Understandings

‘COVID is our Spanish flu’ is a cliché for our times, and                     

When I think of that

and I think of you        

I feel a guilty relief that I need not stew,                   

Sat here, two hours away,

Fretting about lockdown and Dad and you,

Worrying about just what to do

and how.

But each time I think like this, I start with a mistake.

I’m thinking of you in those last few weeks,

at your frailest;

Exhausted,

Even before sentence of death.

The frailty was not weakness.

You had the strength to demand: “How long?”

Shocking the nurse who’d been sent

to beat about the bush.

I’d warned her before that you were a little deaf.

Not gaga, I said,

And still with a core of steel.

After checking you really wanted to know

(You weren’t sure but told her to go on)

She gave you … “a few months”.

You took two weeks.

Dad was upstairs in another ward,

Raging after his missing razor and demanding

You stop everything to fetch it.

On trips to the house to check the mail and

firefight the finances,

I watered your Japanese maple.

Lying there, you asked me once,

Dryly and half rhetorical,

How long Dad would outlive you.

A creaking gate, he’d creak on a while

I tried to joke.

I wish you’d told me what you

Must have known or guessed.

But why would you have,

When your pride had stopped you before?

You’d had enough and

Slipped away with as little fuss as possible;

Not yet cold when I removed the gold studs

I’d bought in ’81 for your birthday.

In February just gone,

Before we got to know the new coronavirus,

I read your copy of The Secret Garden.

A new edition in June ’42,

Published just right for your 11^th birthday.

A plate inside shows a giant tulip

rising from a bomb site.

“Can spring be far behind?” it asks.

Your mother and father were in their teens in ’18,

Old enough to fear that year’s flu.

Spring’s grotesque and deathly climax,

blooming over the final months

Of the war grinding to a halt.

COVID-19 reminds me of that book plate

In moments when I fear the future too;

Of course there’s going to be a tomorrow:

the only question is …

What will it look like,

when finally it hoves into view?

Were you afraid that morning when you left us?

Gone so quietly, as if just stepping through a door;

Would you think my fears now out of all proportion,

Or is fear always a base note of our being,

Even if we have a steel core?

3 May 2020

On the third anniversary of Mother’s death