Aoife

Thank you all for your reading, likes and comments on my blog. This is a remembrance time for us. Over the past thirteen years I have written a number of pieces about Aoife, our daughter who died on the 1^st August 2004, age 26. So this is yet another anniversary. I have debated about what to do here. Should it be mentioned? What would I share? How much is too much? Are we allowing too much to show online these days? I have no answers to any of these questions. I did want to do something. So here are some of the pieces. They were written over the years.

I present them to you for your consideration. I would love to hear from you as always and also I would love you to share this blog site if you like it.

Your dead image
sits inside me
pale face
long washed hennaed hair
long eyelashes closed
traces of cold sore
on your ice frozen lips

I ache inside
my head for you
to wake, to breathe
you lie there
I walk slowly
round you
scavenging for life

screams and howls
of despair and loss
bounce round the room
I know afterwards
they are mine
my love my hope
my soulmate gone

three islands
wake you
behind glass doors
each with their own
death of you
green curtains
end a part of life.

Two beaches in one year,
two countries.

My dad survived one
a long time ago,
we scattered her from the other

Havoc and desecration on the first
still remembered,
hopeless desolation on the second

Common loss washes
both places,
lingering loss, penetrating loss.

Two beaches in one year,
two countries.

Bright in the sense
she always second guessed me,
always went her own way,

needy in the sense
she clung, hovered and demanded,
was unpredictable and nerve wrackingly
stubborn in the face of authority,
she, nevertheless, had fierce drive.

But sentenced in the end
to the force and speed of life,
she vanished as dramatically
as she arrived, leaving
questions of her world
I could never understand.

I missed her since before she died.

She was my light in the fading grey.
She was my pillar in a falling world.
She was my hope in depression.
She was my short-loaned gift in a time of greed.