The Rendering

It was coming.

Days of weakening spread into weeks

Like a cancer.

How apt.

How do you deal with a fading?

I don't know now and I didn't know then.

I don't want to know how to deal.

I don't.

*

I was thirteen, an impressionable age.

Not a kid, not an adult -

The unstable bridging time of social awkwardness

And uncertainty in everything.

Let's overanalyse the shit out of this

Sort of mentality.

A swamp for a death to land

And stick.

I loved you.

Round; rolling gait; high-waisted trousers.

You were an egg, a bundle, a barrel -

Nicknames to tease, affectionately given

By those who loved you most.

False teeth flash, thick frames to squint through.

Work boots peering from brown work trousers,

Open neck shirts of brown sunkissed elderly skin.

The smell of Brylcreem to keep your curls in check.

You were large. You are large

In my head as I write this

And I love this image of you as you lived.

It is your going I despise.

I can smell your solidity

As you sat at the table for Sunday lunch.

A farmer, of the land.

But cancer fucked you over

As it does with its wanton needs.

Like a straw in a milkshake,

It sucked and sucked

Until your face sank, like a slack balloon

And your eye became embarrassed

When it moved away from directness

And slunk away to hide behind a patch.

You didn't look like a pirate.

I could've handled that.

You looked ill.

You looked like you were dying

Because you were.

I couldn't...

I couldn't understand why.

I railed at the unfairness of it all.

How?

How could this be happening?

What was eating you?

Why couldn't it be stopped?

Angry, angry tears.

*

My emotions betrayed me.

It was when you winked

With your good eye, your bold eye.

That wink struck me like a wasp sting.

The pain...

I remember it still.

I loved that wink with its essence of you

But it felt like that was all that was left,

Like it was a wave goodbye

And it was

Because I never saw you again.

I wasn't allowed.

For the good of us both.

I was out of control

And you were in the control of something else.

*

God, how I miss you!

Still.

Tears still flow.

Angry, angry tears.

*

I'm older now than my dad was then.

It's been years, almost 40 for me.

40.

A birthday.

Not yours.

Your son's.

That's when you decided to go

That you'd had enough

Or the cancer had.

Left you alone now it'd taken all you had to give.

That night.

The howls.

I knew.

Bed. I was in bed.

Not asleep but waiting.

And then, I heard.

It was a wail, a cry from the soul

Of loss so deep and cutting that it reached out of you

My father,

And sliced into me too.

Scared by the intensity

And scarred by the knowledge.

Is there anything more destabilising than hearing your dad crying?

Feral, like a wolf;

Unfettered; raw.

There is no sound similar

That could compete or compare.

It echoes sometimes in my memories.

I wonder...

I wonder if my cry will sound the same when you are gone

As it did the night your father died?

*

I changed that day, that night.

I knew so much -

That people went.

That men weren't what you thought they were.

That love did not conquer all.

That life would end.

It was a rendering from which there was no return.

*

Dedicated to Grandad Cyril