Dry as a Pom's Towel
He wanted to
go
but my job to
keep him on,
to drive the
husk of his body
from his house, to beach and park bench
to feed the
birds, to see the sea,
scenes he
could no longer frame with any joy
from the
four corners of his walker.
He just
wanted home
and the Bermuda
Triangle of his ageing –
bed,
breakfast table, lounge
and back to
oblivion of sheets.
He just
wanted to sleep, and sleep.
I’d coax him
to the crossword
over his rhubarb
and yogurt.
He’d sometimes
play along.
Funeral
speech. Six letters: Eulogy.
But to force
him to any activity,
the rudest scaffolding
of life –
shower,
dress, toilet, food –
seemed a
Sisyphean cruelty.
I’d wheedle,
bribe, bully and plea
to oyster
him from his ‘settee’,
blast the
Toreador Song, from his
beloved
Carmen, to get him up
and keep my contract
with his family.
No dignity
in ageing.
What did he
care?
It was the
sheer effort he bucked,
the
exhaustion of just contemplating
this gnattish
stuff.
I counted it
a victory to clean him up,
to change
the sodden kilo of his pads
or shave his
crenelated face.
To dab and scrape
at each sallow gulch
of stubble, to
rinse the razor
of his white
neck tufts,
was the gloved
agony
of saving a
ruined painting.
Stark ears
jugged to parchment skull
he was
Dobell’s Joshua Smith,
only shrunker,
more caricatured.
His skin
wept and bruised like turning fruit,
his teeth a
shipwreck you tried to escape.
Then the
weekly battle of the shower
and his howl
at the scald of tepid water.
Though once
seated he’d give a pleasured moan
as I soaped the
dunes of his backbone.
After this,
I’d say, we’ll go for a drive.
But why?
he’d say. Why?
I don’t want
to go anywhere.
Go to see
what – more cars, trees, streets?
Oh goody! …
As I drove
him to sarcasm I privately agreed.
He was so fucken
polite it hurt my heart
with
questions of where a shoulder ends
and a neck
starts, or a mountain,
and when is
the climb not worth the while,
and why? And
once again why?
I loved him,
and he might have loved me,
his companionable
torturer.
Hard to fit
the remnant I knew
with the man
I met at his White Lady funeral.
The program pictured
a stranger’s face
fleshed in vigour,
buoyed on food and drink
in Ibiza, or
some other brightly bronzed place.
They extolled
the orthopaedic genius,
the philanthropist,
the carpenter,
the farmer,
husband and father.
His daughter
thanked me. I felt a fool
for how I’d
treated like a child
this surgeon
and sentient being,
with all his
precision, feeling and history
packed liked dominos inside.
I lined up, put
a rose on his box
and
apologised. Then filed out
to the
tearjerker Time to Say Goodbye.
He got his
wish and now he’s gone home
to his farm
in Wales,
to his
friends, to his wife,
to his whole
other life.
