Passing the Time

I spent my afternoon in the company of Monarch caterpillars munching a swan plant, and a carnivorous plant devouring flies.

What did you do today?

In or Out

Adrift like the tides; surging

and then receding,

pulled by the moon's tug.

The moon is my life, soothing

and replenishing,

and my death, playing with me

like a young cat with a mouse.

Day after day of the extra days

I have been given, I cannot decide

whether my life is a blessing,

a purring cat, the smile of a friend,

or a burden, the excoriation

of tender flesh; or whether

the crashing wave is exhilarating

or a threat; whether

long stretches of shallow water

are tedious, or a welcome relief.

This poem arose out of what I wrote last week. The difficulty is I can make “beauty a necessity”, but I'm having more difficulty making “necessity beautiful” (Ann Michaels).

I must say a word about the district nurse. I have known her quite a long time, like her enormously, and really value her willingness to tell the truth; the other nurses fudge.

It's just interesting how the same statement resonates differently: “you have passed my use by date”, “if you hadn't done yoga, you wouldn't be still alive”, ”the protein content of your lumbar puncture would not have suggested you would have lived past your sixties”.

Use-by date

“You're well past your use-by date”.

The district nurse announced this last week in a very matter-of-fact tone. I had already known that, but the way she said it took me aback and made me interested in how saying something in one way can illicit a different response. I would have said to you, and indeed have agreed many times with the nurses, that my years of yoga are what makes it possible for me to manage now. I also know my diet has had a hand. But knowing that I might have died is a different awareness than knowing I'm well past the time when I should have died. It's time I was discarded form the refrigerator of life, and I will reject the recycling bin in favour of the organic.

Over 6 years ago, my doctor discovered that my breathing had become so laboured that if I were to get a chest virus, I would immediately get pneumonia as I have no ability to cough. He made it sound as if it was imminent. But some 18 months ago he uncomfortably reiterated that I would eventually get a chest infection, which I, to his embarrassment reworded it as “He reassured me that eventually I would get a chest virus”. Meanwhile, the best I can do is get laryngitis.

After many years of no weight bearing, the calcium in my bones is leeching through my kidneys into the Pacific Ocean. I also have trouble with dead cells. The nurse was convinced I would get bladder infections, but instead, I get blocked catheters. So, I'm not going to die of kidney failure.

When I got the pressure point on my bum, the nurses were convinced I would get septicemia or, at the very least, the ulcer would get bigger and go into the bone. Instead the ulcer is shrinking, and the wound is clean, now free of the necrotic tissue.

These are the truths I live with, truths that indicate that I am doing better than would be expected. You can see why I was a bit startled to be told I was well past my use-by date.

Time means change

Consider the first fish, struggling

to escape its hostile environment,

painfully gasping raw oxygen,

stumping on misshapen fins.

Everywhere, pools were drying out;

It needed to survive,

but did not know that survival

meant it would pass through

a one-way gate.

There would be no returning.

Its brain had enlarged; it had become

a land dweller; like us

it would drown if immersed in water.

If there had been anyone

to watch the desperate endeavour

of that failed Devonian fish,

the watcher would never have predicted

300 million years later,

that fish would walk upright under the stars.

We're a bit complacent about time;

if asked about the next 300 million,

we claim: “More of us; we are the future.”

And we muddle up time and causality,

assuming there is an underlying

teleological urge.

That fish had intentions.

It never seems to occur to us

that time means change,

that in 300 million years

there might well be

a vastly different creature

looking back to its own beginnings,

merely glancing at

our brief span of time,

stigmatising us offhandedly

as failed human beings.

Far away time

In that far, far away time

there were no trauma counsellors.

So when the woman drowned on the beach, we had to deal with it as best we could.

It wasn't a dramatic drowning;

she appeared to have fallen forward

and gone on breathing water

until the end.

Her companions hastened

to reassure us, or themselves:

she was just out of hospital,

heart trouble, had been filled

with delight at the day's outing,

drowning could well have been

her favoured choice of death.

I don't know how my brother

received this bromide. After all,

he was the one who brought her in,

laid her face down on the stones,

turned her head to the left

and knelt beside her

unavailingly pushing down

on her rigid torso,

listening for the first gasp of breath.

I remember standing beside her

but not her body

being moved from the beach,

nor our walk up the hill to lunch,

nor even whether we told our mother.

But I do recall waking in the night

to my sister's silent sleeping

and having to stand by her bed

until I could actually hear her gentle

in and out breath.

I do not know how my brother

coped with his futile contact

with dead flesh.

We never talked about it again,

didn't go in for “do you remember

the time when the woman drowned?”,

any more than we discussed our

shared distress at the cramped

quarters given to the big cats

at the visiting circus.

Emotions were not to be displayed.

For all that, a few years later

when I first encountered Shakespeare's

Mutability sonnets, I responded totally:

his fear that time would come

and take his love away; the fragility

of “summer's honey breath”.

I felt them on my pulse.

Would counseling have smoothed

such awareness away so

I would no longer have acknowledged

that life was transient, that death

could come unbidden even

while I was swimming in

a calm sea, under a summer sky.

Eclipsed

I have been enduring an eclipse,

a brown murkiness across my garden

contaminating trees and flowers.

I am not a primitive, ready

to forebode the future

but it's been hard

not to imagine disasters,

misaligned stars misdirecting

their energies towards the earth.

I know it's atavistic

but it's out of my control.

I'm so glad to welcome back

a brightness of sky and feel

the load I have been carrying

grow lighter and lighter.

The eclipse has been caused by the district nurses' reaction to my acquiring a visible pain. As they have not been able to do anything about my rolling ankles or my compressed stomach they have mostly ignored these problems, but now I am sporting an ulcer on my left bum, at least 3cm deep at its worst and nearly 3cm across.

The nurses threw all of their big guns into this problem, bringing in my doctor and wound specialist, warning me about septicemia, wondering how I would manage the Christmas / New Year break. Until I worked out that their reaction was so extraordinary only because they could actually see this particular pain I allowed myself to be sucked into their panic. Even though I still refused to lie for 6 months to prevent the ulcer deteriorating, I began to feel I might have to give in and take the dreaded pain killers.

Now, over the last 10 years I have continued to choose clarity over comfort with good effect - 4 poetry books and 1 autobiographical account; I would set myself 4 days a year, New Year's Day, my birthday in March, Paul's in July and the anniversary of his death in October. On those days I would make a decision about pain which would then hold until the next date came along. The nurses almost got me to thinking I would have to make a decision once a month and that I would, in effect, lose my clarity of mind, which is all that I have left: my response to the garden, music, friends and the stories they bring. It just didn't seem worth carrying on if I were to live in a fog with only brief spells of lucidity.

But I have realised now what has been going on, realised that the nurses reacted the way nurses do. A doctor friend tells me they sing only one tune and I had been hearing it every day for a couple of months. Now I am free to ignore their harassments, to say “No” to antibiotics, hospitalisation, bed rest, painkillers, or any other interference to how I want to spend my days. I can use my yoga / meditation techniques of shifting my awareness of the pain; the brain can only process one at a time anyway and I have a great variety. There are parts of the day where the pain is excruciating, but they are brief and I can anticipate them. By altering how I am positioned on the wheelchair, I can have less weight on the wound, and gives me referred pain down the thigh, which my mind knows is perfectly alright. Anyway, I have just as much pain on the right bum, where the skin is not yet broken. As the poem says, the sky is brighter and the load is lighter.

A Memory to Love

It must be the same for everyone;

we hold special memories

of when the world felt balanced.

Here's one of mine: walking into

Winchester Cathedral, late afternoon

with the light slanting horizontally

along the arches and the organ

pealing. I rang with joy.

“But what about people?” you say.

If you want people,

I'll give you my three year old

inciting his cousins to kick a ball

up and down the long aisle.

This memory is part of who I am;

I want it to outlast my burial,

to be released it into the world

so that long, long after my body

is mulched into the ground

my memory will still be drifting

over oceans, hovering

across hills and mountains.