Being Poignant.

After my mother died I had the job of clearing the house and sorting out her affairs. I did it single-handedly, and it wasn’t easy. Looking back on it now, I remember that what I found most poignant was going into her bedroom and finding the bed made. Two and a half month’s earlier she’d gone out one morning for what she’d thought would be a routine hospital appointment. What they found resulted in her spending the rest of her days in hospital being given nothing more than palliative treatment for multiple cancers. But she hadn’t known that when she made the bed. She’d assumed she would be sleeping in it again that night. I left the job of unmaking it until most of the rest of the clearance was done; it didn’t feel right somehow.

It’s odd to think that death itself isn’t poignant. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. It’s what happens to all of us; it’s life’s only certainty. Sad as it usually is for those left behind, it isn’t actually poignant. And yet there is something almost painfully poignant about the last day. My mother had approximately 28,000 days living in a human body with a name and a human identity. She had a home to come back to every night, and she interacted with all the complex bits and pieces of external life going on around her. Coming home the night before the hospital appointment was the last time she would ever do it, and two and a half months later she breathed in for the last time a mere forty minutes before midnight on the very last day.

That’s poignant.