Among the many reasons I decided to share my thoughts with the universe via this blog, is the fact that my mother, who lives in rural Shropshire with her husband and various guide dogs, has altzheimer's disease and is rapidly progressing into what the professionals call the moderate to end stages of it.
She wrote poetry all her life.
Brought up five children with fuck all money and mostly within a very unhappy marriage, dealt with losing her sight in her early thirties and found ways to work and play and satisfy her never-ending appetite for writing in whichever way she could.
I read Dylan Thomas to her when I was a child. Sylvia Plath. Stevie Smith. R.S Thomas. The newspapers, until she set up a talking one for other people with sight issues in the county.....then I read onto that into my teens, feeling weird about doing so alongside my school head at our dining room table.
Small pieces of yellow copy paper were all over our house for most of my years between four and fifteen when she worked on the local paper. I would hear the tapping typewriter when I got in from school. She might emerge with a new poem or a completed article ( for me to read, over the phone, to a very serious and efficient typist in the office, who slightly panicked me and never remarked on what a good reader I was or how well I spoke or anything! pissed me off to be frank) or the day's labour brought forth nothing but a hacking cough from too many cheap fags, coffee and repressed anger at her writer's block.
A writer writes.......
She did.
She still would if she could only find the edge and swim out of the soup thats turning all her experiences to nothing.
The drugs make her sleepy and restless at the same time.
She sits with her head in her hands in despair at not knowing what the hell's going on.
We've just used one of those self-publishing websites to get a large part of her life's work together in one place.
62 of so many more poems.
None of the endless rounds of birthday ones she churned out for us and our children and her mates and our mates are in there. So many may never be found.
I spent a great deal of last year pouring over what we could find. Most of them so familiar to me and in a context, a time, place, mood that I remember.
I watched her performing her work on countless occasions, bored and slightly embarrassed about the unusual and talented and couragous way she walked onto stages (with a white stick before the dogs came) and talked out into a room of people she couldn't see and made them laugh, made them listen.
Love poetry for her second husband is in there. The love her life still, although now she calls him 'she' and has lost the ability to empathise with any part of his experience, while he kills himself with the effort of trying to make things work. He is watching his feisty, clever, sexy, funny wife dissapear into a dependant, distressed, utterly selfish, utterly alone and unreachable stranger, who no longer eats his runner beans and who would save the new golden retriever before remembering that he exists.
She has all the support from local authorities that we can muster and various CPN's and proffs drop in to assess her and catagorise her development into nothing.
She's getting there.
She's being robbed of everything.
Bad enough to be unable to read a book for the last forty years. A writer who can't read anyone elses work alone, with her own voice in her head like we do......
At least she had all her own material in her head...........
She's being robbed of everything........
Her later writing ( it stopped for good about three years ago now) is poor and unfinished.
I cried when I read it to make decisions about what should be included in the book.
I cried when I read her previously private love poetry and heard her younger voice telling her lover that his name is a bell hung in her heart and how it rings through her veins.....
I cried for the little fat daughter who wanted to be in the school play so badly that her mum wrote a poem to show her that it didn't matter if Mary with the blonde hair had been given the part and introduced me to the word 'fuck' to ease my tears.
I cried when she fell down the stairs which have never lead to her bathroom in all the years....
I cried when she remarked that the bedroom door had moved, become a wall, and again when I realised that she had forgotten how to clean herself after using the loo or what the shampoo was for on her hand as she stood dripping in the bath with the new seat he made for her.....
She wrote a poem that I didn't understand, called 'My day is Leaving', in her fifties.
Her day is almost gone.
Leaving her behind on a long, dark road to nowhere she ever wanted to go and from where she will never come back.
As we dance around the kitchen to music she pretends to remember, as we play the words out of cities names game again and I see that she is now only really repeating noble...noble....noble....
"Did you add noble?"
" Yes, mum, it's in....."
"What about noble?".........
I think about how fleeting our lives are, however impact-full or anonymous.
Time doesn't care at all. Far too big, far too deep.
Our lives are much about loss. Surviving it. accepting it. Loving it and living it like the precious gift it is.
The earliest leaves are falling outside the windows where I live, with the love of my life, and the sky is yellow to gold to blue with fishskin clouds.
He'll be home soon and we'll talk and make our plans and eat the Kumara pie cooking in the oven and laugh and forget all that time passing crap.
And as he comes up the stairs the bell in my heart will ring his name out through the cells of me.
