Farewell

The hour glass can synch its waist no more and light expands daily across the sky. The sun is shining and the ground is losing its ability to hold a grudge in frost. The solace of spring sings between icy gusts in the greening air threatening her arrival at some undefined date and time, blossomful of emerging scent and clover. I walk slowly to the car, a stone lodged in my throat, ignorant of the gnawing wind, ice still biting with a vinegar sting.

I had taken plump sweet cherries to my Aunt this time, a promise of sweetness to come. Had I been trying to deliver hope, a message of something worth holding on for? How human of me, how frail: to want to give her a reason to hold on even now when she was in so much pain. I knew that she believed with all her heart that her place was with God. She would soon taste the sweetness of heaven. What were cherries to her? I had to hold the fruit to her lips for her to suck. so undignified.  But she was grateful I think. She knew I was doing it out of kindness, out of compassion. Dear Aunt Lucille,Sister Magdalena as she’s known to her order, she has suffered cruelly and with such patience. The cancer has been like opposing armies advancing from multiple frontiers, romans versus saxons, vikings versus celts, arterial wars eroding her away with the monotony of drizzle until her body has become a ravaged war zone.  There is no further treatment to hold back the invading army now but as her body turns against her, mutated and vengeful, she takes solace in her community, in prayer, and the knowledge that she will beat the cancer in the end: she is going to God, and it cannot follow her. 

She lay in bed, her shrunken body all but invisible under her white tucked sheet, her face ashen and bruised all at once, lips stained cherry red like a geisha, a besmirched queens head, walking a white tight-rope as she treads a path in her mind from pain to prayer, from Manchester to memories. I take her hand, hot and dry in mine and feel as it jitters like a flailing butterfly agains greenhouse glass.  There is no escape. Tears sting my eyes as I bend to kiss her farewell. Will this be the last time? It’s hard to tell.

A flyer on the wind blows into my face forcing the present’s immediacy. I don’t remember taking my leave of the Sisters, signing out in the visitor book, pulling on my coat and scarf and yet here I am in the car park, stepped through a worm hole in time. I stoop to admire a little yellow daffodil at the foot of a tree admiring its optimistic deportment. Is it stealing to take these little public offerings of nature? I’m never sure. Sleet begins to fall and I pluck it hastily to save it from the frost, snapping the stem, a trail of sap wetting my finger, un petit mort.I walk to the car and get in hastily, wrapping the stem in my parking ticket then sit motionless looking at the light prism through the sleet drizzle, considering, good or evil. The bitter sweet morphine in the cherries, just enough for a fond farewell. A little death, not really murder, a helping hand, but could I get away with the evil deed.