The simplest words possible, this morning. A woman is dying. One among so many others, you say. Or, no, not you, but them. The dismissive ones at the hospital or the emergency social services, or the ones who post hateful words on ‘social networks’,  in a frenzy of spewing. (What do they do with the rest of their time, the hateful ones, when they’re not busy frothing up more hatred?)

A woman is dying and my dog received a more respectful treatment from the vet last Sunday than this woman is getting from health care. As for the respect shown to her family, let’s not even bother talking about it.

A woman is dying in pain. Medical treatment interrupted so abruptly that the visiting nurse found a locked door and no warning when she showed up for her visit. The family’s final appeal for asylum, refused. Ergo, end of line, shove off, your file is dis-activated. Now, the nurse, the family, the family’s lawyer and some of us attempt to make end of life for the woman – and rest of life for the family – as bearable as possible under dire circumstances. Where to go, how to eat, where to sleep, how to ease a dying woman’s suffering, how to care for two small children, how to even think in terms of the future.

So coffee, black, this morning. Then move on to laughing, crying, writing, talking, finding bits of temporary solutions, fighting down (or giving into) bouts of raging frustration, laughing, housekeeping, buying food, washing bed sheets, reading, writing

and so on.

***

Black coffee and a few lines of poetry for the road? All right.

Seamus Heaney again, from Voices from Lemnos:

V

Chorus

Now it’s high watermark

And floodtide in the heart

And time to go.

The sea-nymphs in the spray

Will be the chorus now.

What’s left to say?

 

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

 

And the half-true rhyme is love.

Seamus Heaney, from The Cure at Troy, in Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996,  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998