Lynne Rees

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on January 23, 2021

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Poem ~ Never

Never For Mam, 1st December 1932 ~ 25th March 2021 Grief keeps changing its shape – a weight like a kilo bag of sugar compressing my lungs, sometimes a water smoothed stone that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. Yesterday the heaviest of winter coats that refused to keep out the chill. Today, I woke and heard birdsong through the early morning mist and remembered the last words you wrote the month before you died – It’s good to be positive and looking ahead, Lynne . So here I am running the lanes looking for all the things I would have shared with you: the planting of young laurels along the hedgerow on St Vincent’s Lane, the way the moss has grown sparsely on one side of the stone bridge but thickly on the other, and how someone has laid a plank across the stream to cross from bank to bank. I think I understand now that grief remains with us. And I never had to say, Don’t go, please stay, because you never left me. Mam, the white wood anemones are like a carp

Reflection ~ On being the next in line to die

The Last Uncle The last uncle is pushing off in his funeral skiff (the usual black limo) having locked the doors behind him on a whole generation. And look, we are the elders now with our torn scraps of history, alone on the mapless shore of this raw new century. Linda Pastan From her collection, The Last Uncle, W. W. Norton & Company (2003) My last two uncles died a couple of months apart, at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. At one of their funerals a cousin expressed the same idea that Linda Pastan so eloquently describes in the second stanza of her poem: we are the older generation now. The idea of being next in line 'to die' does not bother me. I am deeply grateful for all of my own 'torn scraps of history' and I do not feel alone on any shore. I don't know what lies ahead and I have no need to imagine what it might be. Not beleiving in any kind of afterlife, or second chance, is a comfort rather than the source of any fear. Having survived to be

run/write

I started running at the end of 2015 in an attempt to get as fit as I possibly could before reaching 60. Then it became a series of challenges to see what I could accomplish: 5k and 10k races, an alpine-like trail race across the mountains at the back of my hometown, Port Talbot, in South Wales, running 1000k in a year, a half marathon, and another half marathon, so I could at least say I'd run a whole one! It became social and supportive, running with a group of women every week. And it became a tool for my emotional and psychological well-being too. That became startlingly evident in 2020 when the first Covid pandemic lockdown coincided with my diagnosis of recurring breast cancer. I ran throughout that Spring and Summer until surgery at the end of October. Then my Dad died of Covid in December and, three months later, Mam died, her failing health exacerbated by losing her partner of 72 years. It took me far more time to start running again than the surgeon had suggested, undo

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