Again, December

 

I am not a stamper, but I’ve used this stamp multiple times this year. It reads: sometimes this time of year is just hard.

In amongst the Christmas cards on my mantle is a condolence card which arrived this morning. My Uncle Richard died last week leaving my mother, the eldest of four, the only surviving sibling. I tried to write a poem about the incongruity of sympathy cards arriving in the same post as Christmas cards the year my dad died. 

My mum and her brother, a few years ago; 

I have far more snapshots of them foraging for mushrooms, hiking, and sitting by campfires

My best friend’s mother has been diagnosed with cancer, and within days of being admitted to hospital has been moved to the palliative wing. This woman has been a second mother to me for my entire life; a world without her is impossible to imagine. My friend is somehow managing to balance caregiving and grieving whilst also creating Christmas for her children.

Many other friends are struggling with other challenges.

And everything set against the utterly horrific news from other parts of the world. 

Yesterday Doug and I had lunch together. “Had” lunch - his care home is currently in outbreak, so I was masked. Our lunch date comprised my feeding him and making a one-sided conversation. But then we held hands and listened to Fireside Al Maitland reading Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd, and for just a moment my eyes were dry and my heart was full.

 Our Christmas Eve tradition.

Early this year, but just as meaningful.

My wish for everyone is that the coming weeks hold many of those precious moments, when, if only for a brief time, all’s right with the world. 

Physics of A Car Crash

November was your epitaph, Dad --

That awkward month when maples, stripped

of their impulsive sobright leaves, scrape

the pre-snow pale sky

filled with leaving shadows.

The world was rushing toward holidays;

but inertia overcame me; I stopped

slitting thick, ivory envelopes.  

Christmas cards addressed to you 

and sympathy cards for us

lay in a random pile on the edge

of your oak desk.

But nothing is random, I heard you say,

explaining Newton’s laws of motion

energy and force and the ordered

behaviour of the universe,

saw rows of formulae in your neat script

like skidmarks etched into black ice.