Child of her agedness


She has left her home today –

Personality dissolving by fractions,
incremental loss of reality,
consigns her to a dark
and narrowing land,
land of no returning.
Child of her agedness,
leaving home and
entering permanent care;
family grieves
tho’ she’s not dead.
A family’s final farewell
she will not remember,
tomorrow.

No longer just
peripheral forgetfulness,
and evidences of terminal confusion;
the core of personality
succumbs rapidly now
to the rot of diseased
dysfunctionality.
Loss of motor skills
and mobility
brings increasing rage and
threatening behaviour
in their wake –
non-recognition distressing family
and her shrinking pool of friends.

Decay of affectivity,
- as the walls of personality crumble -
and all the cruelties in eighty-five years
beak loose
as her repressed demons rise
to overwhelm
remaining mind
with hate. 

And grief they’ve had abundant
for her dying mind,
as a stranger she became,
self cannibalising self
until nothing communicable remained.
They suffer the dissolution of
her social existence
and mourn for the person
she once was.

Widowed child of her agedness
left her home today –
unaware of family’s farewell,
unknowing there is
tomorrow.
But wondering, abstractly,
- as the ambulance pulls away -
why her husband is not
going with her
to the shops
in this
unfamiliar
bus.



James Gagiikwe © 2008