Monday, March 28, 2011

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?'


10 comments:

  1. How strange Pam would have said that. It sounds as if she was at peace with herself and very happy with how her life was. I hope this brings you comfort.
    I love that poem. xxx

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  2. i like what you did in the editing--i saw it first posting, then refined.
    this is very beautiful. we get such a quick flash of something special, intriguing, about pam; and also about you, asking the friend the questions: tell me everything ( i can hear you say it to her, needing to hear every detail).
    -susan

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  3. maybe she was at peace in some way VV... apparently the few weeks before the accident she was eating all the things she liked and saying she didn't care about watching her weight..

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  4. Susan, I am savouring your response... yes I wanted Pam's friend to help me ... Pam and I had been having some distance from each other the six months before which was adding heaps to the excruciation.. thank you xx

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  5. I agree with Vix. As to your response, sometimes, I think something inside of us just knows.

    Love you. Have a good weekend.

    SB

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  6. What a tonic you are SB.. Thanks you too xx

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  7. I suspect we all need more grace than we thought. It does sound as though something inside her knew, though I'm not sure I could find the comfort in that. What a beautiful way to share Pam and celebrate all moments that can be recalled.

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  8. This post is tight and contains just the jewels I want of images of this scene. Beautifully written and conceived.

    Haunting, that slipping away that she wished for. Our impermanence, and maybe even the desire for that, though we don't know what it means.

    When I read the Rumi, before reading your words, I thought of you as the speaker, not Pam.

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  9. Thank you Marylinn. No I don't find comfort in that either. But funnily my mum said, on the phone today, that it helps her to know Pam said that...

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  10. Ruth thank you. And now I sigh... with nothing more to say... as you put so nicely in your comment..

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