The kids bought me a year's subscription to Ancestry for my 70th birthday earlier this week. (I know what you're thinking; you're thinking "Surely not!").  I've spent a few happy hours researching my ancestry and I thought I'd post this poem about the night my grandma died.  Sarah Ann Hallam (1886-1970).

 

My mother was with her the night she died.

 

She’d sat a vigil in turn with her sisters

for several nights.

 

My grandmother had been paralysed

and bed-ridden by a stroke

of some twelve years previous.

 

She had lost control of her right side

and could not move her arm and leg.

She could not walk,

nor sit

nor move in bed unaided.

 

Her brain had been paralysed

and she could not talk

without involuntarily saying the words,

“Michael seen Flora”;

 

Michael was her grandson, my cousin.

Flora was her daughter, my mother.

 

Every utterance preceded by the words,

interrupted by the words;

for twelve years a thousand,

ten thousand times over. 

“Michael seen Flora”.

 

My mother was with her the night she died.

 

My grandmother’s bed lay by the downstairs window

giving her a view of thirty yards of the outside world

through an 8 foot by 4 foot keyhole.

 

The curtains were drawn, of course,

the night she died;

the room lit softly by a corner lamp.

 

My mother sat awake but exhausted

in an armchair,

waiting. Waiting for what?

For death; quiet, peaceful. 

The morphia would ensure that.

It had been administered in increasing amounts

over the past days

so that she had lain sleeping,

motionless;

her mouth open.

 

My mother told me this years later,

and years ago,

and I never asked her about it since.

 

First,

the lights appeared

where there had been no lights,

around the bed;

in colours so vivid and new

they were unworldly.

Colours she had never seen before.

And the whole room became bathed in a brilliant white light.

 

Then my grandmother sat up,

unaided,

for the first time in twelve years

and said with perfect clarity,

“Don’t be afraid; I’m going now”,

and my mother wasn’t afraid. 

She smiled, lay back down and died.

 

My father explained that my mother

was tired beyond exhaustion,

stressed beyond endurance. 

 

He didn’t quite say what he meant.

 

My mother however

knew this to be true

with a certainty greater

than any other thing she knew.