At the same time I wrote of in my last post, when I was looking after an elderly lady who lived on the banks of the Swan River in Perth, I was very moved by a phone call from my youngest daughter, who was living on the Gold Coast. She had a dear and best friend, Eve, who died suddenly. She told me that Eve had had a recurrence of cancer of the esophagus, which she’d first got when she was only 20 years old. A major course of treatment had left her esophagus very scarred, and she’d had to have it dilated many times. This time, treatment was not an option, so they operated to remove the obstrucion.

I hadn’t met Eve, but I felt as though I had when Filippa told me. I burst into tears, and soon afterwards, sat down and wrote a poem based on the story Filippa told me of her death.

Your Last Mosaic
Elegy for Eve

You can’t pucker your lips to kiss him goodbye.
You cry, and try to apologise
as they wheel you through the theatre door.
‘It’s alright,’ he cries after you, ‘you can kiss me
when you wake.’

Twenty years ago, your body was assaulted
with surgery, radiation, chemotherapy.
‘Your cancer’s gone,’ they said, ‘but the treatment
has left its mark. It will return in twenty years.’
And so, you waited for your fortieth birthday,
watching always, in vivid life, for death’s shadow.

He loves you beyond death. ‘I wanted another
twenty years with you,’ you whisper.
‘Twenty years for us have been like forty,’ he replies,
kissing your pale eyelids.
‘I’ll wait for you.’

This morning he walks the beach, picking up shells.
Your beach, where you walk and swim at dawn
together.

Your hands are still now. The shells will lie
beside your last mosaic
unfinished …

Eve had had a very happy union with the man whom she couldn’t kiss goodbye. She was a very creative woman, and taught Filippa how to make mosaics. Filippa showed this poem to Eve’s partner, and he said that it made him cry too, and that it captured perfectly how it was in those last hours.

Of all the poems I’ve written, this is the one I treasure most.