Blue Castello in the bright blue packet

A poem of sorts about death and paying attention from the fifteenth of March 2022.

I say: “grandads looking good”

Mum says “yes, he’s positively gloating”

Green shirt, hazel eyes sparkling

“Nothing wrong with me” he exclaims

Glee in his voice, almost

A not quite imperceptible spring in his step

Knitting: “you’d better stockpile” he says, wry smile, but not joking

And “order the headphones straight away”

“Do we want insurance? No, no point”

She could not stomach another weeks silence

Embalmed in sterile hospital wards

The TV system down, no background blur or buzz

to deaden the dread

So we order Bose, noise cancelling, they arrive swiftly. A silver bullet, I wonder? Or just a too lately bolted gate?

Either way, I download podcasts for her to listen to

But she can’t stand the adverts and gets enraged. Too loud, too much selling and verbal gesticulation and jangling around, the noise feels pointed and aggressive and personal. It hurts her when she needs soothing.

What a strange process, dying.

The world rages on, infecting itself over and over, like cells dividing dementedly, determined, under a microscope

Everything is stayed and separate, a necessity, we understand, but

It seems a salted injury that

He cannot sit with her to wait a while, while she waits.

All they seem to do now is wait, but for what?

We all know, I don’t know why I mentioned it, how strange.

So this is it,

Four hours (minimum) infant, inane incarceration in A&E, in (I presume, she didn’t tell me the details) agony

A blockage in the porticath- she gave up chemo weeks ago

Though its still sitting there like a switch,

Protruding, masquerading under paper skin still pink, as something human

I text, worrying from a distance, “how are you feeling”

She replies “dying of boredom”

And I am going round to see them

She’s asked me if I could go and make them some dinner

They’ll be too worn out to cook by the time they get back

And besides, they are both starving

I arrive at six pm, the time, for all time, that we have always eaten here.

It has been an azure perfect day

Hotter than to be expected for this time of year (the end of May, probably climate change)

I drink a tonic with lemon and ice in a cut crystal glass

I try to settle in the garden, look at plants, hear, really hear, the birds

And the cars driving by too fast on the Motorway relief road slicing through a previously little village

My attempt at mindfulness is unsuccessful

I cannot settle

Into the kitchen I go, leaving the patio doors open, I like having the air but I can still hear the sounds from out there, human and natural melded in some ultimately depressing collaboration

I turn the radio on to drown it out

I peel one solitary potato and swiftly get distracted.

I cannot get on with it. I cannot stop looking at things

I pull open the cutlery draw and pick up a fork, they’ve had this fork for twenty years, I can tell by the style, the black casing, the size, not the best fork but the every day fork, a comfort, a totem.

This is a museum without them here; so well curated, well dusted

I move room to room, like a voyeuristic ghost, padding barefoot and

Holding my breath, staring at some one else life, their accumulations.

I try to take pictures with my eyes of the Hockney print, my grey-gaunt, sheared reflection lurking in the background of his boldness, his vibrant approach, so full of forward motion

The hall, with it’s neutrality and secret cupboard for coats (his job was always to put them away before fetching drinks whilst she tended hot pots with fat, quilted oven gloves), underneath the stairs

This house is small. Compact, but stylish— glass and sliding doors and tasteful art collected thoughtfully over a liftetime. Brimming bookshelves and the new, prized log burner with the strong silver flue: centrepiece of the living room, shining and desperate to be admired, it’s mammoth heat giving properties acknowledged

Golden Persian rug, twenty years or more old, still gleaming and soft to sit barefoot upon. To splay your toes and listen to the adults talking.

I turn back to the patio doors and behold

The garden backdropped by the loud, arterial road. His domain, his joy. Architectural and tenderly trained into shapes of all kinds. Logs, stacked in the veranda of the shed, perfect as a stack of logs could be, quintissential, the essential stack, almost North American, Scandinavian, whatever, somewhere not here, not this loud roaded semi-detached in Headcorn, Kent.

I try to commit these scenes to memory.

This moment, where she is still here, somewhere, even if only to be staring silent at the wall in the corridor of some indifferent, sterile ward

This moment when she is still real and responsive

And although everything has changed,

It is still possible to deny it.

To talk about car insurance and which shoes I

Would like for my birthday (she always buys me a pair of practical shoes for my birthday: Clarks; Ecco, etc) and

My Instagram posts of their wisteria bush (which my grandad says are not good photography)

Though when I turn back in I find the light in the kitchen is perfectly mournful

I suddenly feel something has already died

I realise that its probably the illusion

That these carefully crafted lives

Could be immortalised through attention

Through rigorous organisation of the shoe cupboard

Being well read, bringing back boxes of the good French wine in the boot

Fat photo albums and Persian rugs

And new, attention seeking log burners with silver flues and stacks of logs

I realise this is a falsity,

and it hits me like a lorry going fifty in a thirty.

How could I have been so naive?

How lucky am I, for this to be my route to this painful discovery

How disgustingly lucky.

But I do wonder, through my fluffy, self loathing vaguery

What is it which might immortalise us, in some intangible way

If there were to be something.

Not monuments or documents or aquisitions

or blue plaques or nominations or knowing, reverent obituaries online in the Guardian

I’m embarassed to admit it but

I think it could be could it be love?

I know I sound saccharine

And by love, I think I mean paying attention.

And I know nothing truly can immortalise us, and that to want eternal life indicates some kind of arrogance or meglomania or delusion of grandeur, and the idea of “a legacy” is somewhat grotesque to me

but,

Attention to detail in terms of the details of

How we treat others.

Can that not stretch out seconds into eternities?

And actually, existing outside temporality seems important, so maybe I retract my previous statement,

because the more I feel, the more it becomes clear that it is not the length of something that determines it’s quality, it is the quality which determines the quality. How you measure quality is a whole other question, but sometimes it is self evident, undeniably precious.

The quality of movement, of a gesture, a sentence, a gift, a look, something gently said or gently left unsaid.

If anything can immortalise us, I wonder, could that be it? How we love each other? How we look? How we try to see the incongruent details of a person, even though we know we will never see it all, even though we know we are simply scratching the surface of their personhood, their perception of things.

Maybe. I don’t know.

Finally, hours later than planned—and even this is shocking, they spent a lifetime being punctual if not irritating early, always appearing just before you were ready— they return from the hospital.

She is yellow and failing

Falling into his shoulder, she looks like a tiny, flightless canary

She smiles weakly

I hold push back against some kind of expected shock, a sucker punch, the reality I knew in my bones but

Blindly hoped against, until this very second, against all odds and reason

She is fading fast, looks ten times worse than she did two days ago

She says, “I’m a poor soul” quickly followed by “I need to sit down” with urgency I’ve never heard her previously apply to her needs, no, never before now, this moment

We lead her to the red leather recliner chair and she slumps down, forceful

She loves that chair but the connotations now ruin my relationship with it, it feels like it’s laughing at us somehow

My grandad fetches the morphine bottle from the fridge and brings it over

He has taken to administering it with a soup spoon now, he ladles it into her mouth and it goes down

(She always made the best soup, it’s ruined my ability to eat it elsewhere, yes, i have been spoiled.

She has taught him her method, so afterwards he can still eat.

She dictated her recipe from the red leather chair, presumably quite high on prescription opiates. Before this he only ever made toast.)

I sit on the carpet and look intently at my feet, to avoid watching the administration, inspecting my imperfections. Hairy toes, toenails too long, like a witch or something. Not very ‘feminine’. Hardening patch of skin on the side of the heel, fallen arches.

I am heating a fish pie from the freezer for supper, not home made, sacrilege. Charlie Bigham, though- not bad

I boil new potatoes and carrots

I burn my tongue on the steam, and can't taste the rest of it really, at all

We sit at the table, the three of us, I don’t

Remember now how we got her there

The table we had sat at for years, her serving us,

Placing down steaming bowlfuls of delights

Him fixing drinks and lighting the candles,

We would sit for hours, discussing things,

There would always be pudding

Though she would never eat it

There would always be cheese:

Blue Castello in the brigh blue packet

The stinking bishop she made him keep outside the back door in a box

Strong Cheddar and occasionally Manchego,

the rest of the roster I’ve forgotten

Perfect purple grapes,

Always wine.

Red as staple, then Rosé or White.

It didn’t seem so long ago, months, mere months

I lived under the illusion that it would last forever, such a fool

Or at least a little longer, the way it was, the way it had been

Being served by our matriarch, being loved by her in her way in her space.

---

In 2018, I moved from one London flat into a small terraced share house in Brockley, on a day where it hysterically rained and I was hungover and depressed about something. I had neglected to pack my stuff or even take out my mouldering cups before they arrived to help me. They arrived half an hour early.

She had made a lasagne and a fruit cake

(we had no knives and forks, so someone ate theirs with a key)

Bought a bottle of their favourite wine

and left us to it,

Saying they should be getting back, that they didn’t like driving in the dark.

The fields behind Headcorn station in the Summer, opposite their house