Cloud of knowing

[Jean Fournell]

A father

He had told us:
"If at my age one does not know how to die,
one has got something wrong in one's life."

His cancer was general, right from the start.
They burnt a brain-tumour, saved his thigh-bone, his spine;
he tried to under-dose the morphine, then complied.

It took a year from his very first feeling unwell
("Oh, it's nothing, don't let's dramatise!")
to his sigh "Oh, you're coming that late?"

We couldn't make it faster,
he made himself hold on;
we arrived, had some fun, then slept early.

During breakfast he was all his old self one more time,
spending freely what strength he had left;
gained his bed without help and had me called in
to adjust his pillow, to lay him to rest.

In the following hours he made no more move,
just let life use up its own remains.
No clear line between aught and naught.

A grand-child, four years old,
summed it up: "It's a pity,
now he can't play with us anymore."

He had long prepared his dying in peace.



A wife

They demoted him to Haiti, for persistent tasks:
one too many had died from his schemes.
I am waiting by the river for his corpse to float by,
I've not wrought any vengeance so far.

There was more to it, as there always is,
but no last straws outweigh the real load.
And whatever I'll do, even bury my wrath,
I'll still claim that a spade is a spade.

She'd come out of depression, after five heavy years,
she was off medication, we were free.
Then the double-binds started; the comrades helped fast,
but too late to keep the poison at bay.

With her stamina gone she focussed her will:
she'd not take one more round, not she, not we.
She drove off to the mountain, set herself ablaze;
the gendarmes were still here when she was found.

Now that locked coffin there — is she really inside?
What's she like? Of course: I must not know!
Yes my love, we are going to help you out,
we'll clear this mess, which will haunt me for good.

A friend briefly made her reasons known;
the oration I had based on "Joan of Arc".
This horror needed a powerful word,
from wherever. — I'm glad that it came.

One foot in the land of the ashes since,
some adjustments, it took a few years.
Then a new balance found for a steadfast pace,
exhausting follies and morbidities.

My December approaching I find I'm still fit:
hips and knees work, the horses are kind.
And liberty's back now, I've returned to the shadows,
and I hug your spectre at times; I'm coming soon.


A friend

He's sitting at the table; his brain-artery bursts.
When the muscles let go, he slumps down.
She comes home at noon and finds him thus,
calls two cops in from the street, things are straight.

She mails the parcel over here,
comes by plane herself, two days later.
I show her the landscapes he liked in Provence —
his Juan Matus "place of power" is best.

His urn in a backpack, we make it uphill,
spend some time in the pines and the oaks;
with a wind one part of his ashes flies,
one part marks the ground, if one knows.

On occasion now I ride up to the spot,
my mare wondering: no grass, no view,
just the silent place where her man becomes nought
while she watches, stands guard over me.

A thought for my oldest childhood friend,
for a lifetime of closeness, for death.
My horse and I, yet alive, are sharing his peace —
for a while, and then we forget.


A fiction

A journey to helpers in Switzerland:
the brain-tumours are growing fast.

A house somewhere out in the countryside.
"Did you find your way here easily?"
"We did, the directions were clear."

A pill of anti-emetic.
A quarter of an hour to wait yet.
Two flasks travel from hand to hand.

A room, small and sober, a simple bed.
A short while of listening to nothing.
The mixture is placed by her side.

"Is it time now, should I go ahead?"
"You can take it whenever you wish."
She steadily drinks it up.

Sliding down on her bed, she stretches full length;
man and wife bathe in each other's truth as she fades.
A moment of silent farewell.

They're quietly bearing the coffin away;
the man's mustering strength to drive home:

Summer breeze in the mountains in Switzerland.

[Cate]

Jean, I just wanted to say that I've come back to these poems a couple of times now and I wanted to let you know that I enjoyed them. It strikes me that, aside from the friend, those who passed took some control of how/what would happen.
In Canada physician assisted suicide has just become legal, your last poem shows a very respectful and loving end support being given to somebody who seems to have made that choice.

[Jean Fournell]

Thank you for your kind feedback, Cate.

It is a somewhat delicate exercise to write poetry in a foreign language, and my only excuse is that I'm just trying to learn English. So it's nice to read that a native speaker enjoyed my stuff.

Some control — well, yes, absolute control is beyond human reach; and relative control, in my personal environment, is only left to power addicts when (and as long as) that can't be helped.

(By the way, isn't death the one thing that we are closest to be certain about (unless we choose to ignore it) — if there is any such thing as certainty for us?
And it goes hand in hand with the impossibility for the ego to see its own corpse (there is no corpse as long as we live; and once we're dead, there is no ego). Nor can the ego see its own absence, in dreamless sleep, or in anatta situations in waking life (an- like in anarchy, and Sanskrit atta for Latin ego).
People close to me tend to "die" at least once per day; quite a number of them more often.
Death, like love, is a thing we can't put ourselves above, but in which we can participate. In the absolute, we can't control them; but in the relativity of real life, we may have a word or two. The last will of a defunct person, for example, is most often accepted as binding.)

Suicide assistance is punished by French law — by Swiss law it is punished if done for selfish reasons. New French legislation is under discussion, but for the time being such journeys to Switzerland (or to Belgium) are the only (legal) possibility.
Respect for the autonomy of others, rather than unasked-for meddling in their intimate affairs, is still a thing which quite a lot of people are pretty unwilling to accept. Sometimes they win, sometimes we...