It’s three years since you died, but longer
since dementia’s poison spread and you receded
like Eurydice to a place we couldn’t go,
and we could only watch as you yielded to the pull
of a muddy past, while in the present keys
turned traitor in your hands and your brain
was a cell phone of random connections –
a game of noughts and crosses nobody
could win. The toaster, you insisted,
must be plugged in so you could use the landline.
You wondered why you couldn’t call us
that time the dog – who sensed things weren’t right –
wouldn’t come back: your ‘mobile’
the TV remote control. And very soon
the only ones to reach you were those folk
you thought we were. As if you were already
on the other side.
Kathryn Daszkiewicz