SLOW TRAIN COMING…
A good day, by & large. Shortly before leaving the flat to look over more houses I rang my doctor to see if my blood test results had arrived. They had & they were all clear.
I started doing annual blood tests about 4 years ago, reluctantly accepting that this lithe & lissom body might just be beginning to falter. The test I had in January revealed a high white blood count & the second of the two PSA (prostate) tests indicated irregularities. So, in spite of extravagant reassurances from my delightfully eccentric doctor, intimations of mortality could not easily be dispelled &, against reason, they have haunted me for the past month or so. My father died of prostatic cancer, plus secondaries, & my uncle still has it, albeit very slow developing. There seemed at times an inexorability, a certain symmetry to it all.
I’ve never feared death until recently. Somehow the child’s assumption of immortality had survived the onset of rationality that separates youth from middle age. Until my father’s death 5 years ago, I had been untouched by the passing of anyone really close to me. Even his passing was a strangely subdued process. Such was the dignity & phlegmatism with which he dealt with the swift sequence of degeneration, his death was quiet & undramatic.
It’s been the arrival of the children that has suddenly made me sharply conscious both of my remaining span of years & my mortality. Without dwelling on either morbidly, I find myself brought up short whenever confronted by manifestations of the frailty of our lives. On a global scale, 9/11 & the tsunami were chilling reminders of our fragility. Much closer to home has been for me the notion of not seeing my children grow towards adulthood because of my own premature demise. From these global & local phenomena there arises an altogether new & corrosive fear.
This has engendered in me a need somehow to realign my sense of time – not so as to lament the short spell of it left, or even to try to pack into it as much action as I can initiate, but more to dispel an awareness of the markers that signify its passing. So instead of there being an acute consciousness of a constant sequence of activity, a linear process that moves away from one point & towards another, the light gradually but distinctly diminishing as it advances, I have to generate within myself a sort of ‘groundhog day’ mentality whereby life is automatically rewound each morning to Hour Zero.
Paradoxically, the very elements that would seem to promote a sense of the telescoping & foreshortening of time can be used to help in this strategy of reiteration. Yes, the same events recur again & again; routines dominate & patterns control. But, provided that I can avoid being tyrannised by memories – difficult in age & difficult too if they are a core source of creative material – the repetition of events can apply to their passage a sort of sidereal quality whereby life self-refreshes each day.
Difficult for one whose consciousness of the finity of things is as pronounced as mine, but, as they say, the game is worth the candle. And the candle must burn long: my eldest children have long journeys ahead of them & my youngest are barely at the perimeter of their own lives & I must be with them there & beyond for as long as physiology, mentality & spirit permit.
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I wrote this rather undistinguished poem before my father died, at a time when I was trying to anticipate what effect the passing of my parents might have on me.
IMMORTALITY
I am not afraid of death, my death.
I am, of course, immortal. A child sits
at my gate; implacable, he admits
nobody. I borrow his breath
and through it speak
with dumb authority to those
bereft. Such green wisdom flows
from innocence: that bleak
and curtained room beyond is locked
to me. My world is light:
big windows, open doors; by night,
imperfect darkness, stocked
with childhood stars. My death
is inconceivable. Unlike yours;
you die and I diminish too because
my child goes with you, his implacability, his breath.
11:53:23 PM 
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