It can't be true, there must be  some mistake.
That's it of course. They happen all the time.
It's understandable someone should make
an error. Or perhaps it's just a game
you're playing with me. Soon I'm sure to wake
up. This will all turn out to be a dream
and you'll be back with me just like before.
I really will be glad to have you home
again. I realise now I've loved you more
and more as all the years passed by. I blame
myself I never said it. Still, I'm sure
you understand. Oh, sod it, all the same
this is unreal. Of course I know what real
life is. We lived it forty years a team
of two. Nothing has changed. I still can feel
you here around me. Christ, I want to scream
out loud. You can't be gone. I know that we'll
still be together. Now it's time you came
back home. This is impossible. You know
I need you. What shall I do? I'm not ashamed
to say I'll just be lost without you. So
that's settled then, our old life all reclaimed.
Or something like it. Please, oh please don't go.
I need you so.

"Mr. Carter? This is the hospice.
I'm sorry to tell you that your wife died
quickly at ten to six this morning."

I never knew what death was till you died.
With others it was just another fact,
some foreign event; celebrities meant nothing -
I don't remember where I was when Di
or JFK died; neighbours passed away
as small clouds in the sky which soon dispersed;
friends and relatives were passing showers;
none of those prepared me for the typhoon
tearing down our world in devastation
when you died. And yet I knew it coming.
Once treatment stopped, the months of weakening
blew icily in one direction only.
My frail human nature humanly began
to think ahead beyond your death to what
my life would be when you were gone. I know
now I could not imagine then my life
without you. How could I know that objects
harbour empty spaces like shadows
and mark your presence by your absences -
the empty sofa, vacant table place,
the car seat where you navigated for me,
the lonely bed where I no longer sleep -
your kitchen and your garden wait for you
and I just can't believe you won't be back.
Death is the unbelievable never
again of seeing, touching, talking to.
What I didn't know was it would hit so hard.

Pain overwhelmed everything;
nothing else mattered except it should stop.
You never complained or bemoaned your luck.
The opiates fought a bitter long retreat
but eventually the shoots of despair
began to pierce the morphine blanketing.
Embarrassed by your helplessness you wailed
"I can't do anything." and once you said
"I can't go on." and only once "I want
to die." The hospice took you when you asked,
clenching the rail of the bed in your
distress. Dying was merciful.

We had the funeral;
I entertained the crowd;
it all went very well.
People talk of closure - nothing closes;
instead there opens an ocean of time
and an endless desert of emptiness.

I brought the flowers from your coffin home
and put them on our bedroom window-sill.
They seemed to like the cold and flourished there
serene among the scene of suffering
where nagging pain had clamped its teeth around
your arm and dumped its weight upon your chest.

I feel so desperately sorry for you
as if I never realised it would come to this.
Your flowers in the bedroom have wilted now
and I, like a tortoise without a shell,
wait for my grief to wilt as well.

I never knew what life was till you died -
our lives are just a momentary spark
that flares an instant only in the dark.
But you existed and I loved you, so
that is enough and all I need to know.

When I sit here at night alone,
I simply can't believe you've gone.
This house, our home for years, has grown
around us like a shell upon
which every little scratch and dent
reminds me of some incident
we shared together in the past
and all the memories outlast
your unbelievable absence now
so that I sit and marvel how
your presence rests upon the furniture,
your commonsense in choice of literature,
your essence in the scent your flowers bring,
your influence enveloping everything.
Your personality is here to guide me
so how can you have died ? You live beside me.

It isn't true to say I miss you all the time
for, when I'm busy, I don't think of you at all
but that's no different from the way it always was
when you were always here to come home to.

And I work hard at keeping myself occupied,
struggling with all the chores I never used to do -
the cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, making the bed -
the things I always used to leave to you.

I take responsibility for your garden now,
planning the flowers to look bright all summer long,
sowing the seeds then pricking out or potting up,
learning gradually what I'm doing wrong.

I do an evening class in Portuguese and try
again to master Arabic. I lift the weights
and juggle, watch the TV endlessly
and monitor the savings interest rates.

But how the hours have lengthened since you went away
and now there seem too many minutes in the day;
I'm only throwing handfuls of sand into the sea
trying to fill it up lest memory
in some unmarshalled moment surge
out of control and once more scourge
my faults and failings, grief
and guilt and disbelief
with words I dread -
that you are dead.

Mornings are worst with waking up
to one more day of loneliness;
bed-time is best with promise of
eventual unconsciousness.

But all the time between is strewn with mines
that catch the progress of the day
and snag attention from my blank routines
on fragments of yourself that stay

scattered around the house like cluster bombs
primed to explode if I so much
as notice them - your precious address book,
your handbag which you tried to clutch

bound for the hospice never coming back,
the garden sweet peas grown too late,
a shopping list in your clear handwriting,
a single shoe without its mate.

So many objects bring back memories
of you and all the years we shared,
gouging new painful wounds in mental flesh,
shrapnel of love because we cared.

It isn't true to say I miss you all the time
but, oh, how I miss you when I do.

Years ago a pigeon lay dead
in the gutter near our house,
killed by a car.
Its mate pattered to and fro beside it
distressed that it didn't rise and fly.
I couldn't help.

One evenning walking through a city square
in Mexico, we passed an injured pigeon
fluttering on the ground.
Its flapping wings only turned itself around.
It couldn't fly.
I went back to crush its head with my foot.

The neighbour's cat began to live in the road,
dozing the day away curled round itself
on the warm tarmac.
(Your sofa was more comfortable.)
It didn't seem to mind the hard surface,
refusing to budge unless forced to.
(You also didn't stir much.)
Pedestrians paused to wonder if it was dead,
killed by a car perhaps, and some lady drivers
even stopped and got out to ask it to move.
Little girls on their way to and from school
got to know and stroke it.
(You didn't have many visitors
but neither did you want them.)
When it rained, the cat tried to shelter under
a nearby bush, its fur sequined with water droplets.
Eventually it was found dead on the back doorstep
of a neighbour's house, not its own.
(Eventually you asked to go to the hospice.)

She lay so calmly after sleepless nights
I hardly had the heart to wake her;
she looked so peaceful in the morning light -
should I disturb her, did I dare shake her ?
I sat beside her on a stool
and kissed her forehead, marble cool.
"Wake up." I whispered, "Let's go home.
There's lots to do and I need you."
She didn't stir - I waited -
then reluctantly I left her.
I know she would have come if she could
but the coffin kept her.

"You and me, we're a team." I said,
"Where you go, I go, since we wed."
But now - I'm here and you are dead.

When cancer whispered down the phone,
I swore you wouldn't be alone.
But now - just how do I atone

for loving life
more than my wife ?