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Anne Ryland

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Her Last Day

Sometimes we hear her counting
from one to twenty, then she jumps to forty,
down to five again, and yes, we smile
at how a woman who added up on her fingers
gave birth to a mathematician.
Her three children have come home;
perhaps she’ll call, or even yell
for silence, but she doesn’t, so we bob in
and out of the bedroom. Her face is smoothed
by the ebb and flow of our voices.
Is this why she refuses to let go?
The apologetic ring of the bell, a trail
of nurses and carers who merge into faded
hydrangeas, their silent words
fewer signs of life seeping out in the hall.
All the sympathy becomes too sweaty,
the numbers have run out.
I wish I did not have to listen to her breath,
scratchy, not yet a rattle, but a grinding
to a halt, each exhalation a little louder.
She no longer worries about troubling the vicar.
The door won’t close on her rasps
yet they have nowhere else to go,
so I plant myself at her side.
The crossword is impossible; its blackness
and whiteness dazzles me, the empty squares.
I slip out to the kitchen to gasp air.
Now my mother shouts: One hundred!
The two noughts echo
as if they might go on and on. I remember
when she guessed there were ninety-nine
sugared almonds in a jar she’d never seen –
we laughed, until we heard she’d won.

 

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