Slip Away

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,

if this is the time.

Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.

Every morning I wait at dawn. That's when it's happened before. Or do it suddenly

like an execution. How else

can I get ready for death?

You breathe without a body like a spark.

You grieve, and I begin to feel lighter.

You keep me away with your arm,

but the keeping away is pulling me in.

Pale sunlight,

pale the wall.

Love moves away.

The light changes.

I need more grace

than I thought.  Rumi

When we were all gathered in Pam's house just before her funeral I plied her friend Sue with questions. Sue told me that a week before this moment, Pam's death, they sat together here. In this Pam's living room we sat with our grey faces where my sister spent many hours knitting and reading and watching television. With it's pea green walls, it's glass doors and it's gossamer curtains covered in bees. Sitting in her little white armchair she said to Sue a week before this awful shock, 'Sue, don't you sometimes wish you could just slip away?' Like she might have wished to do at one of mum's parties, slip out of a side door into the night, unnoticed. Like she used to do as a child, everyone talking up a storm when suddenly someone would say,'Where's Pam?'