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poem 1 from sequence The Last Parent:
The First Parent
She nearly died…
… lay comatose for weeks, Dad or I always with her
through visiting times
and when they called us in to ask ‘What if?’
we had no doubt we knew her mind.
“Let her go.” we said, “She won’t want to be revived.”
She nearly died…
… then, making would-be murderers of us both, leapt out
from that dread place and came alive.
For three years more, we played her games:
Yahtzee, cribbage, count. She made us laugh.
She was as she had always been – a sharp wit,
a lit fuse, intensely aggravating. And she kept control.
Strict diet of exactly what she wanted when; her nightly glass
that tended to a tumblerful of brandy, gin.
Incomprehensible to us, the complex schedule of her medication,
those unnavigable names that she reeled off as easily
as all her favourite flavours of ice cream – she knew their natures,
their conflicts, every bit as well as children knew
their theropods and pterosaurs, and seemed to love them
much the same. Until the will to want gave out.
We managed well enough. Her oxygen, ventilator, nebulizer –
their idiosyncrasies revealed themselves to us.
I gained the bonus of her gratis years. And though it seemed to me
I’d shouldered more than a daughter’s share of the load,
it is his dying that makes me see the overwhelming duty
fell on him. He is the last. Both himself and the receptacle
for all that others miss of his lost wife. And with his going,
I lose them both; I leave the ward with the legacy
of those final decisions I made for him –
the how and when to let him go.
His nurses have been kind. Soon the Medical Certificate
will evidence his death – mark the point where relationship
steps aside, administrative process shifts into its place.
They try to not-watch me leaving.
What should I do now?
It begins.
Anne Stewart
in collection The Last Parent, April 2019, Second Light Publications,
ISBN 978-0-9927088-3-2;
first published as She nearly died, Antiphon online journal and audio online, 2017
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