Dear Bill
It must be seven
or maybe eight years
since it all began.
We should have noticed
when she drove around
the round-about
the wrong way.
That was before the obvious
signs, the road signs
to oblivion:
the changing moods,
the sudden desire
to buy a hose-pipe
for the car exhaust;
long before
she lost the geography
of her own home,
insisting that there
was another stair-case
twisting through
the labyrinth
of the old house.
She found the door
where it wasn’t
supposed to be.
The perspective
kept changing.
She began to live
in a malleable maze
of shifting memories.
Till the day she drove
sobbing to our door.
‘There’s a strange man
in the house,’ she wept.
Of course
we should have known
the stranger
was you,
her lover,
her husband,
her long-time friend.
You had always
been so close, dancing,
horse-racing, gardening, like
two peas in a pod,
but confined
to different beds.
You snored,
she said.
A course of drugs
plunged her
into a limbo of half-life.
It calmed her down
but snuffed out
the vital spark
that made her
her.
Then rapidly
she lost the habit
of making sense.
Her eyes showed
the turmoil in her mind,
but her words were trapped,
echoing within the new holes
of a perforated brain.
Since then
she has lingered, sessile,
like a crippled butterfly.
Only once did we see
her focus for more
than a passing moment,
when her daughter
broke down in tears.
And now
she hangs on to life
like a spider thread.
You two are closer now,
and that is why I ask your help.
Dear Bill,
we don’t know
how to tell her
that you’ve died.
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