Death is ugly. Death is final. Death is cruel. Death is precious. Death is beautiful. Death has a silver lining. There is a stillness that settles inside you when the worst thing happens, when death arrives to your world. No one mentions it, at least I have never heard it mentioned, this place of internal … Continue reading The Thaw
Cormac joined us in my bedroom. Was he crying too? Each person who was there probably has a different memory of the sequence, the words, the pain. It doesn’t require many words to relay the news of someone’s death. The ‘norm’ is for an unexpected death to occur on another ‘ordinary’ day – for it … Continue reading Holding Your Hand
In the New Year of 2016, I counted the days between my visits home to see Dad. Each trip home I watched Dad’s eyes brighten and become bluer as his frame shrank and his energy depleted. I felt guilty that there was a long break of seventeen days coming up when Ken and I had … Continue reading Faint, Fainter, Fainter Still
On 20th September 2015, I wrote in my diary: “Dad sounds, not mixed up, but, like he is waiting for his brain to catch up with his mind.” What we were not yet calling Motor Neurone Disease (out loud) was making him quieter and less ebullient, but with a sharp focus still on family. By the end … Continue reading Family, Laughter, Music, Poetry, Love
“As the hinge of memory rusted in willed self-preserving neglect, she decided it was easier to remember only what she had negotiated with herself to remember.” Kenneth Bush Memories can be painful. But I instinctively knew that, for me, it was better to feel the pain than to lose the memories, than to forget. I write … Continue reading Master of my Fate
There is a lady in York whom I speak to every February. My ten-minute phone conversation with her is a highlight of this short, little drab month. She is an insurance broker with whom I renew my car insurance – probably not usually a highlight in one’s calendar, but it is for me. Unbeknownst to … Continue reading That Time Again
That dream again. Haven’t had it in a while. Ken reappears and I don’t want to know him. He is Hopper from Stranger Things – not exactly Hopper, but someone a bit like him, although he is also very much himself too. He has been to a gulag, or some form of extreme confinement. He … Continue reading That Dream Again
“I think people are uncomfortable, so they say nothing,” she told me, “like people no longer saying his name.” Had that been the case with my husband, Ken, and with my dad, Barry, had my friends and family not been able to remember either anniversary landing on these days, speak either’s name, say something they … Continue reading We Should Speak of the Dead
I’m still in Portrush. Gales and more gales blow through, one trailing the other, bowling balls careening down a polished rink, on they roll, another, another, another. The wind abates for a day or two, then I’ll be lying in my upstairs bedroom at night and hear it gather speed, listen to it rise, rip, … Continue reading Letting Go
Parked up on a cliff edge in East Lothian, gusts of wind rocking my car, I waited for my friend and his two dogs to arrive. Our Sunday morning plan: breakfast followed by a walk. I stared out onto the bruised blue of the North Sea, looked upon the vast nearness of the Bass Rock … Continue reading When The Sky Falls In
My Edinburgh Press 