The Graveyard

This night eight years ago I sat with my late wife Siobhán as her life ebbed away. She had fought with every sinew of her body and soul to fight a creeping cancer that racked her body….but it won in the end and I lost the woman who told me she loved me every day of our married life… She left a legacy that continues in the battered women she counselled into better lives….. women who were raped, battered and abused in indescribable ways…....children who had their fingers crushed in door jambs and had their backs branded with cigarettes……women who were systematically brutalised……and it took its toll….. So tomorrow, as every year, I’ll spend the day in quiet solitude being thankful to all of the people who made a difference to her last year, to the hospitals who declared emergencies to enable her get more speedy treatments, nurses who stayed on past their finish times because they wouldn’t leave her……. And I can’t publicly name the hospital because of the consequences to the hospitals…..and they have told me exactly that. Of friends who raised funds to send her to Germany for treatment…treatment that gave her and us an extra six months…. Of neighbours being neighbourly in the best possible way… of our local bread distributor who arrived with enough trays of bread to feed a hungry army….. Tonight I sat in the hilltop graveyard that overlooks the sea and watched the sun go down on another year without my Siobhán…….and tomorrow I’ll remember the words of Laurence Binyon’s poem, For the Fallen.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Love you still Siobhán and still remember your kindness, wit, laughter and company. xxx