DECLINE

Everything she used to be is threaded through the lines in her face. Good thing too because her eyes have nothing left in them. A woman of such character, how colourful she was. How heavily the mighty fall.

Do you know how hard it is to watch one of your heroes disintegrate? I’ll tell you, it’s damn hard. To see the sparks of intelligence and humour, all glints of mischievousness and recognition held in her eyes be replaced by fear and confusion? It takes a part of you.

Feeling someone else’s end approach engulfs you slightly. Panic rises in your cheeks as you feel tears swelling and bubbling up and it’s all you can do to push them back down because you know, you know, one wrong move from you means a series of cataclysmic events for her and you only have 40 minutes left with her. Hospital visiting hours are remorseless.

Once upon a time she was a whole universe unto herself. At the heart of it stood her heart, with the rest of us orbiting and spinning around her. I guess we still do, it’s just that now her light has burnt out. I miss her light. I miss her stories. I miss her songs. I miss the fact that she insisted on putting on a full face of makeup even just to go to the local shop, leaving 7 year old me dangling and swinging my legs impatiently off the side of her bed as I watched her don her war paint. I miss the way her skin smelled when she hugged me and the way her brushed linen bed sheets felt at night.

It’s strange to wait for the end of something that you never saw the beginning of, and only knew less than half of. Especially when that fraction of knowledge takes up an entire chunk of your own world.

Now a whole person is missing. How can that happen?

The only thing I have to take solace in now is that everything she was to me, all her songs and stories and love and care is etched onto my heart and laced through my blood.