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Weathering your death
I didn’t
think you’d really do it –
Say goodbye
to everything like that.
Even though
you’d flirted with death before,
I believed
you could get better.
I know that
you wanted to get better –
Nobody could
have tried harder.
And so now
I’m weathering your death.
Last night,
when the wind was so high
I wondered
whether we might have a hurricane –
Was that
you?
This
morning, wind and rain finally stopped,
Snow all but
gone,
Sun shining
high in a sky that I think of as Israel-blue,
I wondered –
If the
weather had been like this,
An
unseasonably mild January day,
With sun
shining,
Would you
still have wanted to go?
Or would you
have taken a deep breath and said,
“I can do
this?”
No matter
what happens now,
It happens
without you.
The sun
shines, the wind blows.
Rain will
fall today, they say (or it won’t) –
And it
doesn’t seem possible
That you
will feel none of it,
Know none of
it.
No striding
down the road
(on a good
day, when you could go out),
Hands shoved
in pockets, face down, out of the wind,
On a mission
to normal (whatever that is).
I’m
weathering your death,
Only I
didn’t think it would be so hard,
The
knowledge that the sun will never kiss your skin again,
That you’ll
never rub hands briskly against the cold
Because you
forgot your gloves.
I remember
that sometimes,
Even on the
most beautiful summer’s day,
It wasn’t
always easy for you to come out anyhow.
What cheered
me and made me hopeful, optimistic,
Often didn’t
reach you.
You wore
your sickness not like a cape,
But more
like a second skin.
Try as you
might to shed it, it was going nowhere.
And now you
are nowhere –
At least,
you said that you believed that
Death was a
void, a nothing.
I still
don’t think you were right,
And I hope that now your soul is somewhere
beautiful.
