reality never hit home.

He had been in hospital before, each time coming out a little weeker than before, a bit more immmobile.

His last spell started the same way, a urine infection, it spread to his lungs and there came a point, just before my first poem, where we told he was dying, it wasn't going to get better BUT there was no time frame. Active treatment was withdrawn but he was given oxygen and morphine. It took two weeks, almost the time span of the first four poems.

He kept going on, why we didn't know. The weekend before he died was the weekend when we had to cease the vigil, one of us was a teacher who had to return to school, my brother and I are self-employed and had to work. His longtime carer was exhausted and needed sleep. On the Sunday night (Hallowe'en) we left him alone intending to return the next day.

In the early hours of All Saints' Day he died. Maybe he had been waiting to die in peace.

Steve



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